2000 National SE-R Convention

It all started Friday when I had to get to the airport early for my 6:55 flight. Waking up early sucks. After picking up Nu-Tech’s Ken Nord, we made our way to the airport where we struggled with about 200 hundred lbs of gear. Ken was bringing a bunch of Nu-Tech parts to demo and I had my full load of diagnostic gear which I was planning to take a shot at fixing Mike Jez’s cars driveabilty problems with.

Our flight was packed but smooth and we soon were in Texas. It was there where we discovered the first interesting thing about Texas, it is sort of like a sauna. The heat and humidity struck us like a steamy blowtorch. Sweating like pigs we struggled with our gear and picked up our rent a car. At the rental place we ran into Zak and his wife Leslie who had landed at about the same time we did. Despite efforts from King Jeff, Jim Francher, George Roffe, Ken and myself we could not find and sort of cool car to rent.
The best thing we could do is find a battered bottom of the line 1999 Altima. We hucked our tons of gear into the Altima and stuffed our sweaty already stinky bodies inside. Little did the poor Altima suspect the adventures that she would see in the next few days.

Pulling out of the parking lot, Ken noticed a bad shimmy in the wheel. Since we had a busy schedule ahead of us, we said screw it and headed off to Grover’s house to install some Nu-Tech and Energy parts in his IT car. Within seconds of leaving the rental car parking lot, we made Discovery number 2. The road system in Dallas is stupid and the drivers are horrible! None of the roads are marked well and they go in all sorts of directions! Some freeways in Dallas have 4-5 different names and numbers for the same
freeway. Even though we were equipped with several different e-maps and other maps we were immediately lost and remained so until our plane touched down in Orange County today. The drivers in Dallas were something else, a deadly combination of fast, slow, aggressive and doddling. I mean LA drivers are better!

This sentiment was also reflected by all non-Dallas native convention attendees as almost everyone was lost most of the time during the weekend!

After several cell phone calls we finally located Grover’s house. Grover has a very awesome garage. Wes Thomson and King George were also there. After a nice lunch prepared by Grover’s wife (THANK YOU!) we set about the task of working on the race car. I removed the trailing arms for Ken to press in some bushings, when sweating more profusely that I have ever before in my whole life, I went on a parts run for Ken and Wes with King George. Of Course we got lost right away, and ended up taking about 2-3 hours to find our way back after a slight detour to pick up Zak from the Hotel. Fortunately for me, Wes had just about finished his car and Ken, Grovers by the time I got back. Although it seemed like I had just finagled my way out of a few hours of hot sweaty work, It was an accident guys really! After getting out of my car work activity by default, it was time to check into to the hotel. Already there were many SE-R’s filling a corner of the Embassy Suites parking lot and a bunch of guys milling around. It was cool! After many hellos we got checked in and went to our huge, sumptuous suites to shower and get ready for the reception sponsored by Courtesy Nissan.

My clothes that were freshly laundered that morning were reduced to a pile of grease and dirt covered, sweat soaked reeking rags so I changed and showered. We then headed out to the reception in a caravan of SE-R’s lead by King George I think. I think at this point Kyle mooned Rob Cadle, horrifying him to the point of losing control. The resulting melee almost left several cars totaled.

The reception was great, I was greeted at the door by a grinning King Jeff with the usual filled to the brim beer mug in his hand. This year it was my turn to mumble F-it I am on vacation to him. Mike Jez found me and gave me the bad news that his car had spun a bearing and could not be run, so much for the 30 lbs of tools I was packing in my black bag of tricks. Ryan Besterwich made me drink a sick concoction of Red Bull and vodka, among many other things. This drink is wonderful. It tastes like antifreeze mixed with ground up vitamin pills. The Red Bull gets you wired and the Vodka makes you drunk. A pretty lame feeling.

After the party we went to some restaurant and drank some more. I am getting a bit sketchy hear because the Red bull was fighting the rest of my organs by this point. I think Ken or Pinthong took me back to my room, or was Pinthong messing with me? Anyway I lay in bed with my head spinning around. Damn you Ryan. Somewhere my roommate Kurt Sussman was missing…

The next day I felt sort of good considering that I got like 3 hours of sleep. Rob told me that he and Ken were going back to Grover’s to try to finish the car and I had to handle there seminars. Great… Fortunately we ran out of time so my winging it did not look so bad. We went outside and caught Shell and Aaron’s show on detailing.It was time for the track.

It is also time for me to go to bed so I’ll finish this tomorrow! Reading my prior posts I am somewhat horrified by all the typo’s. Sorry guys I was dead tired and did not proof anything, not that I ever proof anything but those posts were more poorly written than usual which is still pretty bad, even for my low standards…

So anyway we last left off with us going to the track, the Motorsports country club. I have always said that golf courses are a waste of land and they ought to make tracks out of them instead. This was a good example of someone with vision and money making a private track instead of a damn golf course. The track was a 1.7 mile technical sort of track with elevation changes, good pavement, FIA curbs and plenty of runout, in other words, a pretty fun track.

After an orientation meeting where the rules were explained, we hit the track for a lead follow session. My car ended up being pretty full. I think I had Steve Christenson, Zak, Andries and me in the car making it pretty heavy. Right before I pulled out on the track, I noticed why the cars wheel had a shimmy, the rim was pretty bent! Oh well. On the track I knew we were going to have some trouble keeping up. The poor Altima was struggling to keep up on the lead-follow session! The tires were screaming and the
engines was straining to move our fat butts. We still did better than George Roffe in his stock G20 who was behind us. His brakes faded away and he fell back.

After the lead follow, the weather started to get bizarre. The clouds started to boil like in Independence Day or Close Encounters, the temperature dropped about 20 degrees in two minutes and it got real dark. Looking up I saw that the clouds were starting to spin in a counter clockwise rotation and were rapidly getting lower. This was pretty scary.
The Texas guys assured me that this was just like an earthquake but in the sky. Uh thanks, that makes me feel a lot safer… I eyed the Altima and started to calculate several escape vectors.

Fortunately the turbulence in the clouds dissipated and we got to go on the track for our first hot lapping session. I was in the advanced group and lined up behind Mike Palh’s beast jr. His car is very well built and very fast. David with his classic with the downforce producing bike rack gridded behind me. After we got the green I glued the poor Altima to Mike’s back bumper and put it to the wood. The automatic transmission screamed as did the general rockflex tires. I thought I was doing pretty good, keeping up
to mike until he decided to actually go faster where I was dropped like a brick. The Altima’s brakes started to fade and David passed me leaving me in dead last. It started to rain hard and our session got black flagged and we had to go for the day.

So anyway, the track management agreed to let us have more track time on Sunday since we got rained out.

It was about this time that I noticed that my shoes were missing, forcing me to walk around in my blue fembot looking simpson driving shoes for the rest of the evening. Crap. We returned to the hotel and had an uneventful evening of getting drunk and general BSing. I had to pull Mike underwear model, boy band Mager out of the pool area were he was flirting with the bikini clad underage dancing girls. He claimed to be trying to hook up with their 20 and 30 year old instructors. Remember Mike, 16 will get you 20 and
Bubba would just love your spikey blond locks.

We got to sleep in the next day, a whole 4 hours and staggered into the picnic. Grover personally served us a nice chicken lunch and we had the judging and awards rather quickly because we had to be back on the track by 3:00 pm that afternoon. Marc Hernanadez returned my shoes that he accidentally had packed up the day before and Francher won all of the prizes. The best part of the show was meeting King Jeff’s girlfriend who is a total babe and very nice to boot. Why a girl like that would want to hang around with a bunch of car geeks is beyond me. You better be nice to her Jeff! I sent the rest of time determining that Jodys block was wasted and helping Jeff make plans for world domination.

Ryan had won best engineered for the second time and he demanded that I keep his trophy for helping build his car. Thanks Ryan! I missed out on all of the presentations and the raffle because I was running around helping people out with car issues.

Soon it was time to go back to the track. At the track I was lined up behind Chris Pinthong in his mustank. We were arguing whose rent a car was worse all day and now it was time to prove it! I rear ended him to let him know I was back there twice for good measure while we were on pre grid.

We got the green and I chased off after Pinthong. I had gotten within striking distance twice but lost ground by doing some wild powerslides when I tried to extend my braking distance to catch the mustank. So I started to drive more carefully to catch him. I was trying as hard as I could when I noticed that Pinthong was gone, a victim of brake fade. The generals on the Altima did not have enough grip to allow me to fade the brakes although they did get soft and warped a little. I tried to hold off Ben Rockwell but the Altima’s power started to fade, a tendency it had when run very hard. Ben got by me as did Grover who was lapping me I think! Then Rob Cadle flew by me like I was standing still followed by Kyle. Towards the end I had figured out how to do these really crazy drift-contest like slides without loosing too much momentum and was doing so trying to scare people away so they would not want to pass. It was pretty fun. I think I like rental cars!

In the Pits, Lee had overheated the NX and we needed to cool it off using the consult to turn on the fans. Afterwards Mike Jez helped to bleed the cooling system so he could be on his way. Unfortunately the EMS crew had left the track early and we were not allowed to run anymore, a bummer. It was still fun though and worth every penny.

Later we decided to go out drinking yet again. Pinthong, Ryan, Mike M. and Aaron decided that they had enough of hanging out with old dudes and went clubbing. They had some interesting stories and will be posting some pictures soon. The rest of us went to Benigans or something like that and hung out until closing time. Since Ray and the northeast guys had missed their flights and returned their rental cars, we did not have enough wheels to transport everyone so most of us had to walk, except for Larry W and Kyle who drove. Since they got to Benigans way before us and we already inside, we picked up Kyles car in the parking lot and put it real close to Larry’s car to freek them out.

Inside Jeff’s friend fell asleep at our table and we ditched him watching the waiter and manager try to wake him up, it was super funny!