First race

Getting there is half the fun

On Wednesday I found out that PPSCC was having an autocross on Saturday so I decided why not and started making plans.  I was originally going to buy a car dolly to tow the Miata but after calling all the ads on CL only one wasn't already sold.  On Friday after work I checked it out and found out there was a good reason that dolly hadn't sold, it was scary.   So I had to figure out another plan.  I checked recargo and there was a Level 2 at a Walgreens a couple miles away from the event. With a Level 2 it would only take me an hour to top of my pack but it was easier to leave it overnight. We called the store and they said it would be no problem leaving it to charge overnight. The week before I had just happened to order the parts for a J1772 charge port so at 7pm I wired it up and drove it down. 

Apparently things were going to smoothly because just a few miles down the road a deer jumped into the road in front of me. Luckily I was only driving about 35mph and just pushed the deer forward a foot and it ran off.  Because the speed was low the damage was light limited and after a quick check I continued driving to the charge station.  However when I went to charge I found that the charger wasn't working with my port.

I later figured out that it wasn't liking my non-isolated PFC-20 and tripping the GFCI.  There was no 110V plug on the charger but down the road were some more chargers and went to try them. Keeping in the theme for the night they were wired up but not activated yet.  Luckily my wonderful wife spotted a 110V outlet on a nearby light pole 30' away from those level 2s was.  Great!

But I had left my 110 plug on my workbench a 30 minute drive back! D'oh!  At this point common sense would have been to give up and call it a night but a quick run into Walgreen's along with a few minutes turned a power-strip, wire nuts, and some electric tape into a ad-hoc charge chord and left the car to charge overnight and we finally got to bed shortly after midnight.

Track time!

The next morning was time for some racing!  The car passed through tech and got a lot of questions from fellow racers. 

There were a lot of nice fast cars out there Focus ST, FR-S, 370z, '13 Boss 302, several Miatas ranging from stock to turbos and race prepped full caged, and in general a lot of cool mustangs since PPSCC did the event in conjunction with the local mustang club.

Everyone was really nice but unfortunately my co-driver wasn’t allowed.

 The autocross was a fun set-up with a nice high speed chicane and made a U-turn with a broken sweeping 270 that was a lot of fun to steer through with the right foot.  :)  Unfortunately my mount for my camera wasn’t stiff enough to handle the g forces so no in car video but I am going to have a GoPro silver for next weekend’s race at PPIR.

I have to say that my favorite part of driving the car is the throttle control.  If I came in too hot to a corner I could *save* it by hitting the gas and bringing the rear of the car around.  The Soliton1 and the 9” motor just delivered exactly the torque I wanted, whenever I asked for it.  I am actually toying with the idea that my next project will be an electric drift car.

I have to say that I am not a great driver. I haven’t raced in 6 years and I was a slow driver way back then. Each lap I remembered how to drive and dropped almost a second each time around.  I felt the car could have gone a lot faster but turns out the car was doing very well.

I am running the Soliton1 aircooled and it worked wonderfully.  Starting in second gear the initial launch is a little off compared to what is best described as the feeling of thrust once it’s rolling. Looking at the logger I am being limited by the slew rate at launch for the second quarter of a second.  I tired bumping it to 3000 but I need to do some more tweaking (mostly of the driver) and testing to get a good launch.   I do want to get some more weight on the rear wheels.  I am going to move the charger to the back and try to get my 4^th module back together and installed.

I was busy driving and working corners but my wife said when they posted the times everyone on the side lines were saying "I can't believe how fast that electric Miata is, it beat most of the cars out here." which made my day even better.  Looking at the results out of the 44 racers 4 of them solidly beat my best time including an awesome sounding red mustang, a race rX7, a black mustang, and new 370z getting times of 42.5-44.5.  I was within a few tenths of another 5 racers as it ended up that a bunch of us managed times right around 45.5.  An overall 9^th out of 44 was far better then I was thinking I was going to manage.   Even more surprising was beating a new Boss 302, Focus ST and FR-S, which are some sweet cars.  And that was with me behind the wheel and 70% power.  For the next event I am going to bump the power from 800 to 1000 amps and move the voltage up to 155V to give me more pull off the line and a tiny bit better top end.

Working corners my favorite two cars to watch were a really cool tuned up orange focus hatch and that fast red mustang with the white stripes.  Both sounded awesome.  I need to put some open headers on my 9” motor.J Needless to say I was really happy with the car's performance and really appreciative to PPSCC for putting on the event and everyone who showed up.