Well firstly I don't follow motorsports quite as closely as I once did. I do still follow pre-season driver changes in FIA GT by Fantec and AWS and in the Weathertech series (Formerly ALMS when I last posted).
More on that when we come to the end of the 2021 season.
Of course we've all been through a pandemic and it's still not over, though I think the worst is behind us, we'll see this winter if variants come an issue along with the annual influenza season especially in colder climates.
Since I last posted I said I was unable to get a 2015 Focus ST. Well I ended up getting a 2016 Focus ST July of 2016. ST2 with Race Red with optional wheels.
Long story short I started modding it not even after 24hrs of ownership. I mulled the idea of a Cobb AP but felt it was overpriced. The decision not to buy it was helped by the fact that Mountune USA which is in Carson, CA about 40 mins from my front door didn't have any units in-stock. So I went to craigslist instead and found somebody in Oxnard selling his SCT X4 flash controller. I contacted him and drove over to pick up the unit. He had unmarried it to his former Ford F-150 since he bought a brand new Dodge pickup.
He wanted $200 and that's what I gave him. I immediately order tunes from Torrie @ Unleashed Performance for $150 for lifetime updates.
I bought slicks for it and hit the track. First time out I forgot to disable traction control because it prevented me from doing a burnout to get the slicks hot. My 60 ft times suffered and it ran 14.0@99 mph. The tune was for 30% E85 (E30). Eventually I was able to run 13.96@99 on one of my last passes of the day. This was at Sacramento Raceway Park.
Fast forward to about the middle of 2017 and I had the car down to 13.14@102.3 mph and made it to the Semi finals of Import Face-off where my laziness got the best of me and I lost a race I could have easily won and been in the money.
As of 2019 I lost the Focus ST due to stupidity on my part. So I was in the market for another car. I also filed bankruptcy (Chapter 7) to prevent the Focus' loan from showing up on my credit. That succeeded and I was back to square one.
I was in the market for the last of the 2019 Ford Fiesta ST's because all the Focus ST's had been sold (last year was 2018), so when getting one of those proved to be very difficult. I started looking around for other options. I knew the Hyundai Elantra Sport existed but I found that the 2020 models only had DCT for an option. Being a drag racer and knowing the DCT shift quickly I briefly thought about that and decided against it for a few reasons I'll get into in a minute.
I wanted a manual and luckily Kia offered the Forte GT in both manual and DCT. The manual was $578 more, so they are asking enthusiast like me to pay more. Fine by me, I got 95% of the options found in the DCT GT2 model and Michelin Pilot Sport 4 tires ($200 option).
After about two months of ownership I formulated a plan to go a different direction than people usually take when modifying a car, this is based directly off my experience with the Neon SRT-4 and the Focus ST.
When I found Burger Motorsports offered a JB4 for the Forte GT, I jumped at the opportunity especially after I found on Facebook some people had purchased it and performance was very good. I also decided to go a different direction with race tires. I would have purchased slicks again but this time I would go with drag radials..
The tuner community doesn't know it yet but they are about to find out despite the apparent performance advantage of the DCT transmissions, especially the VW/Audi DSG it's manuals that will be the fastest with drag radials which impressive ET's and trap speeds that will seem impossible to understand even with explanation.
I've talked about this beyond especially on the Focus ST forums but the results will speak for themselves. I've run into a few snags installing a key component so once that is sorted I hope by the middle of the week as I post this that I will be able to get some track testing in. I missed the most recent visit to California by Import Face-off, so the next event is the delayed CMI Spring Fling that is now scheduled for July 25th.
In the meantime I will get some testing in, but I also plan to return to Brazil where I visited in 2016.
I will finally start the blog that will cover more of that side of my life very soon.
I will talk more about my Forte GT in a upcoming post, stay tuned.
BTW it's run the best of 13.77@103.47 in trap speed and 13.75@101.9 mph for ET with bad 60 ft times.
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