NC in C Stock - early results not promising

[altiain]

Alan Dahl, a Nationally competitive autocrosser in the Northeast, wrote about his first real outing in his C Stock NC recently on the board. Here's a link.

A couple of excerpts:

Did my first race-tired autocross test in my new NC and the results were not pretty. Unfortunately I managed to confirm just about everything in the Grassroots Motorsports test which has left me wondering where to go from here (besides down to my local Pontiac dealer of course).

Time-wise Ron and Fast Mike absolutely smoked me. Some of that was due to me not taking my last (and driest) run after discovering the wheel well rubbing but even on the first three runs I was about a second and a half to two seconds off of Ron who finally ended up beating me by over 3 seconds on his last run. Very disappointing considering how long Ron rode the rev limiter and that Ron was on Hoosiers, not 710s.

(He's talking about Nationla driver Ron Bauer, in a borrowed C Stock MSM, and and sccaforums board regular fastmike in his ES '95 R)

Observation from someone else in the thread, talking about two other Nationally competitive drivers in Florida:

We had a similar NC vs. NB down in Ft. Myers in early January. Darrin DiSimo vs. Bob Palmblad. I can't recall if Bob had the RX8 bar on the car at the time, but there was ~2 seconds between the two of them. I had the ES MR2 down at the event also, and was only 3 tenths off Darrin on the 64 second, transistion happy course.

Ouch. Here's hoping Mazda gets off their and builds a real NC Sport Package. They've apparently already got a car for the wine & cheese set, how 'bout one for the grassroots racers that made the NA & NB famous?

[blackzx3_13]

Interesting, so how many Solstices will there be at nationals? I think that a 99 sport will still win nationals this year, but the Solstices won't be far behind. What about the Mazdaspeed? Aren't they in CS now too?

[icepenguin66]

Interesting, so how many Solstices will there be at nationals? I think that a 99 sport will still win nationals this year, but the Solstices won't be far behind. What about the Mazdaspeed? Aren't they in CS now too?

I dunno about that. The Grassroots article said they would pick the Solstice if their goal was to win the SCCA Nationals. And wait till the turbo version comes out next year! Mazda has some serious catching up to do with the NC, especially in "non-ricer" styling.