May 1st
It is 11pm EDT, here in New Jersey, and Mike Pancheri and Justin from New York just left. They put in a long evening of wrenching and the car is running better than ever! For the first time since we started preparing for this One Lap I am feeling like we will actually be ready! THANKS MIKE AND JUSTIN!!! Tomorrow it is off to Rochester, NY for the pre-event party and registration.
Ross, Stephanie and Oscar left Minneapolis at about 8pm, we are hoping to see them in Rochester tomorrow night or Friday morning.
My drive out to the east coast yesterday and today was pretty uneventful, other than my contributing to the economy of the state of Ohio. :-(
April 30th
On the road again! This is something we will be hearing quite a bit in the next few weeks. I am off to New Jersey today, I hope, where I will meet up with Sue, who will be flying out with our little one. Then on Thursday we will leave New Jersey heading for the start of our third One Lap that will be departing Rochester, NY on Friday. Whew! Where has time gone?? It seems like just yesterday we started planning our attack and now the time has come! 5 days ago I mentioned we weren't really ready, well, are we ready now? Of course not! That would not be any fun. I did receive the Roll Cage which was professionally installed at Paul's Cages! Paul did an extraordinary job on a very short notice! Thanks Paul! I also had the alignment adjusted by my good friend, and excellent brake and suspension guy, Blake Kettles. Thanks Blake! More to follow from the road! Cheers!!
April 25th
A little more than one week to go!! Are we ready?? In the spirit of the event, NO! We have not received our hood, roll cage and a few other items we are hoping to take with us! Are we worried yet? No, we still have more than a week left!
There has been some shuffling of co-drivers, Mike Potter will not be able to attend this year due to their overwhelming work load. So our good friend and One Lap veteran, Dale Seeley, has stepped up to the plate!
We have been working on the car trying to get a few bugs ironed out. And have spent tons of time on a dyno fine tuning, hopefully it will pay off. I need to thank another great friend, Michael Pancheri, for taking time out of his busy schedule to fly out from NYC to help us out. THANKS!!
April 16th
Click here to see Dyno run 1 or here for Dyno run 2.
April 8th
The car is home! Although the car did not meet me in Vegas as expected, I was able to rent a Honda S2000 to drive at the track event. It was a fun and loose car. After spending Saturday at the track Mike and I headed to California, where I was able to visit Virtual World Parts in person! I could not believe how busy they were.
Finally on Tuesday afternoon the car made its appearance! To say I was happy to see it would be a huge understatement! Lou was nice enough to drive it down from Portland for us. After the car arrived Mike finished up the day at work and we headed off to EuroSport to visit Raffi and pick up the seat bracket he was making for us. When we showed up with the seat it turns out the bracket wouldn't quite line up with the seat bottom. Being the good sport that Raffi is he just started pulling brackets and other parts out until he found something that would work and put it together for us. It was now about 8:30pm and we still had to install the seat, brakes, wing and other miscellaneous items, plus pack the car. I was hoping to leave Wednesday at 5am. We stopped working on the car at 2:30 am! Everything was done, but we were having problems bleeding the brakes. It wasn't until morning that we realized we had forgotten to bleed the inboard caliper! It was late and we were tired! So Mike gets that done in the AM and picks me up at the hotel. I head over to Virtual World and finish getting the car packed up. I end up leaving about 11:30am. Who cares though, I was on my way HOME!
The drive was pretty uneventful, other then the nice new wing we had installed flying off in to the desert in Nevada! I had to stop and backup until I found it. There was no way I was just going to leave it! Well I might as well have left it. It was run over one too many times and no longer looks aerodynamic. We will be getting a replacement shortly. I covered the 1956 miles in 24 hours and 45 minutes, thank you Valentine-1!!
Here are some pictures of the improved 1LapGTI:
March 27th, 2002
The car lives!! The car is up and running and putting some awesome power down, even more than we expected! I will post some numbers when I get the sheets from Matrix to go with them. The car will be delivered to Mike tomorrow and he gets to put on the 13" STOPTECH brakes (Thanks to Bob Lee from Stoptech for helping us out), 17" Kosei Racing wheels and the required Pirelli tires, Race seat, rear wing (want to make sure we stay on the ground) and miscellaneous other goodies. Mike is going to have his hands full! He will then drive it to a track event at Pahrump, NV that is being put on by www.gezuvor.com . I will post pictures and more info when I return from Vegas with the car on Monday or Tuesday.
February 4, 2002
I had my sister-in-law Nikki stop by Matrix and take a few pictures of the car in its current state. The guy holding up the hood is Jeremy from Matrix. Here it is:
Hopefully there will be something in there soon!
January 21, 2002
Hello all! We are back!! After our hiatus from last years One Lap we are well on our way to the 2002 One Lap! Our car is currently visiting Matrix Engineering in Tigard, OR getting a complete make over! It will be coming back with their excellent stage 3 turbo system. We are also getting a carbon fiber hood courtesy of Fiber Images and all kinds of other goodies from our other sponsors. We are really excited and looking forward to the event. Of course Mike Potter and his Virtual World Parts will once again be joining Suzanne and Myself on this journey. We are also raising money and awareness for the Save the Children for our fourth straight year!
