Lead photo courtesy of Meghan A. Yay! Grissom Air Force Base! I'd always been told that this was a fun surface to run on, but never managed to make it down here the one time a year that TSSCC does so, as it is 3 hours south of Chicago and I always had schedule conflicts. Not that I picked the best weather to finally attend the event. It was basically raining most of the [...]
We're finally back to autocross season, and kicking things off with Chicago Region SCCA's first official event of the year! I had hoped to return this year with a more competitive car (read: header and tune) but financial obligations prevented that from happening. The only change this year is the Fujitsubo Authorize R catback exhaust I installed last November, though realistically the only "performance improvement" I'll be getting out of it is a few [...]
It's that time again! Once again, for those who are unaware, I follow a modified service interval for my oil changes. Rather than Subaru's recommended 6,000 mile interval, I've been doing 10,000 mile intervals. This is made possible by the use of AMSOIL Signature Series 0W-20 oil, which is rated for 25,000 mile interval oil changes under "normal use," and 15,000 mile changes under "severe use." Considering my use case (autocross, ice racing, Chicago [...]
We didn't get much snow at all this year, which was rather disappointing. I don't mind cold weather if it's accompanied by snow - and lots of it. Cold without snow, however, is just plain miserable. Especially when you've got a set of snow tires, and are expecting to be able to go hooning around in the white stuff. Luckily, Mother Nature took pity on us, and gave us one more small storm to [...]
If you've been wanting to do this modification, but just haven't gotten around to it yet, do yourself a favor and go order a set right now. I had been meaning to do this ever since I purchased the car, but I was lazy and had other priorities. Then after my most recent ice racing adventure, I grazed a snow bank, causing no damage to my car other than snapping one of the clips [...]
I will start this post off by stating that I am not the sort of person who drives around honking my horn left-and-right at every person who does something stupid, or looks at me funny. I hate those kinds of people. I'm of the opinion that a horn is a last-resort device to avoid a collision, or alert another driver to an immediate danger. It is not to be used to voice your displeasure, [...]
So here we are again. I definitely wasn't going to let this entire winter pass without attending one of these events! So when a #GRIDLIFE IceBattle event showed up on my Facebook feed, I had to jump on it. I wasn't sure what was going to be different about this event, as opposed to a regular event, but it turns out it was pretty much the same, just that they printed some vinyl stickers for [...]
A year ago I bought some Raceseng Camber Plates for my car to allow me to get some extra camber adjustability out of the front suspension. What I received were some functional parts that were machined to a level of such perfection and beauty, that I wasn't sure whether I should install them on the car, or mount them on my living room wall as "art." Needless to say, I was very happy with that [...]
Keen-eyed readers will notice that the vehicle in the lead image above is not my BRZ. That's because it's the loaner Crosstrek I had the pleasure of driving around in for a few days as a result of my first major repair. It's a bit of an unusual one for the relatively low mileage that my car has: a brand new transmission. So what happened? Well, many months, and many thousands of miles ago, [...]
One of the first modifications I did when I purchased my BRZ was to do a full LED retrofit for all of the existing non-LED bulbs both inside and out. That is, all of them except the fog lights. All of the other bulbs I replaced are bulbs designed to be seen by others. This means beam pattern isn't quite as important, and swapping to an LED won't do any harm so long as it is [...]