Autocross results, and Eric's new winter project

For those who are wondering what happened at last week's autocross, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that I kept the car on the track and put in a decent showing - 61st overall out of 127 entrants (results here for those with a MyAutoEvents account). That's not as well as I'd wanted to do, but it wasn't bad for street tires (not to mention I had the heaviest car at the event). All three runs were within one second of each other, which is by far the most consistent I've ever been. I also got a chance to meet Michael, a truly pleasant guy who used his RX-7 to demonstrate lawnmowing technique. The bad news? I tore up the transmission and had to limp the car home in 4th gear, since that's the only one that didn't sound like a can full of rocks in a paintmixer.

That points towards a countershaft failure (4th gear in most transmissions is 1:1, which doesn?t direct power through the countershaft). At least it?s not a broken mainshaft (pictured to the right), like my last tranmission failure. I probably should have called it a day after my 2nd run, when the noises reached the ?something major is broken? point, but I?d hit a cone on that run, and I wanted to end the day with a clean run. I may regret that decision upon teardown.
I have to admit that I?m a bit bummed about this most recent failure, since I?d not expected to break the trans after its last rebuild. But, as my friends pointed out, fixing one weak point (the mainshaft) was just going to lead to the discovery of the next. I?m at the end of the inexpensive upgrade path, my next step being something like the G-Force T56 upgrades. Or, screw it - why not go for the Quaife sequential box? Probably because $16K pays for a lot of rebuilds on my current setup.