UNABASHED PROMOTIONAL SPOT FOR ME!

You can help me reel in MINI MANIA as a sponsor for my racing effort by following this LINK and posting a comment.

Thanks for taking a few seconds to help!

Jerry
USTCC MCS #37

 

would that be the big red cable?

 

Well that's one of them. There are two coming from the battery. Can you find it and photograph it?

 

this should be it (a pic I took of the exhaust). Look to the left of the bend in the black section - flex loom covering the cable

 

Yep. That's it. You can see it better in the battery box where it passes through a collar on its way south.

Anyway, as I said: two cables. What a pain.

 

Next up for me is the Teen Driving Clinic at Thunderhill on March 22. Long before Autoweek and BMWCCA jumped on the bandwagon and started fanning public awareness about the need for over the road training of teenagers, I have been interested in this. Both my boys went to driving school as soon as they reached age 16, one to Skip Barber and one to Bob Bondurant when his school was still at Sears Point. The training saved the life of my oldest boy and his friends one stormy night, so I always thought the steep price of driving school was cheap insurance.

I have been invited to be one of the instructors at the clinic and I am looking forward to it.

After that, it's off to AMVIV for the NAMCC race at Spring Mountain and schmoozin' with my LA & SD homies. I hope to see some of you at the track.

 

Have fun racing in real races!

But I guess that you'll always have to keep an eye out for the slow pokes....

Matt

 

I'll see you there Jerry, but I'm not go to be on the track this year. Still getting the motor broken in.

 

Thank all of you who posted to the Mini Mania site. It worked!!!

Tuslo Motorsports is very pleased to announce the signing of a sponsor for our 2008 US Touring Car Championship campaign. Mini Mania, the largest supplier of Mini and MINI aftermarket parts in the US has agreed to support our racing effort with race parts and cash. More than that no one could ask. Many thanks to Don Racine for his encouragement and support and you can look for the Mini Mania logos on car #37 this season. Please visit my sponsor’s website at http://minimania.com and check out the latest specials. See you at the track!

Cheers,
Sid

**Yes, I know I need a new avatar. I'm waiting until Shiva gets stickered up. Mid April is what I hear from Ali.**

 

 

Way to go Jerry! Gives hope to the rest of us generationally challenged. OFG's Rule!!!
Hey do you have any extra pieces that would work well on my car, since you'll be needing to run the higher quality Mini Mania stuff?
And not the orange wheels. LOL.
G'lck in Vegas, Seeya at Infineon.
vinnie

 

Not yet! Stay tuned.

 

Jerry.....
Not on the AMVIV track this year, but will be in town for AMVIV and out to root you on .. in the mid-afternoon Friday at the track. Good Luck ... Wished that I could be more supportive, but no instructor has even come close to "putting me on the correct line" with the "Ball's" to increase the "envelope" of "ah Sh*t" as I progress! It is all about the "carbon unit" behind the wheel!! The car will do just fine.
Hope to meet up at the "Range Club" on Friday Night!! A good Cigar and Brandy sounds like a good way to complete the day!
Look forward to a great weekend!!
Wm...

 

Sorry I won't get to ride with you on Friday, Willum. We always seem to find a faster way to do things.

NASA doesn't want racers to instruct because they feel we can't give the students enough time, so I had to turn in my shirt. My instructing has decreased since I started racing and I miss it. I did some work with the Aston Martin Club and Track Classic and I'm doing the Teen Driving Clinic at Thunderhill tomorrow, but I wish I could do more.

See you in Pahrump.

 

This week I'm doing the final prep on the car before loading it on the trailer and heading for Las Vegas on Thursday. We worked the electrical bugs out of it at Thunderhill and it's running pretty strong. My old Toyo RA-1s are a little low on tread but there should be enough to gallop around Spring Mountain Raceway for a few laps on Friday. It will be good to stack the car up against some other Mini race cars since it has only previously run against other marques on the track.

I'm supposed to rendezvous with Ed from Mini Mania down there to get my sponsor's stickers on before the race. We'll be adding some Mini Mania parts before the next race at Infineon April 12-13 and I can't wait to see what a difference they make in my performance and handling.

I hope to see some of you at the track on Friday. Stop by my rig and say hello!

 

AMVIV

It’s the weekend of A Mini Vacation in Vegas, organized by Sin City MINIs, and next to MINI Takes the States and MINIs on the Dragon in North Carolina, probably the biggest MINI/Mini event in the US. This year, almost 600 cars and their owners showed up for trips, tours, cruising the Las Vegas Strip and the vendors’ tents, hanging out with old friends and meeting new ones formerly known only by their internet handles.

Phil Wicks’ Track Day and NAMCC Race

Every year for the past three, Phil Wicks holds a track day on the weekend of AMVIV. The first year was at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, not a very friendly road racing venue. For the last two years it has been held at Spring Mountain Raceway in Pahrump. Last year, you may remember, there was carnage with only two or three cars escaping damage. It showed in this year’s roster as only 3 cars showed up to race. There were events for everyone though, a novice training school, a track day a Solo I run, track tour for the folks who had been out to Death Valley and a NAMCC race event.

Due to schedule slippage, the race shrank from 15 laps to 10, to 8 and finally to 5. I made a terrible start, somehow misplacing second gear, and Jeff led off the first lap. Clark and I caught him and passed on the back straight. We had agreed that due to the shortness of the race and the fact that there were only 3 of us and that our power to weight ratios were so different, we would put on a good show for the crowd instead of just droning around widely separated. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. But I’m taking a lot of flak for it. Judge for yourself. The full story is here.

If anyone has any photos of the race or Shiva in the paddock, I’d love to see them.

 

I know I ask a lot . . . But here's my chance to rep the Mini community at the Grassroots Motorsports Ultimate Track Car Challenge held this year at Buttonwillow in June. If you care even a little bit, click here and hit my ratings which are slumping. I need an infusion of MINI enthusiasm. Shiva is THE ONLY MINI being considered.

Take a click for the team! :tu:

 

"It’s springtime in the high desert. Wildflowers cover some of the hills with a mosaic quilt of yellow, orange, red and blue. Landmarks clearly visible are deceptively distant in the dry air and the surrounding peaks of the big shouldered mountains appear to be cut from cardboard and pasted onto the cerulean desert sky."

Dayum! Cormac McCarthy got nuthin on you, man.

 

Luke's little pinto was showing the long day's ride in the scuffling of her hooves through the mesquite, with now and then a kicked up flinty pebble striking a spark against her iron shoes like the small heart of a sun in the fading light of evening. The jingle of her harness had slowly changed from the brisk staccato of the morning to the langorous largo of the late afternoon.

etc. etc.

There's always more.

Thanks for the kind words. I wasn't sure anyone would notice. I try to set the scene in all these pieces. I think the visuals, the tactiles and the aromas are an integral part of a place that are often overlooked in the tumult of a race weekend.

 

May 4, 2008
Willows, CA

Tuslo Motorsports driver Jerry Bradbury finishes third in his third auto race ever and takes his Mini Mania/Bay Bridge Motors Mini Cooper S to the podium in the US Touring Car Championship at Thunderhill Raceway. Bradbury thanks his sponsors, Mini Mania and Bay Bridge Motors for making it possible.

The next appearance for the Tuslo Motorsports car and driver will be at the Grassroots Motorsports Magazine sponsored Ultimate Track Car Challenge at Buttonwillow Raceway on June 8th.


Read the latest Race Report HERE.

 

Good luck at the Grassroots event!

Matt

 

Congregation for the podium finish, and good luck on the next race...

 

Photos when I get 'em.

Grassroots Motorsports. The name alone conjures up the image of a couple guys in dirty t shirts wrenching on a junkyard find in the garage late at night with some cold Budweiser close at hand. The car is held together with baling wire and bubblegum and powered by go-fast grease. So by extension, the Grassroots Motorsports Ultimate Track Car Challenge should be a bunch of these cars whizzing around for the fun and the glory, right? Wrong. The winner of my class (I was placed in Independent Varsity because of the blower) was a carefully coiffed guy driving his Radical SR4. Grassroots? Excuse me, that’s a flat out race car! The paddock was full of such high dollar, high horsepower race machinery including a Morgan with an L7 Corvette engine in it, several Griggs Racing massaged Mustangs and other race cars. There’s no way I can hang with that bunch. They were turning lap times 20 seconds faster than me. A 5 second gap at the track is huge. 20 seconds is just a joke.

There was no chance of winning or placing with this crowd, so I just concentrated on trying to turn consistent fast laps. Approaching Magic Mountain at over 100 mph, the ABS light came on and when I got on the brakes, I locked them up and filled the cockpit with tire smoke. Back in the paddock I called Jacques, my sponsor from Bay Bridge Motors, to ask if there was anything I could do about it. “This is a good chance to learn to modulate the brake pedal,” he replied. Oh great. So I turned the emergency electrical cutoff switch on and off a couple of times and turned the ignition on and off a couple of times and the ECU finally decided that the ABS really was working after all. It gave me no more trouble.

I’ll be back here in October with USTCC. Hopefully, this experience will pay off then.

Read the full report HERE.

 

1-2 seconds when at the FRONT of the race is even huge
sorry to hear about the competition having all the bells and whistles
as you well know its important to enter the right classification when driving Mini's

 

Nice meeting you today Jerry. Hope to see you out on track sometime!

Matt