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QuantSPEED Newsletter --- November 2008 The 2008 Season Comes to a Close in Pueblo The final race of the season was a Double Regional at Pueblo Motorsports Park on October 19-20. The racing was as exciting as ever! Former professional Can Am driver Tex Arnold was kind enough to play some intense games of cat and mouse. Sunday morning Tex and Christine even started the race at the back of pack and had a ball passing slower traffic together. A faster sports racer who spun early in the race captured this video clip as he caught up to the pack again. Christine is in the car directly in front of him and Tex is the next car: In the end, the team finished the 2008 Regional Championship Series in second place! Not too bad for our first full season running the FE. There will be a formal awards banquet in January. The Lead Foot Moves On Also at the awards ceremony Christine will pass on the infamous Lead Foot. As many of you know, many years ago a racer
purportedly put tire tracks 19 feet up a telephone pole on the way home from a race weekend and lived to tell the story. He agreed to have
his foot cast in pure lead (at a size 12 that's about 40 lbs!) and the resulting "Lead Foot" has been awarded for the most
"Spectacular and Unwarranted Driving" of the season.
As many of you know, rolling the Spec Miata at Sandia Motorsports Park last summer was definitely spectacular and unwarranted (some say the
best stunt flip they've ever seen!), and so it has
been Christine's privilege to have the lead foot on display at home this year. But, soon it will have a new home!
 Test Drive: Carl's Report I drove the car for the first time during a test day to collect data on some new engine maps and see what this machine was all about from the driver's seat. I will start out by saying that I have driven many high horsepower race and track cars and have never felt intimidated or physically taxed. Well, that was about to change...driving a modern Formula car is a truly amazing and very physical experience. 
The first thing you notice is despite the fact that you are perfectly fitted in the car and can't move even a 1/4 of an inch in the seat (which is as hard as a rock) once you are belted in, is that it is remarkably comfortable. The next thing you notice is that despite the super tiny mirrors and very low reclined seating position, visibility is better than in any fendered car. So out to the track I went thinking this should be easy...wrong! After stalling several times in the paddock, I finally got onto the track and started to get up to speed for my first session. The brakes were hard, the car was wandering all over the place, every small rise on what was a very familiar track to me was now blind (wow, I really am sitting low), and every time I ticked off a gear in on the sequential gearbox at what sounded like the right time to shift, I would glance at the dash only to discover that I had only used half the available revs. After taking a break and changing the engine software I was out for another session to try to get the car up to speed. This time I made sure to rev the engine until the shift lights came on (at this point the engine sounds like it is going to explode) and was greeted by amazing forward thrust capabilities with the tires fighting for traction over every crack and bump. I finally managed to get the car going fast enough to get the aerodynamics working and heat in the brakes and tires at which point the car stopped trying to kill me. The next session I'm thinking that I can turn a good lap time until I was passed by a turbocharged Miata track car (these are very quick but still embarrassing). So now it was time to get serious and drive the car beyond what one would consider sane limits. I was able to brake after or at the last cone marking the braking zones (this would not by possible in any other type of race car) with such violence that I was literally hanging with all my weight against the belts. I was cornering so hard that my wrists were going numb and my neck muscles were straining as I was pushed sideways with forces greater than the weight of my body until I finally rocketed out of the corner. Now that I was getting the hang of it and could pass almost anything on the track except for a well driven Porsche 911 race car with a carbon fiber body. Now it was time for my last session where I worked on being smooth, braking harder, cornering harder, shifting faster, and not making a general arse out of myself. Once the session was over, I came in exhausted and didn't climb out of the cockpit for several minutes. My final impression? Driving a modern Formula car is not even remotely easy and requires knowing what the car is going to do before it actually does it. It also requires a level of fitness expected from a well conditioned athlete to be able to cope with the heat and the forces (I was wearing down from heat on a 75° day and it is often over the 100° mark on race days). At the end of the day I left with a new respect for the racers of these machines and had yet to turn a faster lap time than when I had been on this same track in both a track prepared Porsche GT3 and a Lotus 7 track car, for all my effort, I was only driving at 6/10ths! Now imagine what it would be like to drive a Formula One car, I will give you a hint...truly superhuman skills and physical condition are required. In the Press Car and driver are popping up in the news left and right this fall:  The Bus ROCKS
The newest addition to Quantspeed Racing is a Fleetwood Revolution motorcoach. This 40' monster makes life at the racetrack far more productive
and comfortable for driver, crew, and sponsors alike. As we have several audio related sponsors, it seemed only logical to be able to display
some of this great gear at the racetrack in a real world environment. So after a few phone calls, Audio Plus Services (Focal USA) generously
provided their new Focal Dome 5.1 theater speaker system and a stack of Cambridge Audio theater electronics to run it. Add to that a 32" Sony
XBR Bravia TV, a Focal Solid4 car amplifier, and the Focal 165 V1 car speakers for the rear quarters of the coach and you have a great
representation of a mid-level home hi-fi system at the racetrack for all interested parties to see. One of the all to often forgotten recipes
to good sound are the cables. Therefore our sponsor TARA Labs (the leading manufacturer of cables in the audio industry) provided all of the cables
to wire up the components from their Spectrum Series. The end result is some seriously good sound and video for showing off our in-car video or just
blasting some classic rock at the end (or beginning) of the day.
  And Next Year?
Many Thanks to our Sponsors We can't thank our sponsors enough for their fantastic support this year. It was an honor and a pleasure to race and market for you!
THANK YOU....
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