COBB goes to the Modified Tuner Shootout

[Justin]

The next morning was the Autocross competition. Our hotel was only about 10 minutes away so we woke up early and headed to the track. We set up shop and Eric began putting the OEM front lip on the car. We removed it because it was easier to get in and out of our trailer. We kept coming up with reasons why we needed a sweet Toter Home trailer while driving out to Phoenix....blah blah this truck is to cramped for 4 us us, blah blah, we could work on the cars while driving to events, blah blah, we could sleep right at the track and save on hotel costs, blah blah....I think X-box came into the conversation as well.......yeah, some reasons were more outlandish then others

Anyway, unloading the trailer and getting the car ready took up a lot of time. Before we knew it, the event organizers were running through the pits asking us to get our cars in grid! Billy hops in the GT-R, fires her up, and rolls over to grid for the drivers meeting. We were thinking this would be our event, after all we had Billy Brooks right!!?!? There were some serious machines out there though, and we never really fully tested the GT-R in real autocross situation before. We ran a few slalom tests at Miller Motorsports Park, but thats about it.

Some of the cars in grid:


While Billy was in the drivers meeting eric started to get a slightly worried look on his face:


I don't like it when Eric looks worried, and I knew what he was thinking. The OEM Dunlops are not going to allow us to be competitive. We made the decision to let Billy run them for his first warm up laps and switch over to the R888's we brought. Good thing we picked up those 19" Volks for the G37. They just happened to fit on the R35 well enough to stick some sticky rubber on them. After Billy ran a few laps on the OEM wheels and tires, we performed our version of a NASCAR wheel change...only it took us 5-10 minutes instead of 15 seconds. Our saving grace was some on course drama....someone sheared some wheel studs and was stuck. This allowed us enough time to get the Volks swapped over and Billy back into grid.