When you're driving a car that doesn't work, Horse Thief Mile is a really frustrating place to be. On the other hand, when the car is working it's one of the most rewarding tracks to drive. Luckily, this weekend fell mostly in the later category.

Since our last time at horse thief, the car has received more steering angle with our new alignment settings and a stiffer chassis thanks to newly installed sub-frame connectors. Usually, I expect the changes we make to be minor and/or incremental. But this time out, the car was a whole new beast. The added responsiveness and predictability of these mods made the car so much more enjoyable and more importantly, added 100% confidence when throwing the 18 year old chassis.

Within one or two laps I felt good about throwing the car at the sweet hairpins and by the end of the first sessions I was linking the top (judged) section without an e-brake. In my corolla, that was really knife edge stuff and it was hard in the mustang but definitely repeatable. So everything was going well until we lost a big chunk of our left rear tire. Since we are saving what little tires we have for all star bash next month we didn't bring enough to continue for the competition. Even if we could have mustered something up for competition time [thanks for offering Mickey] I think it was best that we didn't compete. Mainly because of our lack of an e-brake. At the oval the car would have benefited from having an e-brake but at HTM, not being able to slow down becomes a matter of safety. Rather than competing half-assed, we can focus on making the car better next time.

Overall there are very few things left to complain about on the Mustang but a few things that came up at HTM: there is a bit of a hitch in the steering at high angle, the gas pedal also has a weird bump and the timing was a little off making the car run a little rough. Once we take care of those little issues, we're only 100hp and an e-brake shy of a very competitive car. :)