If you’ve toured Club Auto Sport or attended an event held at the club, you probably think you’ve seen it all. The spectacular 10,000 sq. ft. clubhouse and lounge with its polished black granite floor and 20-foot floor-to-ceiling window walls. The vibrant business community. The beautifully lit drive aisles. And the hundreds of public, private and member events attracting thousands of guests annually. And lots of beautiful cars!

Goodies will take approximately the front five business condos totaling 8,000 sq. ft. of the new 33,000 sq. ft. of space that will be erected behind the existing 87,000 sq. ft. business center and club.

The common thread connecting Goodies and Club Auto Sport is a passion for high-performance cars. Our customers love fast cars and enjoy customizing and maintaining each one to suit their unique driving styles and tastes. Many also take their cars to the track whenever they can. We believe Goodies customers will enjoy the community environment at Club Auto Sport. We’ve consistently stood for the highest quality parts and a commitment to personal service.  Club Auto Sport  provides an ideal environment for us.

“At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter if you race Formula 1 cars, touring cars, sports or business, as long as you enjoy it. That’s one thing about us. If you walk into the garage — even as a guest — you get that feeling we really love what we do and we are passionate.”

At Goodies Speed Shop we love driving our cars — muscle cars, exotics, dragsters, or sedans. That’s why we talk about them. That’s why we upgrade them. That’s why we customize them.

I was back at Laguna Seca Raceway yesterday. The weather was fantastic, mid 80′s and dry and the track was hot and rubber had been laid down all day long. I was able to do my fastest lap (so far) of 1:51.34 during the middle of the afternoon. Still short shifted and lifted from turn 5 to the bridge before turn 6 to avoid being black flagged for a sound violation. Above is a track map from Harry’s Lap timer for iPhone that show my speed and G force (yellow is between 0.6G and 0.8G, red is above 0.8G).

In March, I was able to arrange 3 track days at Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey California. The first was with Your Private Track Day on March 7, 2011, the second was with Porsche Club of America on March 15, 2011 and the third was with TrackMaster Racing on March 28, 2011. Jim and Vafa joined me for the YPTD and TMR events. Jim was driving his yellow Ferrari F430 and Vafa his Ferrari 612 and his new Maserati Trofeo race car. We all had a blast. I’ve posted a few videos on my Youtube channel.

The first, and in most cases more expensive, is to find a local tuning shop, arrange an appointment and drop off the car for the day. In this case they would remove the chip, bench flash it with a new tuned map then insert the chip back into the car.  In cases where a shop was not local it was also possible to remove the chip yourself and send it, via mail (or other delivery service) to the shop where they would again bench flash it and send back to you for insertion back into the car.

The second is loading the map dynamically through the OBDII port. In this case an OBDII cable with a USB connection is sent via mail (or other delivery service) to you and connected to your PC and the car.  The PC reads the current ECU, sends current map to a server / service and in a few hours or a day a new map is provided for uploading into the ECU. With this approach you don’t need to give up the car for a day, or longer, and you retain control of loading / reloading the map.

I decided to go with the OBDII approach.  Searched the web and found Softronic and their distributor SoftronicTuning (Vivid Racing). After checking out their websites and positive responses on the Rennlist and 6Speedonline forums, I decided to go ahead with the softronic tuning. Worked directly with Dan at Vivid Racing – he fedex’d the OBDII cable and sent me a link to download the software.  I connected my laptop to the car and the software started gathering information about my current ECU settings, reading the current map and sending it, via the internet, to Softronic’s servers.  A few hours later I received an email containing both my original map and a new tuned map. Within 5 minutes the new map was upload via the OBDII cable and flashing software.

Immediately took the car out for a drive and went to the nearest highway, accelerated up the on-ramp, quickly moved over a few lanes – with so much torque, and amazing responsiveness of the throttle, I was pushed quickly into the back of the seat and reached an amazing speed without even realizing it. So much smoother. My only reaction is WOW!

I’m heading to the Laguna Seca next week and can’t wait to see how it does on the main straight and exiting the corners.

Today, the business is known as Geeknet. Much of the old OSDN has gone, yet a few of the key assets remain. Animation Factory was sold several years ago to Mecklermedia. What remains today is the e-commerce business Thinkgeek and a scaled down media operation consisting of the sites: Slashdot, Sourceforge and freshmeat.

Geeknet made many major changes in 2010, including:

1. Thinkgeek revenues grew 55% to $76M
2. Media revenues grew 11% to $18M
3. Kenneth Langone and the Geeknet board eliminated the entire media management team
4. Sold media sites: Ohloh and Geek.com
5. Moved it’s headquarters from California to Fairfax, VA, home of Thinkgeek

The growth of Thinkgeek is amazing and the team should be congratulated. The e-commerce business and the media business are two different businesses with widely different business models. With a 55% annual growth perhaps Geeknet should concentrate on this business and phase out and sell off the media business. I don’t know if this is Geeknet’s current strategy – if it is then keep an eye out for sales of Slashdot, freshmeat and Sourceforge. If it’s not, then perhaps it should be. AOL, Google, IDG and Ziff Davis would be a good fit for Geeknet’s media sites.

During my first outing the wind changed direction so that it was blowing directly at the microphone that was halfway up the hill between turns 5 & 6. On my 3rd lap I was black flagged for being at 94.6db. The car is stock so I was very surprised that it exceeded the sound limit. You can see the black flag to the left side at the end of the video.

I ended up short shifting the rest of the day – my speed improved through 4, 6 and 10 and I found the right line by 3rd session on the track.

Three different laps spliced together to show turns 1 and 2 at Infineon.

Here is a lap I took with an instructor. The goal was smoothness in braking and cornering – making sure I made each apex and exit correctly.

Autocross is a sport where you try to drive around a course in the shortest possible time. The course is laid out in a big empty parking lot and outlined by orange plastic cones. — PCA-GGR

I didn’t take a video of my drives around the circuit, however here’s a video of one of the top drives of the day.

It worked really well. Here’s how I set the sliders: Sensual at 75%, Tender at 90%, Joy at 25%, Aggression and Tempo all the way down.