Hi! Hey! How are ya? How've you been? It's been a while, I know. I haven't gone anywhere, but it has been a couple months since my last post.
Oh. Or like 13 years. Oops.
Well then. This is awkward.
Oh, would you like a drink? Yeah, I have milk, and I can put ice in it for you. Good choice.
OK, so when we last talked, I think I was on Miata number 1, I might have had my Viper, and I was doing a lot of competitive motorsports. Time Trials mostly. I ended up going through four Miatas, including one Spec Miata that I did a race school in about 10 years ago, but life changed and I sold that, and it was a while before I got back into it.
A couple years ago, I decided I needed to get back into racing. I was dead-set on getting Miata #5, but a friend suggested I try something different, and so I went way off the rails and picked up a 2003 Audi A4 Avant (that's a wagon). It had the 1.8t engine, which I loved as a kid, and a 5-speed manual transmission. AWD, too, which was going to be new for me. I paid somewhere around $2,000 for it, but man, did it need work. I thought the idea of using an Audi station wagon for racing was hilarious, but it ended up making me an Audi guy in the end.
I tried out different motorsports as part of a YouTube series I tried filming, and so I got to try out Autocross again for the first time in ages, and I did a couple HPDEs with it. The trouble was that the engine was blown up. AMB engine code A4s shatter cylinder heads for some reason. Mine was cracked between all 5 valves in each cylinder. So, I rebuilt the top end!
The first track day I took it to was at Summit Point Raceway in WV. The big brakes caught fire in two laps. Remedied with new pads for the next outing.
Then it was overheating. Oil pressure would drop out, too. It kept not-finishing track days.
So I pulled the engine and cooling system and rebuilt it. I did one lap at SPR again, but I had forgotten to replace the coolant tank cap! Blew the engine up. Almost gave up on it. But what happened? Well, I got lucky. When I took it apart like 9 months later, I discovered that all I had done was warp the head, but I didn't damage anything else seriously. The head that I had put on there was absolute trash (a reman from Autozone). So I went to a junk yard, yanked one off a Passat, and had that rebuilt. Now the thing runs great! I've got good brakes, a good enough motor, and... oh... an airbag light. Race car time!
I've documented this build pretty thoroughly over on Audizine (they've been a tremendous resource for helping me figure out just how the heck this thing works over the years). But I'll try to bring that here. At the time of this writing, I'm aiming to get the car into the SCCA STU class. With the tremendous help of some friends and my dad, I now have what I think is a complete and legal cage that we fabricated from like 6 tubes of 1.5" .090 DOM steel. It's been a super fun process, and I am squarely in the build-don't-buy camp if you can spare the time to do it.
This picture was taken just before I gutted it in May 2024. The tubing over there is now (mostly) a roll cage and some scrap.