[garage_engineer]

No real progress on the car unfortunately in the last few weeks. I've been swamped with some busy summer weekends and lots of projects around the house. However, I was able to attend the UMI Performance autocross event this weekend. The event was hosted at the new UMI Motorsports Park in Clearfield, PA. UMI purchased an abandoned 1/2 mile oval and are in the process of turning it into an awesome facility for autocross, road racing and testing their products. The place looks awesome and the whole crew at UMI did a great job reviving the old track. Since my car is in pieces, I volunteered to help out and shag cones for the weekend. I was happy to be a part of the event, and very motivated to attend next year with my own car!




One of the highlights of the weekend for me was meeting was meeting Valerie and Tom aka owners of the "Dragonlady GTA". I've been a big fan of this car since I bought my 3rd gen, and seeing it in person for the first time was awesome. Valerie and Tom are even more awesome and I talked to them for quite a while about the car and how they travel around going to so many events each year. Valerie even took me for a ride around the autocross course while Tom covered my cones for me, what a guy!




On Friday night, we got to tour the UMI facility. Another awesome experience... being an engineer myself it was cool to get to see all the tooling, jigs and drawings they use for each individual component to ensure quality and repeatability.






Some more third gen pics I grabbed:





I'm fired up now to get back to working on my car! I have a couple of free weekends coming up so my next post will hopefully be lots of updates!