NASA – SoCal Region | We Drive Harder!

It’s a show of faith to buy a used car sight unseen. It’s a much greater leap to buy a car damaged by a flood in Texas from a salvage operation in Ohio, and have it shipped it across the country without ever having inspected it for yourself.
But that’s how NASA SoCal member Viktor Czapla came to own the Audi R8 he’s now racing in Super Touring 3. He saw a listing online on an R8 forum and sent a message to the guy asking about its condition, the extent of the damage, that kind of thing.
The only thing he could tell him was that the lights worked. He couldn’t tell if it ran because the car didn’t come with a key, but he could tell that the flood waters appear to have submerged the car no deeper than the middle of the wheel hubs, which was high enough that

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I’m strapped in tightly, grasping the wheel harder than I know I should, flying through the Dog Leg at Buttonwillow Raceway on a scorching Sunday afternoon. I can see the tail end of the car in front of me disappearing quickly toward the horizon, and I absolutely do not want to let them escape. While my logical brain is calculating that if they can go that fast, then I can go that fast, my overactive sense of self-preservation is waging an internal campaign. I find a moment to mentally repeat the mantra, “Never lift.”
I first saw this expression on the dashboard of a racecar, in all caps, affixed front and center, printed in black on white label-maker tape. At the time, I didn’t recognize the significance of a seemingly trivial, and somewhat comical prompt.
Race starts in competition school were aggressive, with everyone vying for their piece of track in what

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Buttonwillow Raceway Park welcomed 14 Spec E30 teams to the NASA SoCal season finale. Typical for SoCal Spec E30, it all came down to the final race for the SoCal regional championship with two-time regional second-place finisher Andrew Clark going head to head with three-time regional champion and National Championship podium finisher Steve Stepanian as they came into the weekend dead even in the points chase.
Ironically, while the two seasoned veterans duked it out for top honors, the battle for the remaining regional podium spots were fought by two relatively new drivers to the series, Forenz Arabian and Mickey Miller. The stage was set for an epic racing weekend under near perfect weather conditions.
Right from qualifying Saturday, Clark showed he was not playing around by setting a qualifying time that shattered the Spec E30 track record by almost 2 full seconds! J. P. Cadoux of the NorCal Spec E30 racers

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Dan Rose’s Z3 M Coupe was one of the first in the country to be fitted with a GM LS powerplant, and it’s one of a few in Time Trial competition.
The General Motors LS V8 architecture has been finding its way into cars from and on every continent. It tucks neatly into so many engine compartments, makes such ample power and is so abundant that there are prefabbed kits that will cross-fit an LS engine into nearly anything.

However, when NASA SoCal Time Trial driver Dan Rose was attempting to fit an LS2 6.0-liter into his Z3 M Coupe, to his knowledge, there was only one other car in the country that had the swap, and all of it was done the hard way, by trial and error, hand-selecting parts and troubleshooting problems as they developed.

Now, Rose had gone through two S52 engines in his current car before he resorted to

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