The personal website of Graham Leslie.
Consistency in my driving usually comes down to managing variables, and the most volatile of those for me is tire pressure. Since I’m running a limited camber setup (-2°) on my M235i, a track day log is what keeps me from destroying my shoulders in a single afternoon.
It’s the classic truck trade-off: you want the 4-inch lift and tires for off-road performance, but you don’t want the on-road fuel economy of a lead-weighted brick. My 2018 RAM 1500 (2WD) has been a work in progress for years. Bilstein 5100s, a 4” Rough Country lift, and an Eaton Truetrac rear diff. It’s built for dirt or inclement weather that it rarely sees—it usually lives on the highway at 70…
I’ve caught myself saying, “I think I like working on cars as much as I like racing them.” Reflecting on that, I’ve started to draw a parallel between my hobby and the systems engineering work I do in my day job.
In July of ‘21, I decided I would get into racing.
A coworker once built an arcade emulator from scratch. He used a CNC machine to cut a fantastic full-size cabinet, dropped in an old monitor, and wired up a pair of joysticks he’d found on Amazon. It was a neat setup, but I wanted something a bit more compact and console-focused.
Back in April of last year, the speedometer failed in my ‘94 Explorer. Rather than hunting down a replacement cable and tearing apart the dash just to restore an old analog needle, I opted to build a digital replacement using a Raspberry Pi and GPS.