A week in review, and new wheels for the ride

I’ve had new street tires for a few weeks now but finally got my new street wheels today. I called around a few places. I tried Autozone and I think they told me it would be $30/wheel to mount and balance the tires. That was a bit higher than I had hoped to pay so I came home after work and tried a service station shop down the street, they told me they couldn’t do the wheels because of the size. I then ran to Dobbs in the same shopping center.

Dobbs told me it would be $60 for each of the rear wheels and $50 for each of the front wheels. Excuse me? Are you serious, $220 to mount and balance 4 wheels and tires? I don’t think so Dobbs!

So I called up Sears at Chesterfield Mall, they did the alignment on the car last week (more info coming later in this blog post about the alignment), they said they were open till 8pm and if I got there before 7pm they’d be able to take care of them. I got there just after 6pm, and I think I left the store by 7pm. Yet again they were excellent, mounted and balanced 4 wheels and tires, plus mounted an additional r-comp without balancing for $111. So what do the new wheels look like? They’re awesome!

So let’s get caught up on a few other things from the past week, I’ll do the rest in order, or somewhat in order.

Last Thursday I took the vette to Sears at Chesterfield Mall to get an alignment done. They did it exactly to the specs requested, in an hour, and were extremely friendly during the whole process. I will definitely be going back there to get the alignment done again this summer. If you’re looking for an alignment and go there, be sure to call ahead and make sure that Ben is working.

Thursday evening I went to Solo Performance Specialties and did some swapping of my r-compound tires and race wheels. I got the set of wheels ready for the Evolution School in Kansas City on Friday and Saturday. Thursday evening I loaded up the car on the trailer and headed off to KC early Friday morning.

The Evo school was awesome, I took a Phase II on Friday and Nick and I both took the Challenge school on Saturday. The instructors were amazing, and best of all we got to have Mike “Jr” Johnson drive the car in the Challenge portion on Saturday afternoon so we could try to match his times.

Saturday night we headed back to St. Louis so we could run Event #1 in St. Louis on Sunday. Natalie, Nick and I all drove on Sunday. Natalie hadn’t run an event in nearly 2 years, only competing once in the 350Z, it was great to have her running again. She did well though she has a long way to go to get ready for Nationals this year.

Nick went out on his first run and spun the car, the thing is, he didn’t bother to wait for a corner to do so, he spun the car going straight shifting to second. After that he pretty much lost all confidence in the car and it showed the rest of the day as his times were 1.5-2 seconds off my times.

My times were decent, but not as good as I had hoped. Dave was running in the ESP Mustang and pretty much had the top Index spot locked up after heat 2. I had hoped to catch him during my runs but I needed to drop another second or so off my fastest time. Next local event I’ll be sure to run on decent tires, this event we were on a set of dead Kumhos. They still performed well, but there wasn’t much left in them after 2 days of Evo school on them.

I have uploaded some video from Sunday, though only my first run so far. The camera mount wasn’t really up to the task so I might not even bother with the rest of the video as it is all most likely as shakey as this.

So it is now Tuesday. Tomorrow night I’ll be loading the car up on the trailer for the Newport Arkansas ProSolo this coming weekend. I’m going to Atlanta on Thursday for work, and should be back late Thursday night. Early Friday morning I’ll be heading south to Newport. Jeremy Foley is running with me this weekend, it should be a great weekend with beautiful weather, at least so far that is what Weather.com says!