SoundGuyDave
This Space For Rent
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So, my enduro co-driver Joe and I went racing this weekend, just to knock the rust off…
I wrecked a couple of years ago, and work got in the way of getting on track between then and now. Joe, on the other hand, wrecked about a year ago, and has been rebuilding his car ever since. It’s still not quite ready, but it’s getting close. We both had the bug, and found a weekend that worked, so we decided to take my half-patched up hooptie out and run a race weekend with NASA At Autobahn in Joliet, IL. We did a “supersize” team entry, which allowed EITHER of us to drive in both sprint racing and Time Trials. This is a GREAT way to get a lot of track time in a competition environment for minimum dollars, and NASA puts on a fantastic and organized “show.”
Without a current dyno sheet, and being cheap, we went with scrub Pirelli P-Zero non-DOT slicks and declared as American Iron Extreme for the race group, and TTU for Time Trials. Now most of you know about my car, and it’s a fairly conservative build, all focused on suspension. 310HP, 342TQ, 3350lbs, so not a pavement-tearing monster by any means, but it gets around the track pretty well for what it is. American Iron Extreme and TTU are “no dyno required” UNLIMITED classes, so we were “competing” against absolutely insane builds, like 1000+HP Viper ACRs, high-downforce Lotus Elise, and 800+HP S550 Mustangs… We were going to get creamed, but we’d have an absolute ball doing it.
We had a few details to handle prepping the car, like replacing a seat, harness and window net for safety compliance, a couple of post-wreck fixes like swapping a radiator, and basic maintenance (oil change, coolant flush to distilled water and Water Wetter, plus a basic oil change). No big deal, and we gave ourselves a day and a half to do it. Simple, right? Right! Another buddy, John, had my trunk lid and was fabricating underside mounts and reinforcements for the new wing I bought, so we’d just bolt that on at the track.
Things went wrong very quickly in the prep phase, when I discovered that the mounting point width on a Sparco Pro ADV is actually wider than the points on a Circuit II. Okay, I had replacement side mount brackets and a replacement slider on hand, so in they went. With some drilling of carbon-hardened steel…. Ugh. Finally got that done, and the belts and net installed, and knocked out the maintenance. Then we left to grab a trailer. Joe’s trailer has the husk of his old car still sitting on it, and mine has expired tags (VERY expensive in IL), so we arranged a U-Haul car carrier rental and ran up to grab it. BUT, it turns out that the 7-pin trailer socket on Joe’s truck has a duff pin, so we couldn’t get a left turn signal to the trailer, and U-Haul refused to release the trailer without it… No good. By the time we played games with this, the track was open on Friday for early arrivals, so we shot over there, and went looking for a trailer to “borrow” to get the car to the track. Found one, hitched up, sent U-Haul a “you’re number one!” and grabbed the Hooptie.
Set up a nice little paddock area, and grabbed the trunk lid. John got all the fab work done, but just didn’t have time to actually mount the wing itself on the uprights. Something about “walking towards an $1800 piece of carbon fiber with a drill in my hand not going to happen,” so he’d let me do the nerve-wracking part. Fine, no prob on my end, except that it was getting dark by that point, so screw it, we’ll run the race-group practice session without the wing (never had one so wouldn’t miss it) on Saturday, and slap the wing on during lunch. Piece of cake. Saturday was my day to race, and Joe’s to run TT, so we got to the track nice and early (7:00AM?!?) to make the meetings, get the tires mounted, and flush the brakes. We wanted to do that Friday, but it was just too late after dealing with U-Haul, so… $202 later for four mount/balance we had scrub Pirellis on the car, with fresh fluid, and were good to go. I went out in the Practice session, and on lap 2, with the tires JUST starting to come up to temp, the seat slider slipped, and I found myself in the back seat, pedals by tippy-toe, and no vision outside the car, as the seat mount is inclined, and when you go back, you go DOWN as well… All this at 100mph. Fortunately, this also loosened all the harness belts (YIKES!!) so I was able to KIND OF stretch way up and could sort of see over the dash and cowl hood. HOPING there were no cars in the way, I slid over to the edge of the track, and got the hell off. We tore the seat out, and inspected the sliders, and found the culprit; the side brackets were a new design from Sparco, and overhung the actuator lever on the sliders, preventing them from completely seating. Marked up the brackets, pulled them off, then found a shop at the track with a bandsaw. 5 minutes later, we were re-assembling. Joe missed a TT session doing all this, but finally, we were all set!
I took the car out for the race group Qualifying session, and on lap ONE after the out-lap, still trying to get heat in the tires, I went into T8 at Autobahn South nice and hot, hit the hooks, and…. Instant rear lockup, piles of smoke pouring out of the rear of the car, etc. Trying to wrestle the thing back into shape, I found that not only had I apparently lost ABS, but I also lost power steering as well!! Pulled offlline, and headed back to the paddock, AGAIN, to diagnose and repair.
The mount on the power steering cooler had failed (crash damage), allowing the cooler to drop down and rub on the track until holed, which pissed all the fluid onto my rear tires… Oh, remember the radiator that I replaced? Yeah, that took a beating as well… Brand new Mishimoto radiator, beat to hell, but at least not leaking. We cut a 3” section of line from the power steering cooler and just jumped the two hoses, and called it good.
Finally, Joe got a chance to run the car in Time Trials, and reported that all was good, but he didn’t really like the tires, saying that they just kind of felt numb. His times were good, but… Neither of us had any real practical experience in a high-horse car with slicks, so we were both kind of in the dark scratching our heads on what they would do. Whatever, the car has three pedals and a wheel, we’ll just get in it and drive.
Now, it was my time to hit the grid for the first race of the weekend. Woohooo!! The “Thunder” grid for this weekend was massive, with 50 cars crowding the 2.0 mile track, and with a LOT of heavy metal represented. We were one of SEVEN running in AIX, and since grid is by class, not by time, I found myself in grid spot 13 (with 37 behind me) for the race start. Remember, it’s a 310HP car, so I knew I was going to get murdered out there, but hell, that’s racing! Wasn’t in it for the competition, I was out there to knock off the rust and have some fun. We rolled off grid behind the pace car, did our swerve/brake warmup nonsense, then formed up side-by-side for the last four corners and took the green flag!! I was in the first of four waves to take the green, which put nice separation between various classes. I pulled a move on a rookie AIX driver and pulled ahead of him through T1/T2, nice and clean, got passed by two AI cars, then looked for a gap to set up in to start letting the heavy-metal field by without screwing anybody’s race while I tried to get some heat in the Pirellis which are fairly treacherous when cold. By the time we got to T5, we found ourselves in a double-yellow condition: full-course caution. Practically, that translates to no passing anywhere, the race leader drops to 35-45mph, and the field bunches up behind him single-file. Yikes. I WAS tail-end of my wave, which was perfect for me, with at least a solid lap or two before the next wave back would have caught me. NOW, though, I had about a dozen hungry BMWs piled up in my rear-view as the race leader came around the final corner, and the whole track went green. I got mugged. As soon as we went green, I shot over to the outside edge of the track and just hung on for dear life as the train of BMWs went by, and at one point, we were three-wide going through one of the trickiest corners on the track. Slow doesn’t even begin to describe the pace for me. I was sitting WAY offline, with a constant stream of cars zipping by (including the AIX rookie that I passed earlier), and I was at the tail end of the whole shooting match before I could get back on line and start trying to get heat into the damn tires again. I could have been more aggressive, and forced my way into one of the packs, but I was serious about NOT screwing anybody’s race. Eventually, I did get some heat in the tires, but with all the battling, the race leaders had caught us, and I again had a lot of heavy metal coming by. I was polite, I did point them by, but by then my race was shot, my brain was rattled (remember: 2 years off!), and I just wanted to get through the race without incident. Honestly, it was a blast. Yes, I got passed by everything out there, but who cares?! I was racing again! Eventually, I got collected, and got SOME pace going, and started trying to figure out the tires (which I had hoped to do in Practice and Quals), then started to click off the laps, getting passed here and there, and making a couple of passes of my own. I started 6th and finished 5th in AIX, which is just silly considering how little HP I have, but had a blast doing it. Along the way, I got to see some seriously cool battles, and from the best seat in the house. NO TV coverage is like sitting in a car 6’ behind a pair of drivers going at it hammer-and-tong. Awesome! I did note to Joe, that to me it felt like the tires kind of went “off” towards the end of the race, and I was starting to have issues keeping the back end under me, so I pulled pace a bit to see if they would come back, and they did.
I was done for the day, but Joe still had a couple of TT sessions to go. Embarrassingly enough, Joe wound up turning laps around 2 seconds faster than me, in MY car!!! Granted, he had no race traffic to deal with, but still… Bragging rights to Joe, who proceeded to comment that the faster he went, the more he liked the tires!
Finally done with the day, it was time to finish the wing project, which went flawlessly, if slowly. Then the social stuff, and we wound up leaving the track at 10:15 to head to the hotel. Between the U-Haul fiasco, getting the tires mounted, the seat-mount issue, the power-steering cooler, then finally getting the wing on AFTER the racing was done, we were knackered and frustrated. And hungry. The only think I had to eat all day was one hot dog at lunch, and I was starving. Given the hour, it would be fast food, and we found an Arby’s, so I ordered a “mid sized” sandwich… To which the girl behind the counter said “I’m sorry, we’re out of roast beef…” You have GOT to be kidding. Well, it was a perfect capstone to a frustrating day.
Sunday dawned as a beautiful day, and we “slept in” not having to be to the track until 8:00 for the Time Trial group meeting. Today was Joe’s turn to race, and mine to run TT. Cool! Fun! All the gremlins are worked out, and we’re set to just put our heads down and turn laps. Right? Wrong.
The first TT session was RIGHT before Qualfying (no practice today), so I went out with a simple mission: run two laps, and get the car warmed up. So, that’s exactly what I did, I ran two laps, drove it like a jackass, and when the tires came in, so did I. I pulled straight to grid, where Joe was waiting, but since quals were gridded by (pathetic) time from yesterday’s race, he was in position 38, which is on an incline. I couldn’t sit there with my foot on the brake, or I’d cook them, so I shut down, and left the car in gear while we did the driver change and debrief. The track felt great, the tires were gripping like crazy, and Joe should have some fun out there. For whatever reason, there was a bit of a delay, like another couple of minutes longer than we expected before the field was released. We needed a push-start to get the car re-fired (2-year old peanut battery in a HOT car), and off he went. The did the warmup swerve/brake thing, and took the green flag in single-file, and Joe attacked T1/T2 like a maniac, and thanks to the pre-warmed slicks, he stuck it, and was through T3 in the blink of an eye. I stood at grid with a stopwatch, watching down the track waiting for him to come around. Come around he did, straight onto pit lane, and right into the paddock. I ran down to meet him in our paddock spot, and he reported severe overheating, with 240* water temps, and 280* oil temps. WTF??? My car NEVER does that kind of thing! Wondering if the radiator let go, we let the car idle to try to bring the temps down while we started diagnostics, and all we could figure was that me bringing the car in without cooldown, followed by the extended sitting on grid had just heat-soaked the motor. Oh, well.
I took it out for the next TT session an hour later, ran it hard, with no temp issues at all. Heat soak indeed… While I was out beating on it, I started to notice a LOT of little mistakes I was making; over-braking, too slow on entry, not looking down the track far enough, etc. Yup, I’m rusty, all right! Right then, I decided that if Joe wanted it, he could do the third race, because I needed to learn to walk again before I could run. I just needed more seat time to get my chops back, and trying not to get run over in the race group is NOT the way to do it. Cool, got a plan.
I skipped the following TT session, since it led back-to-back into Joe’s race (race #2 of the weekend), so we fueled the car, ran it to grid, and got him set for the race. Grid spot 13 again! This time HE would learn what it was like to get mugged! Unfortunately (for my ego) there was no double-yellow to bunch the field up, and he got clean track to get the tires up to temp, and he started setting a nice blistering pace out there. I have to say, he was killing it. He still got run over by the heavy-metal, but he held his own with the other stuff. Yes, it helped that the cars were fed to him one by one, and not in packs of ten or twelve, but he still handled it well, and all was good. Fun race for him, until near the end, when they had to roll the pace car, and the field did bunch up again. They released on a green/white-checker format, going green with one lap to go. Joe, however, had temps in the tires, and proceeded to pounce on a sports racer that was snoozing, forcing the issue through T1 and T2, then made the Mustang REALLY wide and hung on to the spot all the way to the checker. He started 6th in AIX, and finished 4th, and it was a job well done.
Half an hour later, with a fresh load of fuel, I went out for the 4th TT session, where I hooked up on track with a good friend Terry in his 2013 Mustang. Stock powertrain, no aero, good dampers and Hoosier R7, up against our barely-aero’d (0* AOA on the wing) 310HP Hooptie. We had a BLAST. He wasn’t in it for times, and we just played tag. He lifted a bit on the straights so I could stay tucked up, then we went at it in the twisties. He would pull a bit here and there, I would return the favor, and once I got the slicks, hot, I really started pushing him in the corners, and we swapped places a couple of times for giggles. We had an M3 behind us, who was reeling us in bit by bit, and I immediately planned on giving him the line and a point as soon as he caught us. Neither Terry nor I were worried about lap times, but this guy might have been, so politeness counts. It took three laps for him to make up the 8-10 carlengths, and I threw the point at exactly the same time Terry dropped two wheels trying to keep away from me, and threw ME the point-by. Well, I certainly wasn’t going to point the BMW by, then pop out in front of him a half-second later, so I just got out of the gas. Terry got out of the gas too, waiting for me to pull out. The BMW popped out, went past me, then slammed on the hooks to keep from over-running Terry, and from there it was three-way tag. Great fun, and I really started to get used to the way the tires acted, even though I could tell the best laps were already gone from the rubber.
Finally, it was time for the third and final race, and Joe went out in a VERY reduced field of maybe 30 cars. From grid, where I was watching the race, I could see my car from the mirror up, and Joe was looking good, maintaining a blistering pace, and “playing” with some cars we had no business being anywhere near. He took the checkered flag, and I wandered to our paddock spot to grab him some water and Gatorade, and waited for him to pull up. And waited. And waited. WTF?? Where’d he go?? I doubt they would have pulled him for impound, since AIX has almost nothing to inspect post-race. I wandered back towards tech, anyway, just in case, and I found him. Sitting in the “Sin Bin.” Formally, this is known as “Body Contact Impound.” If you do something dumb, like hit somebody, you have to report and fill out paperwork. If you do everything right, and somebody hits you, you STILL have to report and fill out paperwork. Well, Joe was doing paperwork. He was fine (big relief!), and the car was MOSTLY okay, aside from a bashed in driver’s door with a giant donut on it. Of course, this was the LAST undamaged panel as supplied with the car from the factory. Not anymore!! Fortunately, John has the “Official American Iron Bodywork Kit” also known as a 2x4 and a 5lb sledgehammer. A couple minutes spent with the hammer, and the door was straight enough for me. Adds character, I think! As he entered the braking zone for T5, he glanced up and saw the GTS2 BMW right behind him, he hit the brakes, turned in, and the BMW was RIGHT there. This was a low-percentage move called a “dive bomb,” initiated with no warning, from a car running solo, trying to get around a car running nose-to-tail with in-class competition. Unfortunately, since at the point of contact, the BMW’s front wheel was even with our driver’s seat, the BMW technically had the right to be there, and it was Joe’s “fault” for turning in on him. The race director issued a single-point penalty on both licenses and left it at that; it was just a “racing incident.” Joe got the point for turning in, the BMW driver got the point for being a knucklehead and trying the pass in the first place.
For nearly 10 years, the car has been flawless. Not a single mechanical DNF, never failed to take the green, never broke down on track, never had chronic issues of any sort; you just put gas in it and drove it. Then, in one weekend, we got screwed by U-Haul, had a seat-mount failure, destroyed power steering cooler, damaged radiator, massive overheat, failing battery, and got hit on track. Oh, and Arby’s was “out of roast beef”
But damn, was that a lot of fun!!
I wrecked a couple of years ago, and work got in the way of getting on track between then and now. Joe, on the other hand, wrecked about a year ago, and has been rebuilding his car ever since. It’s still not quite ready, but it’s getting close. We both had the bug, and found a weekend that worked, so we decided to take my half-patched up hooptie out and run a race weekend with NASA At Autobahn in Joliet, IL. We did a “supersize” team entry, which allowed EITHER of us to drive in both sprint racing and Time Trials. This is a GREAT way to get a lot of track time in a competition environment for minimum dollars, and NASA puts on a fantastic and organized “show.”
Without a current dyno sheet, and being cheap, we went with scrub Pirelli P-Zero non-DOT slicks and declared as American Iron Extreme for the race group, and TTU for Time Trials. Now most of you know about my car, and it’s a fairly conservative build, all focused on suspension. 310HP, 342TQ, 3350lbs, so not a pavement-tearing monster by any means, but it gets around the track pretty well for what it is. American Iron Extreme and TTU are “no dyno required” UNLIMITED classes, so we were “competing” against absolutely insane builds, like 1000+HP Viper ACRs, high-downforce Lotus Elise, and 800+HP S550 Mustangs… We were going to get creamed, but we’d have an absolute ball doing it.
We had a few details to handle prepping the car, like replacing a seat, harness and window net for safety compliance, a couple of post-wreck fixes like swapping a radiator, and basic maintenance (oil change, coolant flush to distilled water and Water Wetter, plus a basic oil change). No big deal, and we gave ourselves a day and a half to do it. Simple, right? Right! Another buddy, John, had my trunk lid and was fabricating underside mounts and reinforcements for the new wing I bought, so we’d just bolt that on at the track.
Things went wrong very quickly in the prep phase, when I discovered that the mounting point width on a Sparco Pro ADV is actually wider than the points on a Circuit II. Okay, I had replacement side mount brackets and a replacement slider on hand, so in they went. With some drilling of carbon-hardened steel…. Ugh. Finally got that done, and the belts and net installed, and knocked out the maintenance. Then we left to grab a trailer. Joe’s trailer has the husk of his old car still sitting on it, and mine has expired tags (VERY expensive in IL), so we arranged a U-Haul car carrier rental and ran up to grab it. BUT, it turns out that the 7-pin trailer socket on Joe’s truck has a duff pin, so we couldn’t get a left turn signal to the trailer, and U-Haul refused to release the trailer without it… No good. By the time we played games with this, the track was open on Friday for early arrivals, so we shot over there, and went looking for a trailer to “borrow” to get the car to the track. Found one, hitched up, sent U-Haul a “you’re number one!” and grabbed the Hooptie.
Set up a nice little paddock area, and grabbed the trunk lid. John got all the fab work done, but just didn’t have time to actually mount the wing itself on the uprights. Something about “walking towards an $1800 piece of carbon fiber with a drill in my hand not going to happen,” so he’d let me do the nerve-wracking part. Fine, no prob on my end, except that it was getting dark by that point, so screw it, we’ll run the race-group practice session without the wing (never had one so wouldn’t miss it) on Saturday, and slap the wing on during lunch. Piece of cake. Saturday was my day to race, and Joe’s to run TT, so we got to the track nice and early (7:00AM?!?) to make the meetings, get the tires mounted, and flush the brakes. We wanted to do that Friday, but it was just too late after dealing with U-Haul, so… $202 later for four mount/balance we had scrub Pirellis on the car, with fresh fluid, and were good to go. I went out in the Practice session, and on lap 2, with the tires JUST starting to come up to temp, the seat slider slipped, and I found myself in the back seat, pedals by tippy-toe, and no vision outside the car, as the seat mount is inclined, and when you go back, you go DOWN as well… All this at 100mph. Fortunately, this also loosened all the harness belts (YIKES!!) so I was able to KIND OF stretch way up and could sort of see over the dash and cowl hood. HOPING there were no cars in the way, I slid over to the edge of the track, and got the hell off. We tore the seat out, and inspected the sliders, and found the culprit; the side brackets were a new design from Sparco, and overhung the actuator lever on the sliders, preventing them from completely seating. Marked up the brackets, pulled them off, then found a shop at the track with a bandsaw. 5 minutes later, we were re-assembling. Joe missed a TT session doing all this, but finally, we were all set!
I took the car out for the race group Qualifying session, and on lap ONE after the out-lap, still trying to get heat in the tires, I went into T8 at Autobahn South nice and hot, hit the hooks, and…. Instant rear lockup, piles of smoke pouring out of the rear of the car, etc. Trying to wrestle the thing back into shape, I found that not only had I apparently lost ABS, but I also lost power steering as well!! Pulled offlline, and headed back to the paddock, AGAIN, to diagnose and repair.
The mount on the power steering cooler had failed (crash damage), allowing the cooler to drop down and rub on the track until holed, which pissed all the fluid onto my rear tires… Oh, remember the radiator that I replaced? Yeah, that took a beating as well… Brand new Mishimoto radiator, beat to hell, but at least not leaking. We cut a 3” section of line from the power steering cooler and just jumped the two hoses, and called it good.
Finally, Joe got a chance to run the car in Time Trials, and reported that all was good, but he didn’t really like the tires, saying that they just kind of felt numb. His times were good, but… Neither of us had any real practical experience in a high-horse car with slicks, so we were both kind of in the dark scratching our heads on what they would do. Whatever, the car has three pedals and a wheel, we’ll just get in it and drive.
Now, it was my time to hit the grid for the first race of the weekend. Woohooo!! The “Thunder” grid for this weekend was massive, with 50 cars crowding the 2.0 mile track, and with a LOT of heavy metal represented. We were one of SEVEN running in AIX, and since grid is by class, not by time, I found myself in grid spot 13 (with 37 behind me) for the race start. Remember, it’s a 310HP car, so I knew I was going to get murdered out there, but hell, that’s racing! Wasn’t in it for the competition, I was out there to knock off the rust and have some fun. We rolled off grid behind the pace car, did our swerve/brake warmup nonsense, then formed up side-by-side for the last four corners and took the green flag!! I was in the first of four waves to take the green, which put nice separation between various classes. I pulled a move on a rookie AIX driver and pulled ahead of him through T1/T2, nice and clean, got passed by two AI cars, then looked for a gap to set up in to start letting the heavy-metal field by without screwing anybody’s race while I tried to get some heat in the Pirellis which are fairly treacherous when cold. By the time we got to T5, we found ourselves in a double-yellow condition: full-course caution. Practically, that translates to no passing anywhere, the race leader drops to 35-45mph, and the field bunches up behind him single-file. Yikes. I WAS tail-end of my wave, which was perfect for me, with at least a solid lap or two before the next wave back would have caught me. NOW, though, I had about a dozen hungry BMWs piled up in my rear-view as the race leader came around the final corner, and the whole track went green. I got mugged. As soon as we went green, I shot over to the outside edge of the track and just hung on for dear life as the train of BMWs went by, and at one point, we were three-wide going through one of the trickiest corners on the track. Slow doesn’t even begin to describe the pace for me. I was sitting WAY offline, with a constant stream of cars zipping by (including the AIX rookie that I passed earlier), and I was at the tail end of the whole shooting match before I could get back on line and start trying to get heat into the damn tires again. I could have been more aggressive, and forced my way into one of the packs, but I was serious about NOT screwing anybody’s race. Eventually, I did get some heat in the tires, but with all the battling, the race leaders had caught us, and I again had a lot of heavy metal coming by. I was polite, I did point them by, but by then my race was shot, my brain was rattled (remember: 2 years off!), and I just wanted to get through the race without incident. Honestly, it was a blast. Yes, I got passed by everything out there, but who cares?! I was racing again! Eventually, I got collected, and got SOME pace going, and started trying to figure out the tires (which I had hoped to do in Practice and Quals), then started to click off the laps, getting passed here and there, and making a couple of passes of my own. I started 6th and finished 5th in AIX, which is just silly considering how little HP I have, but had a blast doing it. Along the way, I got to see some seriously cool battles, and from the best seat in the house. NO TV coverage is like sitting in a car 6’ behind a pair of drivers going at it hammer-and-tong. Awesome! I did note to Joe, that to me it felt like the tires kind of went “off” towards the end of the race, and I was starting to have issues keeping the back end under me, so I pulled pace a bit to see if they would come back, and they did.
I was done for the day, but Joe still had a couple of TT sessions to go. Embarrassingly enough, Joe wound up turning laps around 2 seconds faster than me, in MY car!!! Granted, he had no race traffic to deal with, but still… Bragging rights to Joe, who proceeded to comment that the faster he went, the more he liked the tires!
Finally done with the day, it was time to finish the wing project, which went flawlessly, if slowly. Then the social stuff, and we wound up leaving the track at 10:15 to head to the hotel. Between the U-Haul fiasco, getting the tires mounted, the seat-mount issue, the power-steering cooler, then finally getting the wing on AFTER the racing was done, we were knackered and frustrated. And hungry. The only think I had to eat all day was one hot dog at lunch, and I was starving. Given the hour, it would be fast food, and we found an Arby’s, so I ordered a “mid sized” sandwich… To which the girl behind the counter said “I’m sorry, we’re out of roast beef…” You have GOT to be kidding. Well, it was a perfect capstone to a frustrating day.
Sunday dawned as a beautiful day, and we “slept in” not having to be to the track until 8:00 for the Time Trial group meeting. Today was Joe’s turn to race, and mine to run TT. Cool! Fun! All the gremlins are worked out, and we’re set to just put our heads down and turn laps. Right? Wrong.
The first TT session was RIGHT before Qualfying (no practice today), so I went out with a simple mission: run two laps, and get the car warmed up. So, that’s exactly what I did, I ran two laps, drove it like a jackass, and when the tires came in, so did I. I pulled straight to grid, where Joe was waiting, but since quals were gridded by (pathetic) time from yesterday’s race, he was in position 38, which is on an incline. I couldn’t sit there with my foot on the brake, or I’d cook them, so I shut down, and left the car in gear while we did the driver change and debrief. The track felt great, the tires were gripping like crazy, and Joe should have some fun out there. For whatever reason, there was a bit of a delay, like another couple of minutes longer than we expected before the field was released. We needed a push-start to get the car re-fired (2-year old peanut battery in a HOT car), and off he went. The did the warmup swerve/brake thing, and took the green flag in single-file, and Joe attacked T1/T2 like a maniac, and thanks to the pre-warmed slicks, he stuck it, and was through T3 in the blink of an eye. I stood at grid with a stopwatch, watching down the track waiting for him to come around. Come around he did, straight onto pit lane, and right into the paddock. I ran down to meet him in our paddock spot, and he reported severe overheating, with 240* water temps, and 280* oil temps. WTF??? My car NEVER does that kind of thing! Wondering if the radiator let go, we let the car idle to try to bring the temps down while we started diagnostics, and all we could figure was that me bringing the car in without cooldown, followed by the extended sitting on grid had just heat-soaked the motor. Oh, well.
I took it out for the next TT session an hour later, ran it hard, with no temp issues at all. Heat soak indeed… While I was out beating on it, I started to notice a LOT of little mistakes I was making; over-braking, too slow on entry, not looking down the track far enough, etc. Yup, I’m rusty, all right! Right then, I decided that if Joe wanted it, he could do the third race, because I needed to learn to walk again before I could run. I just needed more seat time to get my chops back, and trying not to get run over in the race group is NOT the way to do it. Cool, got a plan.
I skipped the following TT session, since it led back-to-back into Joe’s race (race #2 of the weekend), so we fueled the car, ran it to grid, and got him set for the race. Grid spot 13 again! This time HE would learn what it was like to get mugged! Unfortunately (for my ego) there was no double-yellow to bunch the field up, and he got clean track to get the tires up to temp, and he started setting a nice blistering pace out there. I have to say, he was killing it. He still got run over by the heavy-metal, but he held his own with the other stuff. Yes, it helped that the cars were fed to him one by one, and not in packs of ten or twelve, but he still handled it well, and all was good. Fun race for him, until near the end, when they had to roll the pace car, and the field did bunch up again. They released on a green/white-checker format, going green with one lap to go. Joe, however, had temps in the tires, and proceeded to pounce on a sports racer that was snoozing, forcing the issue through T1 and T2, then made the Mustang REALLY wide and hung on to the spot all the way to the checker. He started 6th in AIX, and finished 4th, and it was a job well done.
Half an hour later, with a fresh load of fuel, I went out for the 4th TT session, where I hooked up on track with a good friend Terry in his 2013 Mustang. Stock powertrain, no aero, good dampers and Hoosier R7, up against our barely-aero’d (0* AOA on the wing) 310HP Hooptie. We had a BLAST. He wasn’t in it for times, and we just played tag. He lifted a bit on the straights so I could stay tucked up, then we went at it in the twisties. He would pull a bit here and there, I would return the favor, and once I got the slicks, hot, I really started pushing him in the corners, and we swapped places a couple of times for giggles. We had an M3 behind us, who was reeling us in bit by bit, and I immediately planned on giving him the line and a point as soon as he caught us. Neither Terry nor I were worried about lap times, but this guy might have been, so politeness counts. It took three laps for him to make up the 8-10 carlengths, and I threw the point at exactly the same time Terry dropped two wheels trying to keep away from me, and threw ME the point-by. Well, I certainly wasn’t going to point the BMW by, then pop out in front of him a half-second later, so I just got out of the gas. Terry got out of the gas too, waiting for me to pull out. The BMW popped out, went past me, then slammed on the hooks to keep from over-running Terry, and from there it was three-way tag. Great fun, and I really started to get used to the way the tires acted, even though I could tell the best laps were already gone from the rubber.
Finally, it was time for the third and final race, and Joe went out in a VERY reduced field of maybe 30 cars. From grid, where I was watching the race, I could see my car from the mirror up, and Joe was looking good, maintaining a blistering pace, and “playing” with some cars we had no business being anywhere near. He took the checkered flag, and I wandered to our paddock spot to grab him some water and Gatorade, and waited for him to pull up. And waited. And waited. WTF?? Where’d he go?? I doubt they would have pulled him for impound, since AIX has almost nothing to inspect post-race. I wandered back towards tech, anyway, just in case, and I found him. Sitting in the “Sin Bin.” Formally, this is known as “Body Contact Impound.” If you do something dumb, like hit somebody, you have to report and fill out paperwork. If you do everything right, and somebody hits you, you STILL have to report and fill out paperwork. Well, Joe was doing paperwork. He was fine (big relief!), and the car was MOSTLY okay, aside from a bashed in driver’s door with a giant donut on it. Of course, this was the LAST undamaged panel as supplied with the car from the factory. Not anymore!! Fortunately, John has the “Official American Iron Bodywork Kit” also known as a 2x4 and a 5lb sledgehammer. A couple minutes spent with the hammer, and the door was straight enough for me. Adds character, I think! As he entered the braking zone for T5, he glanced up and saw the GTS2 BMW right behind him, he hit the brakes, turned in, and the BMW was RIGHT there. This was a low-percentage move called a “dive bomb,” initiated with no warning, from a car running solo, trying to get around a car running nose-to-tail with in-class competition. Unfortunately, since at the point of contact, the BMW’s front wheel was even with our driver’s seat, the BMW technically had the right to be there, and it was Joe’s “fault” for turning in on him. The race director issued a single-point penalty on both licenses and left it at that; it was just a “racing incident.” Joe got the point for turning in, the BMW driver got the point for being a knucklehead and trying the pass in the first place.
For nearly 10 years, the car has been flawless. Not a single mechanical DNF, never failed to take the green, never broke down on track, never had chronic issues of any sort; you just put gas in it and drove it. Then, in one weekend, we got screwed by U-Haul, had a seat-mount failure, destroyed power steering cooler, damaged radiator, massive overheat, failing battery, and got hit on track. Oh, and Arby’s was “out of roast beef”
But damn, was that a lot of fun!!