Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Our first drive

In this week, we were given theory lessons by Najmi where most of the lessons materials that he used were from advance driving course. We learned how to identify different types of dangers on the road bla bla bla. Anyway, we don't want to bore you by telling you all that coz its DRIVING TIME!

During the driving lesson, we learned manoeuvres such as doing S thru a slalom, acceleration sense, and others that you'd find in advance driving course. Once we have completed all the course, we were challenged with a combination of all the manoeuvres that we learned.

5-step parking

The combination consists of these steps, hence the 5-step parking name:
step 1: From stationary position, we have to go through a series of cones lined up as slalom and coming to a stop
step 2: Go through the same slalom, in reverse & into a parking space
step 3: Come out of the parking space & side park into a different parking space
step 4: Exit from the parking space & park into a different parking space, front in
step 5: Exit out of the parking space, make 2 hair pin turns & finally into a parking space, all while in reverse!

These 5-steps is a compulsory driving test required by the cops in the UK. Keng did a pretty good time of 1:11s, which is equivalent to the record time made by some anonymous cop. The nearest competitor that day came close to Keng's was 4s slower :). We got a 3rd placing for this earning 6 valuable points.

Lane changing & cadence braking

This was fun. We were told to do medium speed lane changing in a 2 lane wide road, it's tight I tell you. A lot of guys had close call with the curb when they spun out from doing the lane changing. The other technique was cadence braking ala manual ABS. The steps to execute this are:
  1. Travel to about 70 kph (Keng went up to 100kph),
  2. Lock the brakes (remember to clutch in and slam the momma!)
  3. Steer away from danger while the brakes are still locked; the car will still be going straight at this point
  4. Release the brake; this will steer the car away from danger
  5. Lock the brakes again; this is to slow down the car
These are emergency procedures to avoid obstacle for a car without ABS assistance, if your has ABS equipped, just press the brake as hard as you can & steer the car away from danger. Let the ABS do it's work.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Back to school ..

It has been almost 5 years since both the D24's members have graduated. Now, picking up the pen & reading book shouldn't be that hard right? It is .... because our lecturers/tutors did not teach us these ..

Pace note

Simulation challenge

So in that very first morning is when everything gets back to the basic, we're all learners now. Together with 15 other teams, we met up at AAM Motorsports to attend our first class. We warmed up our seats & were then briefed by Faidzil Alang from FA Racing about rallying. Little that we know, he had a surprise for us, our very first challenge to fight for points, simulation challenge on Ps2: WRC! Obk snuggles & said, "hehehe, I've played that game before" but sadly, Keng have not.


"Bang bang boom", nope, they're not the sound of durians being split open, these were the sounds made by the Scoda WRC hitting the trees & cliff with Keng piloting it. It's tougher than Ps2:Gt4, said Keng. Yeah, it probably is because the Logitech G25 has a 900 degree of turning radius & Ps2 has ermmm, 1/10th of that. Obk keep shaking his head when Keng was behind the wheel. We were struggling, we know our time will suck. We didn't dare to hope for more, a position somewhere around 6th will be good.

When they announce the results, we got more than we hoped for, a 2nd placing! D24 has collected their very 1st valuable 8 points putting us in the 2nd spot at the standings.

Tulip & pace note

2 guests, Jamaluddin & Rozita were invited to teach us about tulip & pace note. Before the class, we thought they meant tulip flower. We knew what pace note is, but we have no idea how to read and write it. Jamaluddin and Rozita are very thorough when they teach about pace notes short hands symbols and their usages. We were given some practices in writing and reading them too. The symbols & alphabets + numbers begins to looks so much more sense to us now! The pace note topic is way too vast, so we'll create an entry just for it alone in the future.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Profile shoot of D24 ..


It took us quite a number of rounds of discussion to finally come to a decision on what to show the TV viewers who D24 really are. Before that, let us bring you around ideas that we did actually put into thoughts:

  • Drifting: OBK's drift car was a defect after Keng's elder brother converted it into a Lotus Esprit. And Keng's drift car was still in the workshop going through more modification (yeah, still at it ^^). So drifting is out of the question ...
OBK's Lotus Esprit
  • Bowling: We were barred from going near the aisle for making dents on the wooden flooring for launching the ball .. upward; we did get pretty good air FYI
  • Snooker: The only reason we played it in the 1st place was because it's near to OBK's foreman's workshop & there's an arcade center just next door
  • Go-kart: They didn't let us wet the track
With that in mind, we knew that we had to show our true color.
  • Keng spends most of his weekend helping at his bro at Nats Autopart in Rawang & OBK will sometime hangout there as well
  • We play a lot of PSP; they didn't tell you that in the show did they?
  • We play a lot of Richard Burns Rally; that's where we did our pace note training
  • OBK loves to play kite, Keng just went along with it
Some facts you'l find in the clip:
  • The Vietcong hats were purchased by OBK during his Vietnam trip
  • Keng was tuning the JPEG, not the ECU
  • Yeah, those really are microphones
Can you spot any other bloopers?