Another TDi'er... :)
 

Hi gang,

I am a retired USAF officer from the SF Bay Area of northern California. Together with my wife and son I own a small composites shop that specializes in race car applications. We do CAD design work, CFD studies, build patterns and molds for race car bodies, repair broken parts...the whole enchilada.

In addition to road racing, I have long harbored an interest in fuel economy, and especially diesels. To that end I bought my first diesel in 1980...a new non-turbo 1.5L diesel Rabbit. After tweaking a bit on it I got it to where it would deliver 50 mpg at 55 mph, which was simply unheard of in those days, when the average American car got about a third of that.

We are now on our third VW diesel, a 2002 Silver Golf TDi, which we also bought new. I've done a few mods to it as well and get up to 70 mpg on long trips. Our best is 72 mpg for 800+ miles from near Seattle to our home near SF, but we've been over 60 mpg many times. Over the 110,000 miles we have on our Golf, we've averaged 49.7 mpg, city and country, summer and winter.

Looking forward to learning lots of new stuff here and sharing where I can.

Cheers! Stan

Welcome to the site, Stan! That's quite a history. Gotta love the TDi!

Thanks for the warm welcome! :)

BTW, my wife is Class of '77 ... just the second year Dartmouth admitted women. She has family in Concord, and we've been to Hangover any number of times. Great school!

O rly! That's great (and sad at the same time, I've seen some of the stuff from that dark era in Dartmouth's history).

Good old hangover, nh, ;)

Welcome to EM.

Wow. Any special type of race cars? Or, come one, come all?

Yet another instance of the convergence of the two interests in one person. I don't know what your take is on it, but I used to be very excited about getting on the track when I could, and I found switching to the fuel-efficiency focus was just another flavour of the same thing: expanding the abilities of driver & vehicle. Just as challenging. Easier to do on public roads. Much less expensive :)

Now efficiency is all I do, car wise. Although some of the skills are transferrable (like choosing the right line through a curve & clipping the apex to save momentum ;)).

Please share...

Darin

We do formula and sports racers. In addition to the cars on our website we build the bodywork and wings for the Piper Formula Cars.

http://piperracecars.com/images/stor...orio_zetec.jpg

And for the Ralt RT-40/41.

http://race-cars.com/carsold/ralt/10...98802801pa.jpg

Yes...all true. And very common among TDi'ers, as well! :D

Just the easy stuff laid out on TDiClub...snow screen, EGR bypass, VAG Com, synthetics, tall 5th gear, plus honing the driver's technique. :thumbup:

WOW

Another 2002 Golf TDI and a performance guy to boot.

Awesome

Welcome to the site

What 5th did you get? I'd like to swap mine out this summer.

Sorry about not posting very often, but we've been very busy in the composites shop. I'll be able to make more time for this forum now, but wanted to let everyone know I've set a new PR for around-town fuel economy. A while back I noticed that the 5-mile drive into town on the 45 mph 2-lane county road is nearly always unimpeded by other cars, so I started slowing down from the posted limit to 32-35 mph and getting even more aggressive with my hypermiling techniques. That resulted in my first-ever 900 mile tank (919 to be exact), for an average of 61.9 mpg for the tank...all in-town and slow country driving.

I do all the same-pump, same-station, fill-it-to-the-rim stuff, so I am very confident of the FE. I also drove all but 5 of those miles. The one time I took my wife's offer to drive to town I was mortified that she was driving too *wildly* ... gasp!, she went up to 45 MPH! ;)

Glad to have you here Stan.

919 miles out of a tank wow.

Later,

Allan Greenblazer