So I finally had it with listening to my Motorola Droid (Google Music and Pandora) for my commute. Why don’t I have a stereo? Well back in February I ripped it all out. Not exactly the best choice, but hey, I was in the hear of the moment thinking I was prepping the car for a fully competitive 2011 season. That has changed, (more on that later).

A couple of weeks ago I told the subwoofer and amplifier for the car, I wasn’t interested in putting all of that weight back in anyways. So tonight after work I put the speakers back in the door (with some cutting and soldering on the OEM wiring due to not having adapters for it.

I managed to get everything back into the front of the car, including the crossovers, and the head unit. I wasn’t able to get the radio working, as it doesn’t seem to see that the Antenna is hooked up, so I’ll have to track that down. I also didn’t get the rear speakers in, simply due to time/darkness, I’ll get those later this week.

So, why am I not building the car fully for 2011? Well honestly, budget. I need to put quite a bit more money into the car, and it’s already the middle of June. Where did time go? So, without the budget to fully prep the car, I’m going to drive something else at the 2011 Solo Nationals.

I’ll be driving Dave Whitworth’s Mustang in EM at Nationals. Dave and I have been friends for 11 years now, he was my first instructor when I started autocrossing, and while I surpassed him in autocross skills long ago, he’s still a friend of mine

I'll fly into Lincoln, though I'm not sure when yet, and likely be there all week. I've offered to announce at the ProSolo Finale, though I haven't heard if anyone is interested in taking me up on that offer or not.

I am hoping that for 2012 I can get the 350z sorted out and ready for Nationals. Though, I really don’t like that I now live 26 hours from Nationals. Living in St. Louis and being a 5 hour drive from it (when it was in Topeka) definitely spoiled me!

I was pretty down today. Going into the first set of runs I had a headache that didn’t seem to want to go away and I wasn’t happy with my performance the day before. I was actually sitting there thinking, why do I do this? I really was thinking, I love seeing friends and talking to everyone, but I was pretty down on the racing part of things.

While I was announcing first heat a number of cars were DNF’ng corner 3, all the MOD cars dnf’d their first run. I thought, what is wrong with these people, why are they dnf’ng up there? Well, on my first run I found out, as I did the same damn thing. I was flying around the top of the course, looking ahead (or so I though) and all of a sudden I realized I wasn’t anywhere close to making it where I needed to be, I slammed on the brakes then decided there was no way I was going to make it so I hit the gas and drove on.

My second run started off okay, but coming in to the end I clipped a cone, I knew it, wasn’t one I should of hit, but did. So I was sitting in 8th or 9th as of that run, where I started the day in 7th.

My 3rd run I wasn’t really happy going into, I was sitting in 3rd place in ZSP (our little Z car competition with 4 drivers). I went out and did as well as I could. I put up the lowest Z time for the day and moved into first in ZSP and 6th in BSP. Had I not had issues yesterday I truly believe I could have taken 5th for the weekend (1 out of trophies) but I still would have been 4 or 5 seconds out of first.

I’ll have videos up in the next couple of days, I have some photos uploading at the moment, when they are all complete they will be found at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chammond/sets/72157626299376321/

So there’s been much debate (or really just many people telling me I am crazy) over on SCCAForums in the thread I started to discuss the proposed move of the 350z from BSP to ESP in SCCA Autocross classing.

Ever since the 350z was released I thought it was the perfect F-Stock car, though others have always seemed to think otherwise and it was relegated to B-Stock where all but a few events it became an also ran behind the RX-8. It was also classed in BSP (b street prepared) where it hasn’t faired any better for the last 8 years. Last month the SCCA posted a proposal to move the 350z from BSP to ESP, I’m all for the move, most of the ESP folk apparently aren’t, “A Japanese car in our American Car Class? How dare you!”

Alright, so no one has made that complaint, but the way they “defend” their ground they might as well be drawing lines in the soil. There’s much debate about what a 350z will actually weight in SP trim, my car isn’t fully SP prepped yet (and to be honest that will likely take 2-3 years due to budget) but I figured I would go ahead and weigh the car at the divisional event today.

First things first, here are the details of the car itself (if it's not mentioned it is stock)
2004 Nissan 350z "Enthusiast" package
18x10" RPF1s
305 V710s
No stereo/speakers
~2 gallons of gas
Injen Super SES dual exhaust (weighed at 15lbs lighter than stock)
HFCs
K&N CAI
Plenum spacer
Hotchkis F/R sway bars
No spare tire, tools, or rear carpeting/mats(not fastened down from the factory)

And what did it weigh in at?

3062lbs

That matches up fairly closely to my 2003 Enthusiast I had from 03-06 in b-stock trim. A few other mods on this one, though the old one had a lighter exhaust setup. The 2003 weighed 3075lbs.