This is the place where you will find pics and updates directly from my race weekends, plus a lot of other fun stuff such as stunt driving or things not always about racing.
Cheers! /Carl
Pic of the week
Grid before the race, Nordschleife 2008.
Songs to check out
1. Foo Fighters - The Pretender
2. Span - Baby's Come Back
3. Adam Tensta - My Cool
4. Outkast - Take Off Your Cool
5. Alexandra Stan - Mr Saxobeat
Food and Drinks
1. Redondo Beach Brewing Co, CA
3. The Standard, Hollywood, CA
3. Nic's, Bevery Hills, CA
4. Vino Pasta, Gothenburg, SWE
5. Paradise Cove, Malibu, CA
Other things
Spot to be filled with useful content.
APR and AIT - part 1 of 3: The Next Level
Sunday, July 5, 2009
The City Tire / Kallusive Clothing 350Z Twin Turbo got some good work done to it after Formula Drift in Atlanta. We cancelled New Jersey to work on getting the car up to top notch; City Tire went on a weight loss mission on the car and AIT Racing fitted carbon fiber doors (they feel like they have the weight of regular post stamps - amazing), a new hood and hatch, new sleek sideskirts and a new front. Even more panels to come from them in the future so watch out as we're getting lighter!
All in all a very noticeable reduction in weight, the car got much better to drive, more agile and definitely much more responsive to any input. I very much recommend doing this on any Z used for grip or drift, the performance improvement is just huge.
From APR we got another great performance improvement - a GTC carbon fiber rear wing. A lot of people have been against the usage of a wing on their drift car, however I guess it all comes down to the overall setup of each and every car, weight distribution, spring, shock, swaybar settings, suspension design, tire choice. On our testing session, I was so happy I can't even tell you, it was such a relief to get this thing on the car, finally getting the car to behave like I want it to! Definitely leaped forward to the famous Next Level.
The GTC wing itself is very impressive, pretty huge and with great aerodynamic data on paper already, and when using it in real life, only minor changes to the wing attack angle completely changed the behavior of the car and therefore it got very direct and easy to setup since it is immediately noticeable when we got too much downforce on the rear end, or too little.
Also props here to our buddy Justin who made a very serious chassis mounted wing installation, with the mounts going through the hatch. Here's a vid from one of the testing runs with the new parts, this is before we cleaned the car up and got it ready for a cool photoshoot ahead of Vegas (pics to come from that one).
Name: Carl Rydquist Age: 34 Home: Redondo Beach Web:CarlRydquist.com Reel:Click to watch Highlights: Winner of Zandvoort 500 (2005), Winner of Swedish Endurance 3h GT Racing Championship (2004), Winner of Swedish Endurance 8/12h GT Racing Championship (2001), Winner of Eurosport Super Racing Weekend Challenge (2001), Winner of Redline Time Attack Mod RWD (2010). 24 Hours of Nurburgring (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011). 24 Hours of Barcelona (2011). 25 Hours of Thunderhill (2010). Memberships: FIA (intl racing license), DRAW Portfolio, Formula D, Performance Two Stunt & Precision Driving Team (Hollywood, CA), SAG Stunt Driver (Screen Actors Guild). Teams: City Tire (Drift), AE Performance, STORM GT Racing.
