Now if you have a chance, you should definitely do a track day and spend a day with a professional teacher. If you like to race, then spending a day of instruction will shave a lot of time off your laps.

In a meantime, I found a great set of videos. These are from a website called hooked on driving and feature everything from the driving line, to heel to driving.

The below video is on heel and toe shifting. This is a racing technique that will help you go into turns more slowly and put less wear on your engine. You can also use this in the real world. It takes a little bit of practice, but after a little bit of practice comes second nature.

A couple weeks ago I went for a fun drive in my JDM Miata (known as a Roadster over here). The car held on the the ground pretty good, but I couldn’t say the same thing for myself. Due to the minimum support of the seat, I felt like I was always sliding away. I heard that a friend of mine was planning on selling his NB roadster, so I asked if he would be interested in selling the seat. He said he didn’t need any money and would be happy to trade.

So after about 5 minutes of removing and installing, and then a couple hours of cleaning; I have a new seat. I added some new padding and and will replace the cover when I get a chance. I’ll also try to get some more pics up. I should also mention that the new seat weighs considerably less than the OEM seat.

If you are reading this page, then you are probably interested in tuning and driving faster. Now I love to tune my car, but it can also be quite expensive. I generally tend to do my own tuning so that saves me a bit of money, but even so, car parts aren’t cheap. Luckily, there is one part of your car that will likely make a bigger difference than the rest and is quite cheap. The driver.

Over the last couple of months I was in the process of searching for a new car. I had been stuck with a Honda Today as my commuter and decided it was time to get something better(You can check out my Mazda Miata here). This process really got me into the mentality of tuning/racing. I picked up a book called “Speed Secrets: Professional Race Driving Techniques” and started to dig in.

The book is written in a way that it’s easy, though some of the contents are actually quite technical.  And while the techniques taught in the book are for racing, you can actually practice most of them in your regular driving. Doing so can help turn even a boring drive in a slow car into something more fun.

The book covers a number of items including the importance of balance, heel-toe shifting, braking, how to take turns, down-force dynamics and much more. This book made me think about a lot of concepts I hadn’t considered before. For example, I knew that drafting reduces the force against your car allowing the car to do less work while maintaining speed. What I didn’t ever think about was that down-force is also reduced limiting your grip.

Overall the book has been a great read (one I will probably read a couple more times) and has changed the way I view a number aspects of driving.  It has definitely made everyday driving a little more fun.

I think this is a great book for anyone interested in driving, racing, jdm engines, and tuning. It is also available on the kindle so you can download it straight to you iphone or other smart phone if you have one.

Subaru Fun – Awesome video clips here

Car Mods: HKS GT570 Kit w/ ECU tweaks. This car dyno’d at 633.9hp and 746.3 torque.