Indy (O’Reilly) Raceway Park Regional

So I will keep this one short (hah!).

I planned to shake down the car last Friday at Mid-Ohio, but, wrecking the tow and trailer does not lead itself to doing much testing.

Then I planned to do the full test day (Friday) at Indy Raceway Park just outside of Indianapolis, Indiana (O’Reilly Raceway Park for those corporate types).   Well, if you read the prior Mid-Ohio post, you’ll know that you can’t test unless you get to the track (on-time).

I started out Friday with a desire to replace all 4 trailer brakes on the 28′ trailer I now have.  I had an adjuster spring distenigrate after the panic stop last week, and one shoe separated from the shoe-housing-thingy inside the drum. So, $230 later I have 4 new 12×2″ Dexter self-adjusting (and yes, they work!) electric brakes.  I just have to install them. On Friday morning before heading to the track.

In the first time in my life, I actually finish a job in the time I thought it would take – I finish replacing all 4 brake housings/etc by 11am on Friday (after getting off an airplane from Dallas at 12:30am the night prior, no less).

I hook up the trailer and am off by noon.

After a few eventful wrong turns, based on some “new exits” off the interstate that apparently were not on the interstate I was taking, we make it to the track around 2:45pm (its a 2.5hr drive…. so not all that bad).

I am now hoping that I can park the trailer, get the car out, quickly get it ready and be on the track by 3:30 to run the test sessions until 5pm.  It starts pouring. It has been pouring rain for a while.  The paddock is pretty empty, so I decide to dock this rig in a grassy area between two gravel roads. I get out, walk the area and make sure it is somewhat stable and dry.  My flip-flopped feet with 200lbs (ok, 208) think its okay.

I get about 15 feet into the grass and stop. Not voluntarily. But something else stopped me.  I give it some gas. Stopped. Backup? Nope! We’re stuck.

At this point, Jim from Colletti Motorsports (also from Dayton) comes over and tells us that the folks in the corner of the paddock had to pull him out of the mud/grass earlier.So, 10 minutes later, with the help of a V10 4WD Ford Excursion I am out of the mud and back on gravel.  We park in an area with light-grass-coverage, but with little water and good drainage.

As good as this spot looks, it is terrible. The trailer sunk in 2″ into the ground.  I decide at this point there isn’t going to be any testing today.  I’ll just do the practice in the morning, qualify and then race.
Friday evening is uneventful – unloading and prepping.  I find out through the schedule that there is no practice session on Saturday morning like I had thought.  This means that I will be on a new-to-me-Formula Ford, with brand new brake rotors (not broken in!), on a track I have never seen or walked, much less driven on. Awesome.

Saturday morning comes around and Elizabeth helps me prep the car. I still need to adjust brake bias, the belts, make sure the new HANS fits good, and some other little things.

Qualifying

About 20 minutes before qualifying, I think its a good idea to actually drive the car for the first time around the paddock.  I get in, and find the clutch is not working at all. Uck oh.  A quick bleed and adjustment gets that going (hopefully it is resolved, but sounds like the pilot bearing is grabbing a little still).

I get out to the qualifying grid.  I am about ready to throw up at this point. I haven’t been in a racecar since the October Looong Race with Midwestern Council at Blackhawk (where I still need to write the blog write up… i know… racing in sleet gets to you), and I’ve never been in this car, and the thoughts are going thru my head – will the brake pedal go to the floor?  Will the transmission even shift (I swapped all the gear sets and dogs)?  Is the car timed right (if I rev this thing to 5k in my neighborhood to time it, I think the local yokels will shoot me on sight)? Does the new transpoonder work? etc etc…

Well – I headed out to qual – I waved a few folks by and then went at it.  The car is amazingly easy to drive.  I set the sway bars are near full-soft for this first time out.. and the car was great. I ended up qualifying 9th out of 13 or 14 cars in the FF/CFF/CFC/F5/FV group.

I come in without indicent.  Things are looking good.

Race

Since I am in group 6, I have a few hours before I race.  We make some lunch, fuel the car ($8.50 a gallon! I’m glad I run $2.85 AvGas) and run thru the checklist.  It is amazing how many locktite’d things come undone on a racecar.  I check everything I can – an, in general, at least 3-5 hose clamps or nuts need tightening between sessions. Given my record of finishing races last year – it is important to do this every time you can….

As I am casually getting ready to run the race, I hear the annoucer call group6 (me!) to the grid for the second call. None of us heard the first call.. So, I quickly get dressed in all my fireproof goodies – which could be misinterpreted as my durka durka outfit.  No, I do not board planes dressed like this.

I hop in the car (already warmed up) and drive over to the grid, expecting to the be the last one there and late.

Well, they screwed up – it was first call to the grid.  I was there with about 3 other cars.  Everyone else is out of the car milling about.  I am sitting in the car baking in the sun. Luckily, it is only about 70 out.  And, I have an umbrella courtesy of my pseudo pit crew.

I will note now, that this is the only checkered-colored thing I’ve ever held in a race car. (sniff, sniff).

The pace lap was uneventful, other than this F500 dude next to me pointing at me to get behind him.  Last I checked, we grid up the same way we drive out, so maybe he was missing something or I was.. but, Once he got behind my at the start, I never saw him again.

The start was easier than I expected – as we came onto the drag strip and got 2-wide, the green flag dropped and we all took off.  The right side of the grid seemed to slow down, with a yellow Formula Ford or similar slowing down real quick and pulling off to the right.  There were 4 cars in front of me at the time, and they took off (damn good drivers!).  I kept seeing glimpses of them for about 2 laps, and then never saw them again.

I saw a few cars in my mirrors on the first 2 laps, then about lap 7 a silver FF got up close when I screwed up twice on the same lap, and promptly passed me.

It took me up to lap 4 to realize that I can go around turn one in 4th gear with my foot on the floor, but I still did about a 1/4-second chicken-lift on the throttle to get the nose pointing in the right direction.

Now is a good time to point out 6,500rpm in 4th (24:26 gear) is 117mph.

On lap 6, however, I got a little ballsy and didn’t lift.  Well, lap 6 is when I say I got stupid.  I ended up sliding the tail of the car out, and the counter steer took me to the inside of the turn at 100mph where it is really, really, really really really (x5) rough.  This shook the hell out of me and bounced the car across to the other side of the track (the outside, near the safe haven of lush green grass hiding nasty mud).

After lap 6, I decided to lift a little on the throttle to prevent having to dry clean my race suit.

The rest of the laps I spent trying to figure out the track – I’ve never been on it, and there are tons of open areas where you can really try 3 or 5 different ways thru a corner before you know what is fastest.

I ended up running 4th out of the whole group 6 of 15 cars or so. The 4 that took off ahead of me at the start almost lapped me (I saw the yellow CFC in my mirrors on the last lap), but one ran off or didn’t finish so I ended up with 4th place; and 1st in CFF.  Fastest lap was 1:48-something.

Full grandstands! yay!

Overall, a successful day. I would have preferred to run the test day on Friday (if it wasn’t raining donkeys and elephants), and run the national race on Sunday (if I could…but I haven’t applied for my national license yet – which I am this week).

Thanks for reading this far. Really. Who does read this far? You should email me and I’ll send you something for doing so….

-Mike

Mid-Ohio Test Day

So there is some stupid saying that knowing is half the battle, or whatever.  Well, knowing isn’t everything you gullible kids – you can know you’re gonna race, but if you don’t even get to the track, then knowing everything doesn’t matter.  That’s my rant about smart kids. Now back to my famous quote:

“If you never make it to the track, it is going to be hard to actually drive the race car to figure out if you screwed up when working on it all winter”

This post is cut short due to the facts outlined below:

First. The before. This is what a Ford F-250 bumper looks like, normally.

and after you’re doing 55mph and hit the brakes and:

the brake pedal goes to the floor
the truck and 8,000lbs trailer decide to stop stopping
you hit the construction trailer stopping in front of you on interstate at 40mph
you hit him again as you bounce his truck and trailer off your bumper
you finally come to a stop, pumping the brake pedal to the floor wondering what the hell happened…..

So, what did happen?

the rear hard-line (steel) from the front brake master-cylinder to the rear brakes ruptured (rusted and facing the roadway – maybe hit by a well-placed rock?). This caused all braking pressure to go right out that hole – spewing brake fluid everywhere and not letting the front brakes stop at all.

Lesson learned: When the brake pedal goes to the floor when driving a contraption weighing 13,000lbs, you should squeeze your ass cheeks together to prevent shitting yourself.  It is mildly scary. Inspect your brake lines!

All things done now – it is great that this happened on interstate in a panic stop behind another big truck+trailer rig, rather than thru a city street with pedestrians and small cars.
So, I never made it to Mid-Ohio.  I sat on the side of I-75 just out of Dayton and drank my celebratory beer (that was planned for when I had a successful track session).

Picked up a new car

(So this post is a little late, about 7 months late.. I know.. been busy!)

So, given the distance to Chicago from Dayton, and the desire to run a few events in the south over the winter; I think it is a good idea to let Don run the Lola and I’ll get another car to run around Dayton and further south.

After some looking, and hoping that prices would drop off given end of season and the economy, I found a 1975 Hawke DL-12.  Some of you will know the car from the Midwest – it was heavily ran there since 1975 but a fair amount of folks who are still around (I’ll have the history and logbook posted soon).  Most recently, Erik Shep rebuilt the car in 2006, and Tod Powers purchased it and ran it for almost 2 years in the Northeast.  Well, Tod is a tall dude like me (even taller, actually) and switched to a Reynard setup for really tall dudes (whilst I fall into tall-dude and not really-tall-dude groupding).  So, short story short – I flew into NYC last weekend for work (which I do about every other week), and headed up to CT to check the car out.

The car is clean. Well rebuilt, well cared for, and well documented (original logbooks to 1975, original sales documentation, setup sheets, CAD drawings, etc etc). Sold!

Now I have to get it from Connecticut to SW Ohio.  Not exactly neighboring states.  And, since I don’t own a truck or trailer in Ohio, I can’t really just drive up and pick it up.  Helllllooooooo budget-rent-a-truck.

So, 5 days later I am sitting on a train from Grand Central Station heading to Norwalk, CT with my girlfriend, Elizabeth (who, at this moment, thinks we’re stopping at a hotel a few hours into the drive. maybe. or maybe she’ll drive some. or maybe it wont snow. or maybe she thinks I’ve printed directions. or maybe….).  After an hour train ride, we arrive at the train station (yeah, no shit, eh? train takes you to the train station) to get a cab.

Renting a truck

We take a cab to the Budget Rental Truck place, which is in a corner of a strip mall which has a pet store and a Chinese restaurant (keep that in mind for 14 seconds).  I ring the bell on the Budget door, no answer. I call them, no answer. I walk around. No one is home.  We entertain ourselves for the next 20 minutes making jokes about the Chinese place being next to the pet store. Come on – now that is comedy.

Did I mention it is 24 degrees (Fahrenheit, for those of you who found this site searching for Hawke, a British manufacturer) out, windy, and Friday at 4:47pm.    Afternoon timing like this dictates being in a dimly lit bar with questionable liquor being served from plastic bottles at cheap prices.  Did I mention its cold out?

Ah ha! Big blue truck comes careening around the corner into the strip-mall-Chinese-slaughter-house-parking-lot containing one dude-who-looks-like-he-works-at-budget.  Success! We’re good, a quick grab of the keys and we’re back on schedule! Or not.

To describe this guy, think of who is at the other end of the phone when you call technical support, or the yahoos at United Airlines – not to stereotype (but, honestly, they are a timesaver) but until last week this guy probably was living in a campus-like sitting outside of Mumbia and heating up talapia-curry in a corporate microwave.  He explained every little detail of the contract. Every. Little. Detail. Over and over again.  It took 42 minutes to actually take possession of the keys from him.  Think about it – that is almost it took you to read this far in my rambling blog. Go figure, karma.

The only thing that sticks out in my head is “Do you want the insurance?” and before I can reply he says “Let me explain” which takes 28 minutes.  I already decided – yes, for the $88 or whatever I want whatever you will give me to protect whatever I put inside this 26×8x7.5′ box of fun.

Home Depot

So, race cars do not just live inside 26 foot long rental trucks natively.  They’ll roll around. Or slide. And all the spare parts will fly everywhere.  That is bad.  So, I gotta tie this new car down.  But, rental trucks do not have tie-downs on the floor (just the walls).

So, the plan has always included going and getting tie-down D-rings and bolting them to the floor.  Since I was in Manhattan all week – I decided to goto the Home Depot in Manhattan (yes, a Home Depot inside the city – it is 3 or 4 floors underground and HUUUUUGE. Pretty neat).  Well, I get there and find D-rings – they are $12 each. What?! These should be $4. No way, Manhattites. Take your high price of land correspondent to your high priced D-rings… I’ll just get them in Suburbia Connecticut and save some money. And, the suburbia store will have a better selection.  At the time, saving $16 on D-rings when buying a racecar is a clear thought.

Well, after finding the Home Depot, which is on the wrong side of the street (well, everything is when you’re driving a 26′ moving truck in 5pm traffic an hour outside New York City) and parking this behemoth,  I enter the HD in search of the aisle containing my bargain of D-rings…..only to find the exact same selection as the Manhattan Home Depot. And, at $12 each.  This is the first, of many, outbursts of profanity followed by deep breaths.

So, I grab the D-rings. Did I mention there are ONLY THREE D-RINGS?  The Manhattan store had a bazillion (who needs that in the city? who even owns a car?).  So, I buy some “hitching posts” looking things – which hopefully are good at deception and don’t reflect their weak appearance.

Driving to Tod’s house

For those who skipped ahead of the last ramblance of text, Tod is who I am buying the car from.  Driving has gotten much more interesting in a 26′ truck at night. In 5pm traffic.    Did I mention that Tod lives on top of a hill.  This place takes about 7 miles of twisty 2-lane road to get to.  If you haven’t visualized this yet – think of trying to push a square of jello around a banister. Red jello. Over white carpet. With your crazy great aunt looking over you.  It is that much fun. Really.

Get to Tod’s.  Realize it is cold out. Real cold.  5 minutes out of the truck and I can’t feel my toes. Oh, wait, there is feeling again – oh, that is the shooting pain of frostbite setting in.  It is around 20f now.

We load the car. It is suprisingly easy with the help of a small valley in his yard that we put the truck into, so the car only has to roll up a 15 degree slope or so.  We load lots of spare parts.  And then a spare frame. And more parts.  Good thing its a huge truck – used up most of it.  Glad I didn’t skimp and get the 18 footer.

Elizabeth and I have some pizza, and find out that Tod went to college literally across the street where I now live in Dayton (University of Dayton).  And, that he got stabbed by an old lady with a pen while panty-raiding the dorm across the street from me (Sorry Tod, that’s too good not to mention).  Fantastic. So did I. But I was 27 when I did that and it was a felony.

Drive to Ohio

We get all loaded up and ready to head out – Tod gives us some final directions, which match up with the Budget provided GPS.  All sounds good to get out of this twisty-road mess in 3 or 4 miles and onto some highway.  Awesome.

We get 3 miles down, turn where directed and promptly see that the road now has an 11′ height restriction 5 miles ahead. We’re 13′ high.  Ah, damn.  It is dark out. Crazy dark. Like, middle of nowhere dark. But, in that mystical darkness, the eerie glow of Garmin technology shines like a North Star.

We tell the GPS to detour us.  The GPS is telling is to turn off 2.5 miles up.  Cool.  We take the recommended left turn, then go 150 feet, then take right.  Sounds simple – but no. doh! – the 2nd road is closed.  Closed as in barricaded (cause, in a rental truck ‘closed’ is relative).

Here is my thought process at the time:
Keep going, it’ll recalculate!
This looks dark.
Real dark.
Is this a road?

This is Elizabeth’s thought process at the time:
Oh shit.
What is he thinking?
Moron. Wrong turn.
See above x24928

While driving, the GPS thinks about it, and says to turn right a mile or so up.  It is very dark. Very very dark, and the headlights on this thing suck.  I turn right. About half way into the turn we realize it is a dirt road.  Gray or black dirt, but dirt.  Wonderful (see above Elizbeth thought process. Now we’re both on that line of thought).

There’s no backing up in the dark with this thing.  Who knows what ditch I’ll fall into. So we truck ahead (pun intended).  We are less than 10 miles from our starting point and already doing horrible. Yay.

It is about 10pm now.  The 8 miles to get away from Tod’s house to the highway take almost 45 minutes.  I believe we got sucked into a Langolier portal or something, as I don’t exactly know what happened during that time.  Maybe it is because it was 10pm on a Friday night and my mind is used to not remembering this time period.

We get on the interstate.  I’ve never felt so good to see that little 5-star sign honoring Eisenhower’s Interstate System.  I floor the truck and believe I said ‘giddiup’.  We hit 57mph.  58mph. Nope, back to 57.  What?!?!?!?   We did 65-67 on the way to Tod’s.  I think that with the load it cant go this fast. But, no, it sounds funny, too.

We drive 8 or 9 miles at 55.  The engine sounds like its revving high.  I goto turn on the dome lights to grab the manual or something. And, in the process of hitting buttons that I thought turned the dome light on earlier – the truck shifts into overdrive, propelling us to a newfound top speed of 70mph! Apparently, when we were trying to turn on the truck interior lights earlier, I hit the overdrive-off switch.  Whew! For a while I thought we were going to drive 670 miles at 55mph. That is so 1965.

We drive through the night, at least a few hours.  Then it starts to flurry (thats light snow for those who don’t follow weather north of the Mason-Dixon line).  Then, about when we’re into Pennslyvania, it starts to really really snow.  I later learn that the areas we drove through at 1-5am got 6″ of snow.  We stop for gas about 2am somewhere in PA, and the snow on the ground is about 2″.

We stop the sleep twice. Well, I stop to sleep – Elizabeth sleeps when she wants.  Which generally is until I fall alseep while piloting this beast and run off the road in the snow and it makes lots of noise.  She wakes up for that. Or, she wakes up when really bad country music came on the radio.

At about 4am, I realized how much snow there was as I was going up a hill on interstate in PA.  The rear wheels started spinning going up a hill at 50mph.  The back of the truck slid out of the lane as we were going up hill.

At this point, we pulled over and slept an hour or so.  If you ever want to make your chairopractor earn his pay – sleep in a moving truck for a few hours. Ow.

We kept truckin’ (I’ll be honest, I giggle everytime I type that) through dawn.  We go by Mansfield Ohio, which has the Mid-Ohio Raceway which I plan to be my first event, at about 9:30am.  Columbus about 11am. And home by noon.

So, after 16 hours of driving thru twisty roads, a dirt road, snow, traffic and no sleep – its time to throw the car in the garage for me and Elizabeth to go watch Michigan football….

I enlist a few friends to unload the car and we’re done!

Vintage Vees @ Grattan w/ VSCDA

Overall this was a successful event for us.  The weather was great (our first time in Michigan), Grattan is a fantastic track (although a tad rough), and the car was reliable, requiring only a few minor tweaks.  We learned that the FormCar is slow compared to other cars in the pack – it is pretty much stock 1962, while everyone else has a tad more oomph, as you’ll see on the video down the main straight.  That’ll change soon enough with new exhaust and some fan belt ‘modifications’.

I will mention that while we had a good time on the track, the weekend was marred by an on-track fatality at turn one, which I won’t go into now.  Both Don and myself are thinking the next $1,000 we spend on racing will be for a HANS (or HANS similar) device for safety.  If you’re on a track, you need one.  I’ve always been told that, but now I’ve seen the situation without one up close and real, and it changed the priority of obtaining a HANS setup.

Here’s a video of Don during qualifying (sorry, screwed up the audio, but you can hum along). More to follow when I get some free time to write.

SCCA Firecracker Race

This will be a brief post… In summary, we went over the car’s troubles over the past two weeks – the biggest issue being – life was hard given the lack of a functioning starter.  The overwhelming consensus of the folks at the track and on Apex was to buy a Tilton Superstarter, and forget about it.

That sounded like a good idea.  Implementing it at $480 for a silly starter (oh, right super)was a little disturbing; but, I think we have established this hobby is not cheap, especially if you want to do it right.

A new Tilton starter was acquired from Pegasus and installed.  It only required minor tweaking to get it installed.  We had to use a few flat washers to get the proper clearance between the bendix and some other piece of metal in there.

Some other new goodies included the steel rain rims being blasted and powder coated.  They came out quite nice.  Jared @ High Performance Powder Coating did them for us – http://www.hppowdercoating.com – If you’re local to Crystal Lake/NW Chicago ‘burbs we’d recommend them for coating.. They’re very shiney!

So, lots of little things (as you can see from the post down below, too) to make our weekend a little less stressful.. Possibly, even allowing us to drive the car and not work on it all weekend.

This was also our first event using the newly aquired RV as our tow and home vehicle for the weekend..  Having the RV for inside storage when its rainy is very, very nice.

Thursday (getting to the area)

This week, I had to work in Parkersburg, WV.  I was hoping to leave around 2 or 3pm on Thursday, which would give me 3 hours of westward driving to Dayton, which is home.  Then, I have an hour of packing things up into the BMW, and Elizabeth and myself would be on our way to Don’s in Crystal Lake.   The plan was to stay
If you like pictures – start at A, go to B and pack car, then drive to C.  Then finish packing and loading the racecar stuff into the RV on Friday at 6am, then drive to D- Blackhawk Farms Raceway. Horrible idea. Who thought of this?

Well, as usual, I get out of West Virginia a little late – around 5.  So, in our current plans, I get to leave Dayton around 9 – for a 6 hour drive to Blackhawk Farms.  Some folks will tell you “we race in Chicago, at Blackhawk”.  No. No, you don’t! You race 2 hours from downtown Chicago and 300 feet from the Wisconsin border!  I only stress this because, I can drive from Dayton to Chicago in 4.5 hours. Blackhawk in South Beloit, IL, is well into 6 hours.  Crystal Lake is 350 miles – which is a pretty ballsy 5hrs.

So, with this wonderful idea in place, we head out sometime between 8 and 9.  We hit a spectacular summer thunderstorm about an hour south of Gary, IN… All I remember was sunshine on the right of the car (illuminating the big-yellow-adult-porn-store sign, which, I am a firm believer that all porn shops on interstates are required to have a horrible hand-painted yellow sign.  If I ever repaint a racecar, it’ll be in porn-sign-yellow.) and on the left, was a humongous thunderous looking pile of black elevated moisture.  Someone with an education that starts not with ‘liberal’ and knows science would call it nimbus-something-special, however, I’ll refer to it as damn-big-rain-cloud+lightning.

Well, with that, our 5-hour hopeful drive turned into about 6 and change.  The BMW did get a good dousing, which is beneficial, as I haven’t washed it since April.

Friday (getting to the track)

Friday morning consisted of throwing the remaining stuff into the RV and heading out to Blackhawk.  Elizabeth wanted to take a shower before we left, and much to my encouragement of showering in the RV’s shower while we drive there, she did so only in the non-portable comfort of the house.  So much for roughing it this weekend.

Here’s Don doing work on the car, while I slack around and take pictures.  Note the very green grass.  That’s because it had been raining for, oh, uhm, the last week.  A tad bit “marshy”.

Tech

Prior to getting on the track, we have to get the car tech’ed.  The SCCA stewards are, uhm, sometimes a bit oppressive.  It is probably all in the interest of safety, but sometimes it can be very frustrating to get to the track only to find out you have a headrest that is 1/16″ too small (fixed with a layer of duct tape), or you don’t have a fuel sampling port just in case you win the race (we don’t have that issue) and someone says you cheated with some new fuel (if you find any other fluid you can put in the tank to make these things faster, let me know!)..

The April SCCA school+race had a few tech stewards inquiring about the ability of the Lola to be towed given the setup of the engine cover.  The engine cover went over the main roll hoop, which meant a cherry-picker type lift could not yank it out of the grass to bring it off-track in the event we did something stupid on the track.  We argued for a few various reasons, decided it was useless to argue with these stewards, and let them tell us what to do…

They told us, in April, to remove a certain piece of metal on the cover that would allow access to the roll hoop.  These pictures show what we did (look behind the helmet).

So… fast forward to today, when we’re prepped to race with no tech issues on our mind.  The same guys are running tech, so, Don and I think this’ll be quick and easy.

Well, no.

The stewards (some of the same guys!) look at the logbook, look at the changes (as you can see in the pictures), and say it will work to tow the car with (probably, gruff gruff) but they think the opening has created two problems -
A)  – they say it is a duct.  Which, without my big old head in front of it, it might push some air down there to cool the engine more – but no way is it supercharging the air going into the engine.
2) – they say we know do not have a barrier between the engine compartment and the driver.
Us: “Huh? You told us to take this thing out. ”
“And, look at the all the other cars – most don’t even have a high engine cover – so they don’t have firewalls up this high either”
“And, ok, fine, here’s a twenty”

Anyhow..The stewards let us off, with our promise to investigate the setup in the near future.

Saturday

It was a bit damp on Saturday morning.  The sun was apparently sleeping off the night before, so the track remained pretty wet for a while.  We decided Don would go out first, as he’s never driven the Lola, and given our history – there’s a chance I’ll blow it up within a few minutes and he’ll never get to drive it.

In brief – its wet, Don’s never driven this thing before, the slicks are cold, and did I mention that Don has never driven this thing before (although he’s quite good in his Vintage Vee):

Don does a few slow laps.
Don comes down the straight a little faster.
I think, “wow, he’s going a tad fast”
Don touches brakes around the start/finish tower.
Car spins on the front straight, out of my sight to the right.
I wet my pants, and, promptly start running down the side of the track.
Somehow…. The car spun completely around, stayed on the track, and was pointing forward.
While I go change my pants, Don comes in, apparently to change his shorts too.

Well, that was Don’s practice session. His next ride is Sunday morning for qualifying.  We’ll see how that goes (maybe).

After a short while of another group out on the track, I get to head out.  The car actually doing something when I mashed the start switch was a nice change.   I go out for my practice session and it is somewhat uneventful.  Nothing spectacular on old R60 Hoosiers – but it was hot – so the were pretty sticky.  Nowhere near as sticky as the R25 compound I might have used (by budget, not purpose! I promise…) in a Club Ford before, however .  No timing on Friday, so no idea how fast or slow I was.

The group was pretty light… I went out and returned without incident.  The car ran great – seemed to rev thru 6400rpm (soft redline for those of us on a tight budget!) or so, the new gearing selection was great (thanks Brad!), and the car seemed stable even at speed.  I came in, parked, and we waited until the next test/practice session.

Well, it wouldn’t be Don and myself racing if disaster didn’t strike.  We go thru the car to get it ready for the session,  and we don’t find anything wrong with the car, compared to last events – tires still have pressure, nothing is oozing out the bottom (well, we paddocked in the gas so it wouldn’t be so obvious this time), and we don’t have any spare parts on the table that belong in the car.

We goto start the car. Nothing. No groaning. No click. Nothing. Sonofabitchnofriggenway!

While we frantically look at switches and wires – the heads of Don and myself end up at the starter solenoid about the same time.  Well, what is left of the solenoid.  The brand new (less than 2 hours of engine time) Tilton Superstarter XL-whatever-shininess had shit itself.  The solenoid is attached to the starter housing with 2 long bolts, that, you might expect a $480 racecar starter to have lock-tited, or saftety wired, or something.  Well, no. Tilton apparently did not do that to ours (more on that in a minute).

What happened? Well, in the last 2 sessions, the two bolts holding the starter solenoid (the thingy that engages the bendix (the thingy that turns the flywheel on the engine to start it)) decided to take a break from their holding duties and are sitting somewhere on 1.96 miles of track.  Oops.

To get me out on the track, we unbolt the wires to the solenoid that is now dangling by the hot-wire from the battery (a hazard in itself) and tape the wires to whatever doesn’t look conductive (well, more tape, and then more tape). Then we do what we know best, we push start the car!

Qualifying

We had a rough time in April with the T-440, and we were really hoping to have an unstressed race, but, we already lost the starter so that was out the window.  Hopefully it’ll be ok the rest of the weekend….

I get ready for qualifying, which, means getting all ready, then yelling like a 4 year old in a wagon “Push! Push! Push!” at Don (and whomever else happens to be around to help) until I can pop the clutch in 2nd gear and start the sucker up.

I grid up for qualifying and head out.  Qualifying was uneventful as my last session, as my track time was blessed with a warm track and hot tires.  I qualified somewhere around 4 or 5 out of 8 Club Fords, with a “I’ll blame crappy tires” time of around 1:21 around the track.  I’ll also blame my fear of running off track and stalling, which means I can’t restart the car (thanks, Tilton!) and that would suck.  Or something like that.

Race

I was psyched for the race, even though I was pretty stressed that the car would blow up.  So I started the car; rather, Don started the car by pushing me down the gravel paddock area with me yelling at him again (get to the gym, tubby, really)… and… headed down to the grid.

My big stress point is getting to the grid without stalling the car.  Then, once I get to the grid in this heat, I have two concerns – one, the car overheating (although it never has), and two, me overheated (black suit + helmet + hot car + sun).

So I don’t explode, and the car sticks around 190f water temp.  Onto the next stress point – not stalling the car pulling out of the false grid to get onto the track.  Ok, that works out ok – although I probably took half the life of the clutch with me.  I try to stay slow and hopefully make it to my grid spot on the track just as the pace car takes off – so I don’t have to come to a complete stop.  Well, dammit, that doesn’t work. I have to come to a stop.

Now the pace car starts to move.  I get the car moving without stalling it. We’re moving now! Yes, this is the big deal so far today for me.  Yes, I agree, that is sad.

The pace lap is ok. Car feels good. Granted, we’re only doing 40-60mph.  We come onto the straight, and somewhere in the distance the green flag waves.  I do not know this by sight, I know this by feel.  You can feel the 25 car engines revving to 7,000 RPM.  I will make note that a downside of being in the pack of the grid, is that by the time this occurs, I am pretty sure the air I am breathing is about 0.0002% oxygen and the rest pure exhaust nastiness.

The start is good. I end up on the inside of turn 1 and actually might have passed a car or two that was on the outside, as those folks slowed down a bit due to some traffic (I’m really ok with being in the back on starts…).

The first lap I just play follow the leader – everyone is slow enough that I can play.  I just don’t want to get someone elses paint on my car.  I’m sure they don’t want my paint on theirs, either.   On the straight it opens up a little – and the guys behind me that didn’t qualify but have fast cars zip on my me.  I generally have enough time and lack of attention to wave at them.  They wave back. They feel bad for me, I am sure.  I also make a point to wave, or at least make sure they’re there, at the Lindstrand group in the pit.  I am sure I’ll need their help soon.

Oh, did I say I’ll need help? Right. About lap 5, I am heading down the front straight and had just shifted into 4th gear. I guess (and estimate based on a worker with a radar gun later that day)  doing about 115-120mph (someone correct me here if I’m way off), when, get this – the nose of the car flies off!  I barely even saw it – all I know is it was no longer there, and my legs were much cooler than a second before.  I am positive I was the only one out there with forced air conditioning.

From witness accounts, the nose flew up in the air high enough to let three cars pass under it.  Luckily, it landed about 100 feet from our paddock area – so it was easy to retrieve.

On this lap, I decided to come into pit lane and see if anything else was hanging off the car.  Luckily, I found Bruce Lindstrand, which, I promptly stopped in front of (see, waving earlier helps) and yelled “Do I need this?” pointing at the nose-within-a-nose setup of the Lola – the other piece of fiberglass body work that was probably also going to fly off now that the other part was off.  Bruce agreed that I didn’t, pulled it off, and sent me on my way.

On this lap, the folks standing at the fence spectating were now pointing at me – like, maybe, they were surprised to see me come around again. Or, maybe they were saying something like “Hey, watch this dude, I wonder what else is gonna fly off his car! <swig of beer> hah hah”

Well, nothing else came off my car, but, another car had their nose fly off as well, but on Sunday – you can read about it here on John Haydon’s blog – http://haydonracing.blogspot.com/2008/08/firecracker-double.html )

About a lap later (yes, I know, we’re only on lap 7 or so now), I started getting a high-RPM miss. It was for sure electrical.   About a lap later, I couldn’t get the engine over 5,500RPM, then it was 5,000RPM max… I knew I had to keep going for a few reasons -
I had used my pit stop quota with Lindstrand.  He was probably (and should) going to send me a bill if I stopped in front of him anymore.
I knew I had to complete half the race in order to make this race count for my SCCA license, which I needed.

So, I kept going – I played with throttle position to get the maximum revs out of the engine before having to shift.  On lap 10, 9 completed (whew!), coming up to the carousel (turn three) – the car completely quit. Luckily, I was near a corner station, which I was frantically waving at in hopes they’d tell me what to do while I was still coasting.  They were quick and smartly guided me around their corner station and behind the wall.  They asked if I was ok, probably made some side jokes, and then gave me some water as it was crazy hot outside, much less in a race suit.

I watched the race for a bit from the corner station.  Then a little SCCA Subaru wagon came to tow me back to the paddock.  The irony of it all is, if I hadn’t removed the engine cover metal to expose the rollbar – they wouldn’t have been able to tow me, and I was a long way from the RV

What happened?

Well, two issues – first, the nose.

I had put the nose back on, as I clearly remember doing so earlier that day.  I must have slipped the bottom lip of the nose OVER the aluminum floor pan extension, rather than UNDER it like it should have been.  Thus, once it got enough air under there it just pulled up, ripped the screws out of itself, and took flight.

Second, why’d the engine die?

Don and I had rewired the coil, and most of the car since April.  Somehow, we wires the hot/+ wire TO the condenser on the distributor, rather than the negative/- wire.  This cooked the condenser over time, thus having no spark.

Lessons learned. Beer drank.  Sunday’s entry money down the drain, as we didn’t have a starter to crank the car and troubleshoot, we called it a weekend. Oh well.

However, I did end up officially “finishing” the race – 9 laps did that for me.  So, I earned my SCCA regional license. Yay!

Lola prep for Firecracker Regional

The last few weeks have been busy, both under and around the Formula Ford, and with our paypal accounts and AmEx cards… Lots of things on our list to fix, and some new candidates popped up.

In summary, our accomplishments include:

This should be all we need to run a stress-free (err, less-stress) weekend at Blackhawk this Friday-Sunday.

New tow and track car

You might chalk it up to another impulse buy of a vehicle, but, we waited an entire day before committing to buying the latest automobile… Don found a 1994 27′ RV near his house for a real decent price.

At first I was skeptical of A) Don finding any more cars to buy (given the “race ready” Formula Ford find) and 2) throwing more money into this “hobby”.  Well, apparently, Don should go into sales and I should buy some waterfront property in Kansas.

We each are 1/2 proud owners of this shiney RV with 30k 10mpg miles on it. Spectacular.  It even has floral print window valences. Bling!

Why?

There is some logic in saving money by not staying at hotels. However, we’ve yet to whip up an excel spreadsheet on this, because I’m not sure the Saturday-afternoon math we did on the phone works out.  More to follow. Or not. I think we’ll brush this subject under the rug.

The biggest benefits of having this 7.3liter-studio-apartment-on-wheels is the abilty to store all our tents, chairs, tools, equipment, etc in one place (lots of storage compartments on the outside bottom of the RV), as well as being able to stay on the track – eliminating the 6am drives from scummy hotels after taking showers wearing flip-flops to keep the ecoli at bay.  This will also come in handy when I cannot make my mortgage payments due to racing expenses.

Don’s first VSCDA event

The weekend of June 13th brought Don and myself back to Blackhawk Farms, this time for a VSCDA event with Don’s 1962 Formcar Formula Vee.  This car is the 2nd Formula Vee ever made.

This car hasn’t been run in just about 20 years.  What’s the worst that could happen?  In general, the inappropriate but normal answer is, you die in a fiery crash.

This weekend, that was about the norm.

Friday

On Friday, I met Don out at Blackhawk just as he was gettting out of the car in the paddock (our favorite spot, the wonderful garage spot next to Tom’s office).   He had just finished his first session of the test day.

Not to sound like a broken record, or a record that is playing the Formula Ford song – but Don hops out of a car that is dripping oil.  OIL! No no no no no no, this must be a mistake.  Don must have kicked over a can of oil.  Or….not…. Oil leaks – This seems to be typical with anything we try to put on a track at Blackhawk.

It seems that the valve covers that came on this Formula Vee (which, by the way, was another impulse race car purchase by Don) are incorrect.  There is a cut-out on the top of the valve cover, that apparently needs to be the right size in order to let the cork valve cover seal make, well, a seal.
The culprit was the cut-out on the valve covers currently on the 1200cc stock VW motor are too small.  After 30 minutes of walking around trying to find a Formula Vee racer with a spare, we find Tom and his bench grinder.  10 minutes later and some metal shavings on the floor, Don has the problem solved.

Don gets suited up, I stuff him in the car, and he gets out for the last test session of the day.  He got a little late, and it was a short session – so he only got about 8 laps in.   He was somewhat slow on the straight, which is caused by the car refusing to rev over 4,000rpm due to (most likely) the transaxle fluid being the consistency of molasses.  We’re planning on changing this – tomorrow looks good.

So, I pulled out my stopwatch, but found that it rolled over by the time Don came around.  So, I pulled out my sun-dial and was able to get a semi-accurate lap time of 1:39.  In all fairness, Don’s 40hp 40+ year old car running 3/4 power is still faster than your street car around a race track

The car ran good – handled well per Don, and was overall a good 12 minutes of track driving after 7 months of prep work (no, really, this one only required about 2 months of work).  It seemed that the races tomorrow would go well.  Then, Don $&@*@D everything up on our departure from the track by saying “What could go wrong now?” (I’ve now learned to kick him everytime he says that, in hopes that pavlovian response will make him stop saying that).

Saturday

We made it to the track about 9:30am, just in time to start our checklist of things to do before putting the car on track.  Don got to checking fasteners and I was putting gas in the car.  The fuel filler neck felt a little soft when I removed the fuel cap.  The cap isn’t bolted to the container, but rather is attached to the soft fuel bladder, so a little wiggle is expected.  I filled up the fuel tank in anticipation that Don will actually finish a race.  About 5 gallons, which should be plenty.

At this point, we should note that Don filled up the fuel cell to the top and let it sit for a month, to ensure there were no leaks.  No leaks. Keep that in mind as you continue reading, before you say “those morons took a leaky fuel tank to the track.”

Don gets suited up and in the car for the 30 minute qualifing session. Today, the car that now is not leaking any oil.  This is a first for us.  And yes, there is oil in the car (at one point in the past, I declared victory to a oil-leaking Porsche, when in fact the oil had been drained from it. Mr Bush, can I get a “mission accomplished”?).  The car fires right up (this car, differing from the Formula Ford, has a working starter!) and Don drives over to the grid.

- Don on track 0:00 – I walk over to the pit area in preparation to see Don come around the track after a couple of minutes.

- Don on track 0:30 – I finally figure out to make my phone act as a stopwatch.  Start timer.

- Don on track 1:30 -At speed, Don should do a lap around 1:35-1:39.  Should be coming around any time now!

- Don on track 1:40 – Hmm. Its the first lap. He must be taking it easy.

- Don on track 2:00 – He’s taking it REAL easy. Hurry up, slacker.

- Don on track 2:30 – I discard the stopwatch and setup my sundial for timing.

- Don on track 3:10 – I discard the sundial and tack a calendar to the post in the pit.

- Don on track 3:30 – I see the safety truck on the track around turn 4 behind us.  That’s not good for anyone.

- Don on track 3:45- Don’s not on the track anymore.  Don pulled off the track.  I hop in the Jeep find him near turn 5.  I find Don and the car smelling of fuel. Lots of fuel.  For safety reasons, I put my cigarette on the tire before leaning in to talk to him.. The entire cockpit area is slick with fuel and filled with gas vapor.  Fun.

What happened?   The fuel cell is old.  Maybe even older than Don.  The car is over 40 years old, and hasn’t been raced in 20 years.  So the fuel cell is most likely original (ack!) or 20-25 years old.  The bladder itself is fine, but the bonding agent used to attach the fuel filler neck broke down, seemingly in a few hours of fuel being in contact with it.  The fuel filler neck become unattached/unsealed to the fuel cell bladder, resulting in copious amounts of fuel sloshing around all into the cockpit.  Here is a picture of where the tank was:

Those fuel lines used to connect to the fuel cell. We took it out in hope we could get the thing sealed back up….

But, no go.  The entire filler neck is toast.  It disintegrated.

At this point, we realized our weekend was over.   Tom, our infinetly useful keeper of the track with his office next door to our garage place, offered free beer from his fridge and some consoling words and advice, including “just tape it up”.  Did I mention Don was covered in fuel and Tom was smoking? Awesome.

We tore off our red wristbands (which, while wearing, creates frowns while drinking beer) and became spectators.. we watched some great racing, packed up, and headed home.

Photos from April SCCA race

I promised higher resolution pictures, and finally got around to posting them… Here are some good ones.

These pics were taken by Brad Ellingson (thanks, dude!), my most-awesome instructor at the SCCA school, and who also plays weekend photographer of things that turn dollars into noise on racetracks. He takes a ton of pictures, so chances are if you were at the school he could have a picture of your car. Or 50, like in my case. You can find his website here – http://www.bradellingson.com/ – with his pictures and stories about his race cars, fast women and booze. Or, stories about race cars getting towed by minivans that tote kids to soccer practice during the week – really, pick your fantasy.

The fallout from the race weekend…

It has been a while since I last wrote.. mainly as I’ve been busy with work, and Don’s been busy with work and prepping his vintage Formula Vee for the Blackhawk VSCDA event next weekend (June 14th).

Since the Formula Ford’s first outing, I’ve been exercising the wallet plastic at Pegasus’s website and emptying my paypal account to ApexSpeed members obtaining all the parts and such to make the next race weekend a little, uhm, less stressful.

The major things that need attention after the Blackhawk flogging for 3 days are….

Starter - the old Lucas (yes, that Lucas Electronics) starter and solenoid bit the dust. Rather than replace it with the same setup, I did some research (read as: posted on Apex and let the smart folks tell me what to do, in this thread) and am having someone put together a Nippondenso setup. Hopefully that’ll be in soon.

Valve cover gasket - we had some issues with oil staying inside the engine. After most on-track sessions, the engine compartment looked like the oil-equivalent of a monkey at a zoo flinging poo around. Lots of oil. Lots of $9/quart oil, I might add.
We determined the leak is coming from the valve cover.. the valve cover itself is probably not straight anymore, and it is missing a valve cover gasket hold-down. Pegasus has the hold downs for cheap, and a new-to-the-car valve cover from another racer will be installed soon.

Wheels - During one session I cracked the left rear rim. Luckily, it held together until we realized it had zero-pressure (which, otherwise would have made for a really really bad day) and was able to swap the rear tires to the rain rims.. But, the rim is toast for now (might be repairable). Two spare rims are getting blasted and powder coated (gray, to match the uncracked front rims) for the next race.

Hopefully, all this stuff will come together in the next few weeks in order to be ready for the next race.  Which race, you might ask? The next race is the Firecracker Double-Regional @ Blackhawk Farms on July 12th and 13th.

First Race

Don and myself’s original goal was to run the school, get my license, and anything other than that was a bonus. So far, the entire cost of bringing the car up to spec, the school and race entry fees, and other misc things is less than a weekend at Skip Barber that would net me the same license (the same one Don has, as he went to SB and ragged on their cars).

Soooo…The idea of racing on Sunday left me more excited than a senator in an airport bathroom, namely that this is my first wheel-to-wheel race, with other drivers actually trying to win (rather than the less-aggressive school days).

The day started as usual – remove the spark plugs, use a blow-torch on them to get them hot, push start car and let it warm up. It takes a while for the car to warm up, as today is about 45 degrees with a high of only 55. There was talk of snow on the forecast a few days ago, but it seems to have passed. This is a good thing, given my issues with rain tires and slicks, I don’t need any other complications.

Qualifying

The day has 5 groups/classes of cars, each with their own 35 minute qualifying session, and 22-lap race. My qualifying is just after 9:30am. Qualifying is a little more relaxed, in that, I can show up a few minutes late, wave to the grid-starters and just drive out into the pit and onto the track.. Given our starting issue (lack therof starter), this is nice as I don’t have to stop the car, and risk the chance of stalling it.

I head out for qualifying, just behind the big group of cars that were lined up waiting. We all have cold tires, and my car isn’t fully warmed up yet. Driving cold slicks on a cold track is much like ice skating. You don’t steer the car so much as you suggest which way you’d like it to go, then eventually, maybe, or not, it will go that direction. Or, it will snap around on you before you can say “hitting-that-wall-is-gonna-cost-alot”.

I feel good during qualifying. My only hiccup was that even though I taped over part of the front radiator intake, in order to get the engine temperature higher on this cold day, I still didn’t get the car above 150f degrees. The engine really needs 180-190 to be able to blip the throttle as required during downshifts. This resulted in some squirrelly downshifts – where the engine would drag the rear tires down pretty quickly, upsetting the traction on the rear of the car. Some corners left me looking more like a Ricer-Drift-Central video game than road racing.

Anyhow, I qualified with a 121.something. That put me 12th position out of 26 cars. Not too bad!

Race

My run group, group 4, gets to race around 3:30pm. Group 4 includes Formula 500, Formula Vee, Formula First, Formula Ford, and Club Formula Ford (me). Most of the cars are equally matched with just a few seconds difference in laptimes. It makes for some close racing, which is always good with open-wheeled cars that will flip/do crazy things when you touch wheels with each other. Most generally avoid doing that. Those who don’t avoid touching other cars wheels generally only do it once.

I will write more about the actual race when I get some spare time.. For now, look at the pretty pictures. I should also have some better race pictures up, courtesy of my instructor who has a camera that costs as much as our race car.

Out of the 26 cars in group 4, I started 12th, and finished 10th. My fastest lap time was a 120.6xx. Which, I think is respectable for my first time out. A well prepped car and good driver could do 1:15-1:16. Not too bad for 1.95 miles (avg 84-86mph).

If you’d like a signed poster of this, let me know. No, really.

Bruce Lindstrand drove this car (customer car, I recall) amazingly quick, even without a clutch.

SCCA School, Day 2

Yesterday evening, we found the guy that seems to know everything at the Blackhawk, Tom, and got us into a nice paddock spot. Given the issues we had on the car, and have to work them out in the mud in the grass paddock, the $100 or so was an easy decision to have easy access to electric, air, lighting, and pavement to drop stuff on rather than 1″ of muddy water. I’d highly recommend paying the $ and shacking up here to anyone that doesn’t have a full rig to work on.

This was a good decision, given what happened during the day and the work we had to do on the car, and, that it was 39 degrees out and windy. Mind you, this is the end of April and it is near freezing. Crazy.

In summary, here is what happened:

- Car won’t start. Remove starter wiring and push start.
- Run 1st session. Good.
- Run 2nd session. Good.
- Run 3rd session. Crack rear rim.
- Mount rear tires on rain rims in a hurry.
- Realize throwout bearing destroyed in last session. No need to hurry now. Car is broke.
- Miss 4th and 5th sessions. But, I still get signed off on the school (yay).
- Decide to fix car tonight and race tomorrow.
- Drink beer to gain confidence in mechanical skills.
- Rip apart rearend of car, installed new bearing, reassemble

In detail, the day went as follows:

1st Session

After being confident we had resolved the starting issues last night, the starter will not turn over this morning. Profanity ensues from both Don and myself. We blow-torch the plugs to get them hot, push start the car and make it to the first session, just a few minutes late. I was a tad nervous without a starter, however, if I spun or had to stop and the engine stalled I would be out of luck to get the engine going again.
On-track, everything seems to go well. The car feels good and I didn’t run it off the track. That’s success in our book at this point.

2nd and 3rd Sessions

These sessions were uneventful, other than the (now normal) push starting the car. The SCCA grid folks were very helpful and accommodating to me. I even stalled it once on the grid, waiting to go out to the track, and some nice ladies helped get me going. I am sure they make fun of me when I’m not looking.

4th Session

This one was a good on-track experience. Lots of cars, got into some traffic, dropped my lap times down considerably (was running 1:35ish in the prior sessions) to a best of 1:25.8. Not too bad for my newness…
Upon completion of the session, I pulled into the pits to get off track and heard this ‘worrblely’ noise. I knew there was a car behind me from my mirrors, and I thought “wow, that guys car sounds horrible”. As I proceeded out of the pits into the paddock area, I realized that the nasty noise was coming from my car. Doh!

The car smelled horrible (even worse than our hotel room after 2 days of eating carnival-like track food). It smelled like burnt clutch disc. I didn’t have any clutch slipping during the session, so we agreed to run the car again without any changes – we couldn’t see anything broken, and we weren’t going to replace a clutch disc in the 30 minutes before the next session anyhow. We found out later that this was most likely the rear brakes being cooked from me driving the car harder (clutch disc and brake are the same material, and smell the same).

5th Session

Problem 1

We had an hour break for lunch before the next to last on-track session of the day. It was now about 55 degrees and sunny. Much nicer than the morning.. And much nicer than the rain yesterday. We begin our pre-race checking that Don compiled (and that we’ve added a ton of things to this weekend), everything seems to be going ok – fuel up the car, battery is charged, oil is good, etc, then a snag – left rear tire pressure is zero. 0. nothing. zilch. not pressurized. Uck oh.

We quickly take the wheel off the car, and, with our new paddock digs being so close to the on-track tire guys, we have the wheel to them in a few minutes in hopes they can find the leak. At this point, we both think I ran over something and punctured the tire. I hover over the tire dude while he fills the tire to 60psi and wets it down with soap (if there is a leak, the air will create bubbles in the soapy water on the tire and you can easily spot the leak). There is no leak in the tire, he says. What?! Has to be!

Next, he sprays down the back of the rim. Uck oh – it becomes apparent now – there is a hairline crack in the rim that runs 4-5″ around. That’s a show stopper. The rim could (will) come apart at the hub, crash into the suspension, and generally make the car uncontrollable, ruining my day and probably a few dollars worth of car parts, too.

Our solution is to
- dismount the rear rain tires (yes, the ones we just got mounted yesterday to race in the rain)
- dismount the rear slicks
- mount the rear slicks onto the rain tire rims (which, are heavy steel, and ugly too)

We get all this done just as the next on-track session is beginning… We think we’re all set. So I gear up and hop in the car…The car that now has 2 front gray racing wheels, and two ugly yellow rear wheels. Yay.

Problem 2

Don and Michelle stuff me in the car, and we get our usual push-starting process going. This is a complex process that involves, well, Don pushing the car, people staring at us thinking we’re crazy, me popping the clutch in 2nd gear, and the car starting. If this doesn’t work, we repeat these steps except there are more people looking at us, and some feel bad enough to offer to help.

This time, Don starts pushing, I pull my foot off the clutch pedal, and nothing happens. I realize this, but Don yells at me to let go of the clutch. I did! No! Yes. No! Stop! For some reason, the clutch is not engaging. Uck oh.

I abandon ship to inspect the car, which, given my status similar to the Michelin Man when wearing a driving suit and helmet, takes a few minutes.. We can’t figure anything out. We work the clutch pedal and it becomes hard as a rock. Something is clearly wrong between the engine and the transmission.

Between Don and myself troubleshooting, we think the problem could be with:

1. Clutch disc
2. Clutch hydraulics – master/slave cylinder
3. Throw-out bearing (likely candidate, as it was making noise before this. Did we mention that already?)
4. Transaxle (highly unlikely, as it was working fine before)

We venture out to find someone who knows more about this stuff than we do… We come across Bruce Lindstrand from Lindstrand Motorsports (http://www.lindstrandmotorsports.com). We determine he knows more than us from these little observations:

1. He has multiple racecars
2. He has these racecars in front of his really, really big trailer
3. This trailer has tools and parts for racecars
4. He isn’t as dirty as we are, so he must have more reliable racecars and work on them less

Bruce listens to what we have to say, and explains how things work inside the bellhousing assembly (which, we cannot see, have never seen, and really don’t think we can crack open and see at the track). He confirms our suspicion that the throw-out bearing is the culprit, however, you can’t be sure unless you take the trans out of the car (ick..).

At this point, I figure my racing is over for the day. And, since I’m missing 2 sessions for the day, I will not get signed off for the school, not get my license, and not be able to race tomorrow even if I could fix the car tonight. At some point after the first session I missed, my instructor (Brad for those following from yesterday) comes over to find out what happened. I explained my concern that if I don’t get my school signed off for the day, I can’t race (which I need 2 races to get my regional license), and will generally screw up all of our plans for the next month or two.

At some point in the near future, Brad returns with a certificate much like the one I received yesterday (the school I passed). Apparently, I’m not a moron on the track (its good they can only see me from one corner at the time) and didn’t piss anyone off. So, they signed me off. While the school completion is huge, and really our must-do goal of the weekend, we now have motivation to fix the car and actually race the car tomorrow.

Fixing the car

The toughest decision of the weekend comes around 4:30pm today. Here is what we know:

1. I passed both school days, so I can race tomorrow
2. The racecar is broke, seriously broke
3. We don’t exactly know what is wrong with the car
4. We don’t have parts to fix the car, even if we do find out what it is
5. I need a running car to race tomorrow
6. There is free beer

So, if we can fix the car, I can race tomorrow. Fix car. Free beer. Fix car. Free beer. Free beer + fix car. Decision made.

Disassembly

First, we want to make sure we have the parts to fix the car if we take it all apart. This could drastically change our decision on beer consumption.

We find Bruce again, and he has a new throwout bearing which is most likely the culprit. We get the bearing, some instruction from Bruce, and a weird look when we tell him we’re going to change it now, at the track, and race tomorrow. The reason he thinks we’re crazy is, because, the throwout bearing is in between the engine and transmission (see technical drawing picture below).

In order to get to this area, the rear suspension has to come out, and the transaxle.

So, with this thrilling news, we head to the pavilion to socialize a while and build our confidence in working on race cars (read as: drink beer, oh, and there’s fried chicken, too!).

After an hour or three, we grab another box of friend chicken and head to the car. By now, it is about 45 degrees out and windy. Perfect time to work on the car outside.

So, while I wrench on the car…

Don dances around…

Since we do not have a manual on the car (and one probably does not exist), we get to yanking out bolts that we think hold the rear of the car together. Within an hour we have this:

We quickly confirm it is the throwout bearing. This thingy should be in ONE piece, and not dangling like a hoop earring from 1984.

Reassembly

Bruce was nice enough to interrupt his wine party (ok, that’s a big of an exaggeration, but whenever you bring wine and wine glasses to a race track, you’re gonna get some flak) to check out our situation. He confirmed our only issue was probably the bearing…Good news.

We cleaned up the bellhousing of the transaxle, which was quite messy after the bearing had committed suicide in there, and put in our new bearing. Reassembly is just reverse of disassembly – and we didn’t run into any issues. Well, I take that back, Brad and Joe stopped by to heckle us, then offered to get us a beer when they were heading to get their own. It seems they proceeded to head to the pavilion, only to find about 15 corner workers (aren’t these the guys that are going to save my ass tomorrow when the car burst into flames? Uhm right) yelling “Toga” and empty kegs. They don’t come back to tell us, but instead head to Lindstrand’s rig where there is beer.

Once everything was back together, we confirmed that the clutch disc was grabbing and called it a night.

We enjoyed a celebratory beer, courtesy of Bruce Lindstrand.  I think he felt sorry for us.

SCCA School, Day 1

Note: Once I get pictures from the event.. I’ll post them in here.. Until then, you get my witty banter (or lack of) in text format. Thrilling, I know.

My goal of the weekend was to complete the SCCA drivers school. This will allow me to race in the 2 required regional races and get my regional license (which leads to a national license, if I want). To get signed off, I need to complete both schools (one Friday, one Saturday). If I don’t do anything too stupid, drive somewhat quick, and keep the car running – I should pass.

Friday begins with a few minutes in the classroom at 7:30am. The chief instructor, Jim, gives a few words of advice, mates us up with our instructors, and sends us on our way. We begin with an hour (or less, depending how you count hours) driving around the track @ Blackhawk in my instructor’s truck.

Around the track, round 1

This is my first time around Blackhawk. I’ve been there twice before, but never driven on the track. Seeing the track is interesting, especially from my instructor’s big old truck. I used to think only rednecks had big trucks, but, my new instructor, Brad, has a big truck and doesn’t yet seem to be a redneck. On this note, Brad brings a camouflaged ATV with him also. And, I think he had a camo jacket. This was all very Alabama like, until I read his hat and spoke with him to realize he is former Army. This makes sense now, even if it was 10 years ago and he is a computer geek now. I’m sure he had a gun with him the whole time, in case one of us students went crazy he could shoot one of us. That’s ok, I had a gun the whole time, too.

Rain, rain, go away

The school is split into two groups, 1 and 2. Group 1 is closed wheel cars – mostly consisting of Spec-Miata’s, as well as some Civics, RX-7s, BMW 3-series, etc.. Group 2, my group, is open wheel (formula) cars. Open wheel cars this weekend encompass Formula 500, Formula Vee, Formula First, Formula/Club Ford, and some Formula Continentals.

Group 1 ran first at 9am… and the rain was moving in quickly. My issue was that the rain tires I had were with me, and the tire guys were just across (outside) the track. No one can cross the track while cars are running. So, just before the first session, Don and Michelle took the rain tires and rims to the tire shop and left them there with hope they would understand to mount them up.

Well, this didn’t happen by the first session. So I missed the first session, even after a delay for heavy rain and lightning. The Group 1 cars went out again, and during this time I was able to get and mount the rain tires.

Session 2

This was my first time on track with the Lola. It was raining lightly, and the track still had puddles on the surface, not to mention the mini-ponds all around the track runoff areas.
The first few laps were under double-yellow, which means you can’t pass other cars (not that I was going to) and need to drive cautiously in general. Once we got out of the yellow flag business, I took the car up to speed. I did about 2-3 laps, still timid in the rain, before disaster struck.

Blackhawk is a mild-speed course -most of the track is done with 2nd or 3rd gear. There is one corner (3D) 1st gear is used, and 4th is used on the straight (bottom of the track map picture) with my car. Some will argue that 4th is used more with the right gearing.

So, at some point during my 2nd to 3rd shifting, or my 3rd to 2nd shifting (all without the clutch, mind you), the shifter had decided to do something I did not want it to do. In fear of something was wrong, I came into the pits rather than destroy the gearbox. Come to find out, the transaxle was stuck in 2nd and wasn’t hurting anything except my ego for going-fast.

Don and I quickly (in the mud) pulled the end-cover of the Hewland, re-aligned the selector fork, and resealed the transaxle. Problem solved.

Session 3

By now, the rain had gone away and it was humid and getting warmer.

Session 4

Session 5

Getting to the track

Thursday began my first of two vacation days from work.. And predictably, it began with a conference call for work, then 2 hours of stuff that had to get done before I left, then another 30 minute call to explain what to do in my absence. So much for a full day off.

After finishing up work, I loaded up the car and trailer. It is amazing how much crap you have to bring…Tools (lots of tools), extra parts, tables, tents, fluids, cleaners, funnels (yes, multiple funnels!) and more.

I had picked up a few items during the day, and was just left with filling up 2 fuel jugs with race fuel from the local Mobil, and getting some beef jerky, which is required for all drives more then 30 miles for me.

I stopped to get race gas at a Mobil station that I’d never been to before. A few indicators of how the weekend would progress began here:

- I can’t drive a trailer worth a damn. I’ve never had to. I can pull it around, and back it up in a field, but I’ll admit my backing skills in tight areas simply sucks. So, I pull into the gas station, find the race gas pump, and need to backup. I backup over the gas pump hose, and miss the pump by a good 3 inches.
- I get situated at the pump (by not being parked on the hose) and fill up a 5-gallon container with race gas. $5.99 a gallon. Let’s hear it for foreign oil (insert other political blog link here), whatever. As I go to put it into the back of the Jeep, I spill at least 64 cents of my new shiny fuel all over me, the back of the car, and the stuff inside the car.
Lesson learned: Fill up your new fuel jug with water, and make sure it doesn’t have any leaks, before filling it with gas and expecting it to be watertight.

So I get on the road to head Northwest, with a Jeep smelling like gas and not beef jerky. In my gas-spillage adventure, I forgot about the beef jerky. Oh well. The drive lasted about 30 miles into the 50 mile trip from Don’s house in Crystal Lake to Blackhawk (South Beloit, IL) before started raining. Then it started raining really really hard. I believe this was just after Don, via phone, said “wow, there’s a huge red band on the radar right where <click>.”

I tried finding an overpass or drive-thru to park the car under, as you can see it isn’t covered and the idea of everything being soaked wasn’t too appealing. Alas, I’m in the middle of nowhere with a few grain silos, lots of trees, a tornado here or there, and no cover from the rain. Everything gets wet and dirty.

I got to the track early, but couldn’t get inside as there was a test day going on. My rain tires were inside the track, courtesy of Andy @ Schulz Motorsports, which I planned to get mounted today for the rain tomorrow. A series of unfortunate events led me to not being able to get the tires until after the tire shop near the track was closed. Oops.

The SCCA registration folks were great – I clearly was lost. Marry Ann, Sue and Bob were very patient with me to get everything straight. My novice permit logbook was sent to my PO Box in Ohio, but arrived only after I had left for Chicago. Apparently showing up to race without a license or any paperwork is not cool. But, after a few phone calls, some printouts, and offering my first-born I was ok with the powers that be.

Once inside the track, I started getting things setup. It was rainy, and everything was soaked as expected. I also learned another valuable lesson: Setup everything beforehand to make sure it works. One of the ez-up tents that Don had bought was missing a leg. Luckily, a bungee cord, a tie-down-strap, and the trailer worked to hold it up. Once Don and Michelle arrived, I was clearly explained the downsides of my half-ass-structure-job. I’m not an engineer. Both of them are engineers. Whatever, you dorks, it held up.

After getting everything together at the track, we ventured to the lodging facility Michelle had arranged for us. I refrain from saying motel, or hotel, because I’m not sure what to call this place. In my travels for work, I experience some crappy places to stay. Some have smoky non-smoking rooms, some have loud traffic all night long, some have a lobby that scares me. This place had everything, and everything worse. I’m going to save my writing on this establishment for tripadvisor.com or hotels.com. Let’s just say Michelle wore her flip-flops the entire time while in the room, and no one looked up once I questioned why there was silly string on the ceiling in our room. Uhm…Right.

Thumbs up from someone who knows more than we do….

This evening, we had Yves from Historic Race Car come over and check out the [near] finished product… Yves clearly knows his stuff…and actually checked out the car a few months ago when it was in, uhm, lessar-quality-condition.

Today we finished putting the gearbox back together, reattached the suspension components we removed last night to clean and paint, measured rear-suspension hardware and ordered all new stuff, and cleaned off all the yellow spray paint that Don tinted the car with last night (one could argue that Don and the beer tinted the car).

After Yves performed seemingly (relative to the last 2 months) easy chores, but things we never knew about, on the car – timing, adjusting values, pointing out what we need to replace and what we should/should-not do – I took the car around our ‘practice race track’ (which consists of 4 blind corners, 2 entrances for vehicle traffic, lots of kids riding bikes thru the area, and a lonely law enforcement officer every once in a while) to get the car up to speed and let Yves hear how it sounds.

It only took me 4 laps to actually floor the silly thing and get it over 6k RPM. I kept shifting early as I thought I needed to, only to find out that I wasn’t even in the car’s power band. Once I kept my foot to the floor in 1st gear, then into 2nd (thank you, no clutch shifting) I realized that this car is scary fast. I was only brought back to reality by the fire-pin I left in place gouging into my knee cap as I slammed on the brakes. Note: next time, buckle the belts and avoid slamming into small metal protrusions when braking while wearing shorts.

Bottom line: the car seems good. Sounds good. Looks much better than January. Is much safer (new fuel cell, new hardware, better harness mountings, etc).. and should be faster (that’s driver-dependent, so that might not be true as I have to drive it).

Today is a turning point in this whole adventure: Don and I feel like this weekend might actually happen. So, in predictable fashion, we drank all the beer we had at the shop, then went out and drank more beer. Then we ice cream sandwiches, complained about being tired, and went to bed. This…must…stop. Next week, of course.

The easy stuff….

Tonight, our task list included:

1. Change the oil
2. Bleed brake and clutch fluid
3. Flush coolant
4. Make new headrest
5. Remove, clean, repaint rear trailing arms on the suspension
6. Drink beer
7. Reseal the end cover and bearing carrier on the gearbox (bad seal job the last, and first time, we did it)

Well, I think our task list included more than this, but this is what we actually got done. We were both hoping for an easy night. However, this is never the case.

Two things learned this evening:

There’s no manual for race cars – So very easy questions for most cars, likeHow much oil does it need, end up being mild challenges for us… So, just fill it up, run it, and see how much more you can pour in. For those wanting to write a manual for us, it was 7 quarts of oil to make it to our feel-good mark – take note.

No job is simple on race cars - “simply” bleeding the brakes turned into an hour and a trip to Autozone. The right-front brake bleeder screw is 1/4″, which means its a really tiny wrench, with lots of possibility to round it right off. Well, someone (not us!) had done this prior (which, also means the brake fluid in there was probably 15 years old) so we ended up using the jaws of life to extract the little guy, which renders it useless. Luckily, the Autozone up the road had them in stock. I bought 3, just in case. And, in true karma fashion, if you buy spares in anticipation others will break, they won’t. Good thing they were $3.

The positive side of the evening included the coolant flush, which was painless and 10 minutes, and Don making the new headrest plate. During our SCCA tech inspection, the inspector wouldn’t pass us because the headrest was .5 square inches too small. Yeah, like .5 square inches is going to matter. That’s why I wear a helmet, right?

The trailing arms were relatively painless, too. Although I think Don has carpal-tunnel from scraping the old spray-paint job off. They look nice. They don’t look so bent when they’re cleaned up.

Resealing the Hewland was easier than before. This time, it only took us two attempts at getting everything lined back up and spinning in the right direction. This required RTV’ing, letting the RTV get dry as we screwed around trying to stack gears, then removing all the RTV, re-RTV’ing, finding a broomstick (ok, an entire broom that Don wouldn’t cut up) to stack the gears on, then assembling everything properly. We’re getting good at this.

And, as usual, we succeeded in drinking beer. That part of the job never seems to take too long, cause too many problems, or require us to soak our hands in cancer-causing nasty oil.

Buy parts rather than make them, what a concept!

When we got the car, the left lower trailing arm for the rear suspension was a tad bit, uhm, bent . Take alook just to the left of the “S” in this picture… It was bent just a few degrees, and it seems the car had been realigned with the bend factored in.

The car could have probably run with the old arm, but, given the surprises we’ve found on the other suspension components it was best to get a new one. A month ago, I would have just drive with the bent arm, but now that impending doom on a race track is 3 days away, I’m a bit more liberal with the things that might break and jettison my ass into a wall.

The original idea was to get some chromoly tubing and 10 hours of free time, and make a new tube. However, we’re wising up that sometimes we should just pay someone to do somethings. Given that the car needs to e on a racetrack in 4 days, it was a wise choice..

Yves @ Historic Race Car, http://www.historicracecar.com, (luckily 5 minutes away in Crystal Lake) was able to make a new arm in short order for us… And, relative to other parts recently purchased, this was cheap (insert new picture here).

We also had a poor situation with the exhaust (see the above picture, that silver looking debacle has more holes than a pepper shaker).  The current exhaust system on the car was a bit old… rusty might be another word for it. Once we determined that the popping and richness from running around the shop was due to the ‘holy’ exhaust, it was time to replace it. The problem is, “time” to replace ended up being Friday afternoon when we needed the replacement exhaust Monday. Go buy stock in Fedex if this continues… $167 to ship the darn thing.

Here’s how it looks – pretty darn nice (made by Porter Racing in California)

Fuel Cell

The fuel storage and delivery situation was “vintage”, at best. The fuel bladder (yeah, not a cell, but a flexible PVC-type bag of race fuel sitting outside the frame rails) was older than me, which isn’t saying much.. So, I’ll add drama by saying it was older than Don

Here is the old setup – the fuel bladder is on the left (hidden) and the vent debacle is there in the middle.

And, here is the new setup. Much better.

So, what does this accomplish? Well, now, instead of the fuel cell being punctured by another car that t-bones the car (and ensuing fiery death), I now sit on the 6 gallons of race fuel. While this might sound worse, the new fuel cell has all sorts of goodness to not explode. Like foam and flexible walls and a certificate that says I won’t die (but don’t sue if you do, etc).

Project time:
Don’s estimate: 2 hours
Mike’s estimate: Is this really gonna work?
Reality: 10 hours

Dot dot dash

Old dash.

New dash being cut out of G10 fiberglass board.

New dash installed. Mucho nicer!

And random picture of Don doing what he does best – drinking miller lite and revving the engine

Which is in prep for driving the car around our ‘test track’….

which, is clearly a fantastic place to test drive a race car

Test drive, and all the fun that comes along with driving a car for the first time

We drove the car for the first time this weekend. It was a tad bit chilly out, but the car seemed to run ok. Shifting, was another story…

It seems the dog-rings (the thingies that engage a gear so you can move) in the transaxle were pretty worn in the Lola’s gearbox. The shifting was chatty, not smooth, and kinda scary overall.

It is good that dog rings are cheap. Considering they are a 3″ piece of steel with about 9 little bumps on them, $290 for two of them is a steal. In this picture, the old rings are at the far left bottom, and the new rings at the far left top. I clearly see $290 of difference. duh. (For those who feel the pain of dog rings – check out this awesome shirt by James Hakewill on ApexSpeed )

So we tackle disassembling the gearbox in order to find out what is in there. We find lots of parts. Luckily, Hewland is nice enough to put their manual in PDF format online.. And, luckily, we find a neighborhood kid who can read to us. Remember, we went to a public school in Florida for education, some of these big words are tough.