JST Focus ST First Shakedown in GLTC form at Roebling Road!

We let our intrusive thoughts win and decided to un-retire our Focus ST Time Attack car to turn it into a Gridlife GLTC car. After setting mutiple power/drag racing/road course racing records in her prime, we wanted to see what she could accomplish with a drastically different setup. 7 years of being in retirement required a long list of mild prep and restoration, but we were able to take our FoST down to our local track, Roebling Road (near Savannah, GA), to see how she would stack up against our GLTC Civic Si's lap times. We had no idea how the Focus would stack up or if she would even have the ability to compete against our top 10 finishing Si, but after just 1 session, we were pleasantly surprised!

The Garmin camera decided to not record video for our final 4 sessions, so the lap posted below is the fastest lap that we were able to get on camera (which happened to be the very first session out). A 1:19.2 at this track is pretty quick, but the 1:17.5 that we were able to do later on is really impressive. By the end of the weekend we were carrying a ton more speed into the braking zones (braking at the 100ft marker on the front straight), and easily going 100% WOT through turns 3 and 9.

This is a VERY good first event for this car. Our Civic Si is only a few 10ths of a second faster here, and it has years of prep work, custom gearing, ect. The Focus is a little rough around the edges still, with parts that are kind of old/undeveloped by today's standards (many are still development parts from when the platform was new), and has a whole list of improvements that we are excited to begin working on!

The ST did great on cooling and tire management as I was able to turn consistent lap times for 5-6 laps in a row, however the car is starving for fuel after 5 laps on this short-ish track. Its starving even with 3/4 of tank in the car, so I will really need to dig into baffling or a surge tank setup. Along with that, this is the first time we've driven this car on a track since 2018, and the rear shocks need to be rebuilt (possibly the fronts as well).

GLTC is a power to weight wheel to wheel spec class, so of course we had to pull out a good bit of power and swap from the 100tw tires to the class legal 200tw tires. Now the basic setup is as below:

• FBO, JST Custom Tune via Cobb Accessport, Limited to ONLY 226WHP per class rules (The car does make A TON of tq though)
• 2870lbs with Driver and a full tank of fuel
• Konig Hypergram wheels in 18x10.5 Front/18x9.5 Rear. 295/30 front, 235/35 rears.
• Fortune Auto Pro 2 way Dreadnought coilovers
• Stoptech BBK
• mFactory Diff
• Custom built airdam and 9 Lives Racing wing