johns

Cheers Arch. Are you competing this year?

Remember to book up quickly for the next event on the 5th October so you don't end up on the reserve list

Uploaded a selection of photos to my website: http://www.flatoutphotography.com/gallery3/2013/KH06 Also on FB if anyone wants to tag themselves, or comment on the photos: https://www.facebook.com/#!/media/set/?set=a.618962334788672.1073741852.248878411797068&type=3

I will have some spare ones printed out on the day, so don't worry about it

Afraid not Peter - still got more than 10 people on the reserve list!

Best Impreza turn out for a long time with over 10 taking part, with 6 EVOs as well.

As Kim has pointed out, this event is now fully booked! Drop me an email on john@sidc.co.uk to be added to the reserve list.

3 spaces left now!

Brilliant response less than 10 slots left now, so you'll have to be quick in booking up John

Excellent - glad to hear it

As most of you will be aware, SIDC have Knockhill booked for our usual 4 hour open pit lane session on Saturday 22nd June from 9am to 1pm. Discounted rates available for SIDC and MLR members in the club shop: SIDC Shop Additional drivers are free, as are indeed passenger laps It is an open pit lane event, which means you can go out on track when you wish, and stay out for as long as you like. You can also take advantage of *free* instruction at our events. Just speak to the instructor in the pit lane or helmet store, and he/she will go out in your car as either a passenger or driver, and give you pointers on your lines, braking points and other suggestions to improve your driving. The first thing many of the BTCC drivers do when they come to Knockhill, it to get a few laps from a resident instructor giving them tips to fine tune their lines which can save those vital 1/100ths, and to make them aware of any changes in the track since their last visit. Wheels Around will also be in attendance (they now have a new permanent unit at Knockhill), where you can store things from your car whilst out on track, get new tyres before or after the event and even hire slicks if you wanted! The SIDC AGM will be held directly after the trackday, and we are expecting a large contingent from south of the border to attend, so we need to put on a good show and show them how strong the Subaru community is in Scotland. Hope to see many of you there, and out on track! John

Best person to speak to would be Gemma Hobbs at Knockhill

Also some classic rally cars from a bygone era: Sadly this nice puma cut the corner just a little too much Plenty more on http://www.flatoutphotography.com/gallery3/2013/GCR

Got the chance to visit my local rally last weekend. Good to see a selection of Imprezas still competeing:

I've recently bought a Legacy diesel as a daily driver. Not sure about any tuning options, but am aware that you can get an ECUTEK remap for them.

Thanks all, it is indeed a composite image made up from 4 seperate shots which were taken as part of a sequence hand held, and then stitched together using Photoshop Elements (can't afford the full version of photoshop). This took quite a few hours editing, as it was the first time I've tried something like this and was struggling with the concept of layers and how to get bits of the background layer to show through. There is only one shot of the VX220, as the focus was on Ben's car (which filled most of the frame), and it only appears once in the final frame. I didn't select around the image of the car and paste it onto the background, but instead stitched together shots of the car complete with background so that the tyre tracks lined up under the wheels of each car shot, and gave a continouous background image. I used mostly the centre portion of each frame, so there wasn't too much of an issue with barrel distorsion and compression. The shots were taken on a Canon 1D using a Canon 100-400 lens. The full size image is approx 12700 pixels by 3500 pixels!

Ben Shimmin sliding his Pro-R Impreza onto the main straight at Anglesey during the Time Attack round there last year.

Subscribed to this one

Sorry for the late reply, but been madly busy with some other stuff. Here's a couple of my photos from Saturday: There are a few more here if anyone is interested http://www.flatoutphotography.com/gallery3/2013/KH3003 John

See you all there - you better bring a car with plenty storage space Peter

Back when I first owned a classic Subaru (1997), one of the first mods we did was to fit driving lights in place of the fog lamps, as it allowed you to see much better and maintain a reasonable pace when driving in the dark, though only on full beam. Even with HIDs on the hawkeye, dipped performance lags well behind that of the car. I reckon that over the past 10 years, the headlamps of the majority of other cars on the road have improved and are much brighter when they are coming towards you (especially noticable with high mounted HIDs on Range Rovers etc). I'm guessing that your pupils contract a bit more with the glare, reducing the effective range of your own headlights.

nice one Peter

There used to be a big car show at the AECC called Golden Wheels which we attended as a club a few times, but the organiser was a guy from 20th century classics who retired and the event didn't run again after that. There's no club parking at Alford for the Sprint round that is held there, as the whole paddock area is filled with competitor cars. In fact you are often lucky to get parked within 1/2 of the circuit if its a sunny day No reason why everyone can't meet up inside the arena though. Same for the Fintray hillclimb, but at least the public parking is big enough to allow car clubs to park together if they want. Best option would be to join forces with another car club such as the Capri or mini clubs, since the Public Liability Insurance requirements would limit us from holding our own events there due to the prohibitive costs.

For some reason I never uploaded any photos from the weekend of the McRae Gathering back in 2008. Recently found them on my hard drive, so have uploaded a few to FB How many of you were there, and can you spot yourself in the crowd? http://www.facebook.com/#!/media/set/?set=a.563728933645346.134743.248878411797068&type=1 John

Winter tyres make a staggering difference to traction, and grip, especially under braking. You can get incredibly cheap winter tyres now, and almost all of them will be a vast improvement over the standard "summer" type tyres in wintry conditions. A good set of winter tyres will last many years - I am running a set of Michelins now that are on their 9th winter. Tread now is down to about 3.5mm after about 26k miles. If we are in for as bad a winter as predicted, then not fitting winter tyres could be a false economy in terms of excess payments and lost no claims bonus, as well as lost time at work due to not being able to get in etc. You can probably get by if you live in a city centre or not too far from a main road which gets well gritted.