We did it! OUSCI Here we come!

The goal was to prove you could run the OPTIMA Batteries and Ultimate Street Car Association Search for the Ultimate Street Car and get into the big show on a “normal” person’s budget, and we did it. We pointed in after finishing the season 6th overall in the GTC Class. This is a big deal …

A Staggeringly Happy 2023 Optima at Daytona Recap!

Blue Ford Probe on the banking at Daytona Speedway

Woah! What a rush! Round six of the 2023 Optima Search For the Ultimate Street Car visited Daytona International Speedway this year, running the road course configuration… at night! This was going to be a test. The Probe had never been taxed like this. The closest would probably have been our trips to Road America …

A fantastic adventure to a famous track!

In what was easily the most ambitious automotive venture of my career thus far, I towed all the way to the legendary and historic Laguna Seca in Monteray, California, for an Optima Search for the Ultimate Street Car event. When they announced this year’s schedule, I couldn’t ignore the two bucket list tracks that weren’t …

C4 Corvette Rear Trailing Arms

This is a reproduction of a post I made at CorvetteForum about building my own adjustable rod-end style rear trailing arms for my 1992 Corvette. The original post can be found here: https://www.corvetteforum.com/forums/c4-tech-performance/4718559-rear-trailing-arm-parts-list-banski.html#post1606398882 Hey all, I did search for this and didn’t find it, so thought I’d share. Rear trailing arms for the C4 are …

The Assessment (boy howdy, mountains of work to do!)

Peeling clear coat on a red car fender

Well, we’ve had a few weeks to dig into the project Corvette, and we have a good bit of stuff to report. This thing is a mess. Rust, rodent infestation, water damage, mechanical issues, bad paint, destroyed seats, old tires… this thing has almost everything wrong it possibly could have wrong. It’s perfect. The first …

Let’s try something more appropriate for a change!

For the last twenty years, I’ve been doing more with less. I’ve turned a V6 sedan into a track car that’s made it to the top of the Pro-Touring heap twice with trips to SEMA and the OUSCI. Managing that required overcoming deficiencies inherent the platform itself. The Buick Regal was a sedan designed in …

The super season preview! 2023 is coming FAST!

2022 was a rocky mess for us. Breakage in 2021 ran into the supply chain COVID mess, leaving us with just two major events, at which we broke at both of them. The RX-8 experiment ended at the Time Trials Nationals with an exploded clutch, and the Probe’s post-rebuild debut was marred by an oil …