We win!! N1 Racing scores full points at Round 1 of Redline Time Attack, taking home the 1st Place trophy in the Super Modified RWD class at Buttonwillow.
Congratulations to our phenomenal driver, Andrie Hartanto, along with the rest of our amazing team for pulling together such an incredible accomplishment after a very long and difficult weekend.
As you may know, on Saturday we fought through mechanical problems with prototype parts and ended Day 1 with absolutely no testing time and no laps ran at all. Sunday we persevered and we were only able to run 1 lap during Practice Session 1. We again missed Practice Session 2 because we again ran into problems and so our mechanics worked furiously to diagnose and fix the issues as best they could. We were able to only run 3 laps during the Time Attack session to put down our winning time, definitely an amazing accomplishment considering how little seat time Andrie had this weekend due to all of the issues.
Looking ahead, we're confident that we will be able to make significant improvements before Round 3 in Las Vegas next month. Also look for us to return to Buttonwillow as we plan to take on the 1:4x naturally aspirated barrier in our S2000.
We would like to thank all of our sponsors: J's Racing, Mackin Industries, DesignCraft Fabrication, and last but certainly not least, Hankook Tire for providing us with the amazing Hankook Ventus Z214 C91 compound tires that enabled us to win).
We are incredibly grateful for all of our fans and friends for the continued support. Thanks also to Redline Time Attack for putting on a great event!
N1 Racing wins at Round 1 of Redline Time Attack!
Round 1 of Redline Time Attack at Buttonwillow Day 1 Recap
After almost a full week of wrenching, trial and error, and some serious late night dyno tuning sessions (HUGE THANKS go out Andy for helping tune our car and for being so patient with everything. Also thanks to Tommy, Mike, and the great guys at GST Motorsports along with Dave, Edwin, and the awesome guys at DNR Performance in Hayward for helping us out and letting us use their dyno(s) well past 4am this week), we finally left for the track on Friday around 9pm (thanks also to Kris at MachIII for letting us borrow a fender roller in order to make our super wide slicks fit). We arrived at Buttonwillow close to 2am and after checking into our motel it was almost 3am.
With barely 2 hours of sleep, we woke up this morning and went to the track to set up our paddock area.
We attempted to swap in our new prototype valve cover along with new VTEC solenoid and ran into a serious problem...our prototype banjo cam advance bolt had broken. So we sent Norm down to LA in our stock S2000 to pick up new ones from our fabricator, Gary at DesignCraft.
During the day we did manage to have some fun. We were pitted next to Paul Walker's team and so we got to bug him and take photos with him. Our Team Principal Tom also happens to be a Redline Time Attack Official & Model Director for the series, so he had no issues bringing over the lovely 2010 Season Spokesmodels Alexia & Novella over to hang out with us.
After fighting a full day of traffic through LA, Norm finally got the part that we needed back to Buttonwillow and we were able to put the car back together.
After a quick drive around proved that things were working really well. Our tire sponsor, Hankook, hosted a photoshoot of the all the cars they sponsor for the season: Sierra Sierra Enterprises, AE Performance, GST Motorsports, BR/Grunewald Racing, and us.
We want to thank John at City Tire Online in advance for staying at the track tomorrow to support us as we plan to go through several sets of C91 compound Hankook Ventus Z214 racing tires throughout the day...special shout out goes to Paul at Hankook for being an awesome sponsor and always working to help us out tremendously. (We still need a photo with you tomorrow - hahaha)
Wish us luck as we try to tackle the NA record at Buttonwillow tomorrow!
It's 11:58pm right now. We're stuffed from eating delicious BBQ at Willow Ranch. Team N1 is going to knock back some beers and watch Formula 1 before we call it a night.
We'll try to live-blog tomorrow at the track if we can get internet.
Goodnight!
3 nights in a row of dyno tuning into the early morning
So we've been swamped the last week preparing our S2000 for Round 1 of Redline Time Attack at Buttonwillow which is...as of this entry...only 15 hours away.
We're anxious to do some fine tuning this afternoon before we pack up and head down to the track.
Here are some photos and a brief pull video from last night:
J's Racing x N1 Concepts GT Widebody S2000 at Nagoya Auto Trend Show in Japan!
Our friends at J's Racing seen here displaying their GT Widebody S2000 at the 2010 Nagoya Auto Trend show in Japan last week. Look for N1 Racing to be rocking a similar setup later this year!
N1 Racing S2000 v2.0
Our debut at the 2010 Redline Time Attack Pre-Season testing session on February 26th at Streets of Willows in Southern California.
It's 5:18am and we're still busy wrenching on our S2000!
So it's 5:18 in the morning and we're at Gary's shop in LA wrenching on our S2000 and trying to get everything done within the next 3 hours so we can head up to Streets of Willow for testing with Redline Time Attack.
What a crazy night it's been so far! During our drive down we found out that we needed a cam trigger to tune our car on a different engine management system than our Motec, but it was already 7pm and no shops were open. So we scrambled to call a bunch of people to see if we could source one. The four of us spent almost three hours of being simultaneously on our phones and a laptop tethered to an iPhone until we were able to get help from Chris and Laura (huge thanks!) who called around and posted our dilemma on a few forums. We were extremely fortunate that a generous S2000 owner and forum member named Phil volunteered to drop off the part we needed before we even arrived in LA. Thanks so much Phil!
Huge thanks also need to go out to Eddie from Mackin for meeting us up super late in order to make sure we got our newly arrived from Japan set of Volk RE30's in 18x10.5 +15 offset.
We also had an interesting time driving around Orange County looking for a gas station that would sell us 100 octane at 2am. Not as easy or as fun as it sounds.
Time to get back to work. Pardon the Blackberry teaser photos. As of right now it's not looking so great, but we're remaining hopeful. Wish us luck. Will blog tomorrow!
