We also started tackling all the gasket surfaces that need to get cleaned up.

Still a couple more to do.  I wonder if looking at pictures of us cleaning gaskets is as boring as cleaning gaskets…

Rob cut us a new access hatch for the gas filler neck.  It’s still fiddly and annoying to deal with but at least it takes less time now.  We are going to make some cover hatches too.

Aside from that, the rest was just moving some fittings over and cleaning up the manifolds for the third motor.

During tech at the AutoX we noticed a weird clunk in the front suspension.  I’m going to take the care down to tire factory tomorrow and get it up on a lift to see if it can find out where its coming from.  I want to test the belts (not actually showing positive signs ) and checkin

We had a spare steering rack out of the white car.  My plan is to mod that rack and install it when we put the new motor in.  I went out to the tarp tent where the ChumpCar and discovered that a furry friend had decided to make its home there (just a cat!).

First off, time to get the steering rack off the front subframe.

Looks like the semi that hit this car bent one of the tie rods.  That will have to be replaced.

6 quick bolts through the bottom to release the steering mounts (with the bushings inside).  Don’t just hit the nuts with the impact gun, they are welded on to make it easier on you.  I make this mistake.

Bare rack.

Next, remove the tie rods.  Take the boot off first.  Since this tie rod was going to be replaced anyway, I cut the boot.  It’s important to have good boots so that the parts stay well greased and clean.

Next, I removed the steering knuckle.

Then I removed the locking nut and cover on these two access areas.

After removing a plastic dust cap, a snap ring needs to be removed from the top of the spindle.  It took me forever for some reason.  I even had the correct tool.

Next the spindle can be tapped out gentle from the bottom and removed.

Remove the lock pin on the passenger side end cap (by turning clock wise until the lock pin pops out and then counter-clock wise until it is removed).  The main shaft can now be removed.  Give it a good tug and it will pop out.

Slide the larger carrier bit off and the lock ring bit at the end.  All that will be left is the offending pneumatic seal.  All this work is to get this out of the system.

I prep’d the vise and got to work with the grinder.

Success!

Leave the little lock collar on the rod.  Next up, removing the fluid lines from the housing.  Since there will no longer be power steering fluid in this unit (just grease), all these holes need to do is be well cap’d to prevent dirt and water getting in.

A hammer finished these off nicely.

For the ports to the pump its self, I managed to find hardware in our box that matched the treading.  They were unfortunately too long, so I got out the dewalt bolt shortener.

For the line feeding the cooling loop, I found our spare loop and cut off the fitting that normally goes there.  It got the same hammer treatment.

Now it’s time to put everything back together.  The carrier bit slides back on the main shaft.  Apply a ton of grease.

… and reinstall.

Reinstall the lock pin.

Grease up the spindle and reinstall.

Lock washer goes back in.

On the bottom reinstall the nut (25ft-lb) and the housing cover (35ft-lb).

Before reinstalling the tie rods, make sure these little pins are pushed up.

Assemble the last door, half circle washer thing, spring, cover.  Tighten the cover to 43ft-lb four times.  Then loosen one quarter turn.  Then tighten up the lock ring while keeping the center tight.  If you were an idiot like me and striped the nut, apply grinder until the 14mm head becomes a 13mm and swear a lot.  Reinstall tie rods.

Nearly done!  The only thing I have left is to install the new tie rod and put it into the car.  Great saturday project.  Bench only projects make me happy.

Motor!  It’s a pulled block from an n/a S4 (there were two kinds of 2nd generation rx7s, we have the earlier S4 car).  I saw it pop up on craigslist and jumped on it straight away.  It was pulled from a daily driver that was getting its own turbo II motor upgrade.  It has only been out of the car a month and looks to be in good condition.  It’s been rebuilt by FD3s engineering at some point.  We don’t have a lot more history than that.  The coolant seals were tested fine and it was running fine a month ago.  It cost us way less than a rebuild would cost.  The plan is to put this in the car as our primary motor.  The motor that’s in there now will then become our known good spare.

The guy we got it from was a real rotor head and hooked us up with a bunch more spare parts.  That’s the great part of running the lower trim levels.  No one wants the parts!

Manifolds, a tranny, starter, alt, and a cut wiring harness (good for replacement connectors!).  While we were fiddling with the new motor, nick get started on mounts for the new wingy.

We started swapping parts off our blown motor on to the new (to us) shiny one.  First off, the flywheels.

Just a couple of 2 and 1/3 in nuts later and were good.  The bearings in there were shot.  We have some spares but the seal at the end will need to get ordered. Some of the coolant lines on the blown motor were… bad.

The rats nest comes off.

Some block off plates are moved and the motor is shifter back so we can get at the water pump.  It’s amazing how light the “keg” is.  Two people can easily lift it.

On this motor, we are going to take some advice we got (several times already ) and premix the gas.  Rotaries are like two stroke motors is that they need their lubrication sprayed into the combustion chamber.  These motors have an oil pump and oil injectors that serve this purpose.  These pumps can fail and when that happens you can kiss your motor good bye.  So we are going to mix oil into our gas as we fill up the car and remove the oil injection system.  This is where the injectors once went.

The tentative plan right now is to just blue it with a bolt.  We also removed the water pump.  It looks serviceable still but we want to make sure we have a nice tight seal for the housings and the pump (it could be what caused our failure at the last race).  The pulleys have to come off first.  (We have a good spare set now!)

Boy was this thing a pain to get off.  One of the studs was so rusted that it filled the passage with rust and it took us a good ten minutes with a hammer and penetrating lubricant to get it off.

That’s it for tonight.  I have a good shopping list to work with and I think we have a great new motor!

Tarps and tarps on legs to the rescue.  Here is the state of things after the AutoX.  This is after nine ~45 second autox runs and 20 or so miles of freeway driving.

More direct pictures of the damaged belts.  New vs Used.

The newest and I think best theory for all of our belt problems is rusty pulleys.  It then acts like sand paper against the belts and just grinds them down.  These pulleys were on the gray car originally and had been sitting for 8 years growing this “sand paper”.  The state of the pulleys currently on the car:

Not awesome.  The pulleys on the blown motor were much better.

Despite having three stock alternators at one point, I couldn’t find any other pulleys.  I think I threw them away thinking that the double pulley would solve all our problems.  We did our best to clean up the only remaining stock alternator pulley.  It’s not perfect but its a lot better.

We got a protip from a local guru (Thanks Bert!) about the fan.  It was designed to run idling in traffic with the a/c on.  We will certainly never have that kind of standing heat load on this car ever again.  We don’t need all 8 fan blades!  This should reduce load a little.  We were even told that maybe 2 blades would be enough.  Off with their blades!

Nice.

So now for the bad news.  I’ll tell the story in a series of pictures and then explain.

This is a series of pictures of the exhaust ports on our first (blown) motor.  I’m not going to go into the basics of how a rotary works but you can read about it here http://www.howstuffworks.com/rotary-engine1.htm.  It’s not at all like a normal piston motor.

I’m pretty sure that white fluffy stuff is mold.  In the third picture you can see the center iron which contains the chamber sides for both motors.  It’s blue.  I’m assume due to excessive heat.

The motor is FULL of water.  I think this pretty much means we have completely shot coolant seals.  If you turn it it just spits out massive amounts of water.  In the rest of the pictures I was trying to get a good shot of the combustion chamber surfaces.  These are supposed to be perfectly smooth and have a mirror like finish.  They are scored and pitted.  It’s likely that they are warped too.  That means that this motor is so badly damaged we can’t even rebuild it.

Lame.

Anyone have a rebuild-able S4 or S5 2nd gen N/A rx7 motor they want to sell?

Nick was nice a enough to give me a ride home yesterday and back to the “track” today.  The course was the same as the day before, only backwards.  It’s amazing how much that can change it.  I got a pro-tip from an veteran once that if you really want to learn the secrets of a track you should walk it backwards. I’m going to try to remember this at the right time during the next event .

After the walk was the customary driver’s meeting.

Then it was time to go out for some course work.  Some of the lines changed out there and had some gravel left on them.  It’s was nice to let the first group deal with that .  By the time I was out it was all cleaned up.

Then it was time for my runs.  We ended up getting 5 runs.  This pavement is great.  We were able to get 3 cars out on track at once.  It really cut the event time down and let us get the most runs.  I managed a pair of 46.2′s on my last runs.  I’m pretty happy about that.  This car really isn’t setup as an AutoX car at all.  No other issues to report.  I love driving this car.  It’s so forgiving and light.

There will be more work next tuesday.  See you then!

More car pictures:

Since the FD met a wall, I haven’t had a car to autox.  We have also been looking for a way to test our water pump belt issue.  Both issues are solved with a trip to the local autocross!  Luckily we have an awesome AutoX club here in eugene, EESCC (www.eescc.org).  I just got back from participating in their 5th event on some sweet new pavement they got from an RV dealership.

Since we don’t permanently have a truck and trailer, I went ahead and insured the car and drove it there .  Boy did it get some looks.  I shared a couple smiles with people on the way there.

The weather today was brutal.  High 90′s the entire time.  I made a bad choice and didn’t put the cool shirt back in.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  Tomorrow that will be fixed.

First off, I popped the hood and checked everything out.  Yahoo belt?

F’d.  Awesome.  Is our car cursed?  Haunted by a ghost who’s parents were killed by belts?  I’m out of ideas now.  Maybe new custom pulleys?

The car ran pretty good.  No major issues at all.  I managed a 48.1 and even placed 3rd (out of 4) in OSPO (a completely ridiculously high class for this car).  There sure was a lot of body roll.  You can change direction once, then back, but if you try a third time (like in a slalom) you are pretty much asking for a spin.  I did have fun with the spins .  This car is so easy to toss around and recover.

There is another event tomorrow.  I can’t wait .  I’ll leave you with a couple pictures of some of the sweet rides that showed up.

(That’s one of our car’s siblings with a 500+ hp brand new crate LS3 in it.  Awesome.)

First off, some combination of our window tabs and the boiling hot water from the overheated motor didn’t work out.  We have cracks forming at both of the bottom pieces.  Not much we can do about it now.  We don’t have any more spare windshields.  I think we will be able to do portland without fixing it.  I doubt we will make it through the winter without them spreading though.

The next big thing was this darn gas filler neck.

Yeah screw it.  This thing is such a pain in the butt to deal with.  Were going to cut the panel out here and just make it easier to work on.  We will have to make some kind of shield to protect the cabin but it will be work it.  So we just put it back to the way it was.

The shifter was positively owned.  It had over an inch of play vertically.  The bushings were completely shot.  It wasn’t this bad when we started the race.  My theory was that we left something out when we put it back together and that caused excessive play.  That let it wear out pretty quick.  I found some spare stuff in our parts bins and got it … better.  I still need to get another couple of serviceable pieces for it to be totally right.

The rear view mirror was such a silly little mistake.  We mounted it way too far to the left.  We ended up with a view of our helmet and some of the passenger side blind spot.  It needed to be moved over to the right at least another 4 inches.  As it was, you couldn’t even see a car directly behind you.

Much better.

Next up, just a little bit of clean up.  So much belt material.  It would have made working on the car a lot less fun.

All clean!

We also got a gift from a friend!  Mad tight wing.

Just needs to be mounted.  I’m stoked.

Time to work on the belt problem.  Were going to try the most common solution to the belt routing issues that come from removing the air pump.  The double pulley didn’t work for us to time to try the yahoo belt.  It’s some kind of fancy belt that doesn’t need a tension mechanism.  It’s just the right size.  I hear tractors use something similar.

We nicked the belt trying to pry it on.  I hope that isn’t going to be an issue.  We did get two just in case.

I’m going to take the car to a local AutoX (with EESCC) this weekend for a super-mini shakedown.  Hopefully this solves our belt problem.  I’ll report back next week.

Turbo our mascot

We get into the track to find the team is busy working on our fuel issues.  I had been there all of 15 minutes before I was welding away on the filler neck.  We got “home base pits” set up only to have some really cool jets fly over and throw anything light 40′ into the air.  That reminds me, sorry Mom and Dad for the dent in the roof on the Ford.   Anyways, its time for me to suit up and take some practice laps.  Just before I went out they announced they shortened the course to the “night course”.  As destiny would have it, this was the only course set up I ever got to race all weekend.

This car and I have never been the best of friends when I’m in the driver’s seat.  We had only one short 20 minute date so far. That was a rainy day in Portland months ago. It has really shone light on the bad habits I have from driving turbo AWD cars. But the course was easy to memorize and very fun. After 20 minutes of driving this time I’m starting to feel confident I have a good chance at not dieing in tomorrows race.

Aiming the HID’s

The day of the race has come! The anticipation of this day rivals how 5 year old’s feel about Christmas.  My driving experience was very limited for what I was about to do.  A few seasons of autocross, a couple of hillclimbs, and a total of 40 minutes of actual track time ever!  Two hours and forty minutes into the race, I’m all suited up and ready to go.  We are in 10th place, behind the leader by about 5 laps.  Laps that the team only had because of a better theme score, so I know the car is competitive.   Well…not for long was it competitive.  Rob brings in the car early for what we later find out is a bad motor.  The next 11 hours to put it nicely were rough.

Checkered flag!

With the team beyond exhausted we pull through thanks to some help from great people.  Leos parents Juva and Dennis cooked for us and kept us hydrated.  Ali was also very helpful in the pits when she wasn’t busy robbing the casino on the penny slots.  At about 2:00am I hear the most beautiful sounding Wankel engine I have ever heard in my life, its ours and its time for me to go race!

Motor out

Test driving the new motor around the pits

Ready to drive

Holly Crap! Its dark, its dusty (picture foggy) and I’m hauling down the front straight at 100mph in a 1987 Mazda GXL.  The brakes; amazing, almost too good mixed with our lack of ABS.  The power; good enough.  The handling; very good! At this point I was very happy I got to at least practice the night course the day before.  Each lap I was getting more and more comfortable with the car and track. Passing a  few slow cars here and there, but also getting my doors blown off by much faster cars.  I would learn a lot from the line they were taking.  Nearing the end of my short stint I was amazed at the range of skill. When all of the sudden RED FLAG! Stopped on track.  A truck escorts us off track, we go by Dave’s Rabbit on our way off the track…not good.  John calls a drivers meeting reminding us endurance racing is 23 hours of survival and 1 hour of racing.

We changed drivers to give people who still have not got a chance for some seat time in the car.  The next few hours were riddled with belt problems.  But the truth is it didn’t bother me at all.  I was still high from getting to race,  thus a chump and racing addict was born.  Fixing belt tension was easy compared to changing engines.  We didn’t care what place we got so we were in no rush.  I got a much needed 45min nap and I was awoke at 6:15am, time to suit up.  This time the plan was to take an hour long stint.  Semi in disbelief that our spare motor was proving to be better then our “good” motor I hopped into the car.  It was still the night course but the sun was up and visibility was perfect.

I love this track! Me and the car worked out differences, and put the past behind us.  I got to the point were I felt like the fastest cars were no longer “blowing my doors off”.  Putting down a fastest lap time of 1:41.xx.  I learned so much about driving, attacking the course lap after lap.  I ended up with a longer stint, because the service break was so close, Leo radioed in for me to stay out until the break.  At around 8:00am they switched back to the day course.  Every hour of the motor swap, and all the work over the last 8 months was worth the time on track.         I’m counting down the days until P.I.R.

The car did great.  Brakes were awesome.  Tires felt good (and we had the pressures dialed in from the practice before).  Shifting out of 3rd wasn’t as easy as I would like.  It was a little vague going down/up into 2/4 and it took some concentration to make sure you got the right gear.  I managed to not mishift and over rev it though.  We put the rear view mirror on the wrong side of the car (it needs to be on the passenger side).  I got a great view of the passenger side but directly behind me and to the driver’s side all I saw was my one giant dome.

We were doing great on pace.  I was able to keep up with almost everyone on track.  This track supposedly has the longest straight in North America.  I don’t doubt it.  It was huge.  You come out of the last turn in 3rd gear and shift into 4th as you head down the drag strip.  You can stay in 4th allll the way down to the first turn easily hitting 110.  While I wasn’t brave enough on my first few laps with the car, our other drivers did manage to do turn one flat out (held the gas down) at 110.  Before turn 2 there is a bump.  A bump, that you take at speed.  It’s unsettling to take something that fast that removes your ability to give input safely to the car.  After the car settles from the bump you are hard on the brakes and diving into a long late apex turn.  The back “straight” was a lot of fun and we easily got over 100 again.  The last turn into the front straight was also a ton of fun.   If you took the right light you could take it flat out as well.  I really enjoyed this track.

The run off areas aren’t so great.  Pea gravel (no way you are slowing down, and easy to dig in and roll) and dirt mounds line the entire track.  Where there is “flat” ground there are pretty good sized rocks.  It’s very important to stay on the pavement here.

The radios worked awesome.  I’m so happy about that.  We had clear strong radio communication from all points on the track.  It was easy to use and never failed us once (we did forget to turn it on once though).  The little GMRS walky talkys were useless.  Real 5W handhelds were needed.  We will be getting more before the next race.

The homemade cool shirt system was a total success too.  It was hot in the car but I didn’t feel like it was impeding my ability to drive at all.  Well worth the investment.

We started late (12:22) so I got a slightly shorter stint to split the time to the 3pm break.  Rob was next up.  Since I was already in full gear, they had me fuel the car.  Moving the fuel cap to the back did have one unintended side affect.  When we filled it up, instead of spilling out the side into the drip pan, it spilled out into the truck and we had to clean that up.  That will be getting fixed before the next race.

Our first race pit stop was <6min, which is great.  There is a 5min minimum so we should have no problem hitting that consistently in the future.  Rob went out and immediately started putting in fast laps.  Pulling us up to 10th place (out of 34)!  That’s just ahead of my old team (Free Range Racing).

I peeled my self out of my race suit (imagine wearing a quilt in 90F sun) and took a stroll around the pits.  On my way out someone was shouting to get the attention of the ChumpCar staff reporter.  This is what I followed them to find.

Size Does Matter (Car #67) had an off course incident and plowed into one of the dirt berms out side of the track.  They had bent up the front of the body on the car and were trying to fix it… with the biggest forklift I have ever seen.

It worked great!  They were back out on track soon after that.  Awesome chumpy repair.  On a side note, this is probably the last race for this car.  They have gotten it through 10 races and the chassis is not what it used to be.  The welds are so bad that its flexing enough to bend the sway bars/end links.  A proud finish to its carrier I think.

Rob started reporting higher temps than what we were comfortable with.  210-225 for water/oil was expected but he started seeing 230 and even higher.  I told him to stay out (not knowing what our limit really was).  Less then a lap after sending the instruction, he reported that he was coming into the pits.  He had some major over heating and something had happened coming into turn 2 from the front straight (Where we pickup the most heat).  He saw lowering water temps (sensor is at the top of the system, meaning it wasn’t touching water anymore) and raising oil temps (the oil was the only thing cooling the motor anymore).  After taking the hood off we found the upper radiator hose had blown off the radiator.

The car was hot, really hot.  We tried reconnecting the hose and adding water but the water would instantly boil the second it got to the block.  It was boiling all the way up to the filler funnel we were using.  We covered the windshield to protect it from raining liquid pain and used a folding chair to stop the splash.  After 30 min of fighting with it we felt good enough to try starting the car again.  It would crank but not fire.  After one or two turns a huge 6ft geyser of water shot up from the funnel.  A dramatic bad sign.  We tried closing the system instead (after adding even more water).  The system would instantly pressurize well beyond where it should be.  After messing with it for another half an hour we found a pretty major water leak coming out of the water pump.  At this point we had two choices.  1.  Take the new water pump off the spare motor and install it on this motor that we couldn’t get to fire. 

Or 2. go ahead and put the full spare motor in.  Since we couldn’t get 1 started it was assumed that something even more major had happened (blown coolant seals, warped something important, ect) and it would be a waste of time to work with it.  We started the process of willing the motor.

We got a total of <3 racing hours on this motor.  No one was excited about the hours of work that laid out before us but 4 of our drivers hadn’t even driven yet and we had tons of time left in the race. 

Taking the first motor out wasn’t too bad.  It was still really hot but we had lots of motivated hands and it was straight forward.

We had some issues with the oil cooler being too tight and had to pull it with the motor.  After getting it out we were able to borrow a socket and get the space to get it off.  We also extracted the alternator, some sensors, and the motor mounts off the first motor to donate to the second.

Hours passed as we fought with the clutch alignment (forgetting that we had a tool that came with our spare clutch).  We also had some issues getting the motor mounts just where we needed them.  We probably wasted an hour at least just on that.  It was very very frustrating.

We would soon learn, when we went to start this motor, that it wasn’t the most frustrating part of the weekend.  After all that trouble, it wouldn’t fire.  We tested spark, looked good.  We made sure we didn’t swap the fuel lines, they were fine.  We checked for fuel pressure, yup we had some. 

We made sure the ecu was grounded.  After all these start attempts, we failed to smell any fuel from the exhaust.  So we pop’d down to armadillo racing’s trailer on site (stocked with awesomely available parts and supplies) and scored some starting fluid.  Bam, it fired right away.  We were sure we had a fuel issue then.  Since we had pressure it had to do something withthe fuel system in front of the fire wall.  Bad injectors?  Bad harness?  Something blocking the fuel lines?  We tried to figure it out but decided in the end that the hours we have wasted troubleshooting werent’ worth it.

We started the process of essentially doing another engine swap.  We pulled the intake manifold, engine wiring harness, and fuel system off the first motor.  This is a fidely fragile process that many of our team had never done before.  That led us to make mistakes that caused us to back track and consume huge amounts of time. 

That did the trick though.  After over 11hours of wrenching the car finally fired and came to live for our 3rd driving stint with nick.

I stayed up long enough to see nick through his stint and know that the car was running.  There was a couple eventful hours when the driving skill on track decreased and we had two serious incidents.  There was one involving the produnk miata and a corvette.  It was bad enough to take both cars out of the race and one of the drivers to the hospital for observation (we hear he is fine).  Another involving a friend of our’s, big dave.  His driver reported being rear ended by another car and pushed off into the tire barrier in turn 1.  This was the result.

I assembled my air mattress in the bed of the giant truck and caught a couple hours of sleep under the stars.  With the gentile sounds of a race surrounding me I passed quickly into sleep.  I awoke 3 hours later to our car still running!  Not without issue though.  We had gotten close to over heating several times with belt issues.  They kept needing to be tightened (even though the alternator wasn’t moving) and some had even broken.  Luckily we have many spares.

Our plan had been to get the remaining 4 drivers 30min stints in the car.  In the worst case scenario this was better than nothing.  We would then get them back in line for longer 1 hour stints.  After that we would regroup and talk about what the plan would be.  We continued to eat belts.  See the upper right hand corner of the engine bay?  All that black?  That’s belt material.  It was everywhere.

I tested a theory that perhaps we were wearing on the belts due to the double pulley on the alternator being out of alignment.  I moved a washer on it to push it out more and slapped two new belts on.

This was during the 8am break on Sunday.  Here is a shot of part of the pits busy with life during a “free” pit stop.

The “ChumperHome”.  Race central.

Despite needing to mess with the belts every hour or so we did manage to get people some good time in the car.

More belt problems.

F u belts.

My only comfort is that these belts would be ground to dust and could be used to strike fear in the heart of the other belts about to enter the combine that is our pulley system.  Now, we go back to racing.

A little over an hour from the finish, the car started getting hot again.  A sure sign that the belts would soon fail.  We pulled her in and parked it.  The idea was to let it cool down, tighten the belts one last time, and then send someone out for the last 15 minutes to take the checkered.

We held on the 24th with the comfort that we would finish the race and that we broke and recovered better than 9 other teams.

Gabe prepairs to take the checkered for us.

The car gets a bit warm, but gabe keeps her running for the finish!

Trophies!

It was a long race.  I’m glad it worked out for us in the end.  All my our drivers got some decent time (weighted a bit heavier for the newbies).  We are all pretty happy with our results.  We have a great car and did many things right.  For our first race, this is probably as good as it could have gone.  Now we have 3 months to fix our issues (belts, spare motor, mirror in the wrong place, fuel filler) and be ready for a strong showing at our home track, PIR!

Stay tuned for updates on our progress developing the car to the next level and further stories from other team members about this last race.

We were lucky enough to have access to a practice day on the track the friday before the race.  It was easily the best deal of the whole weekend.  The test day would let us learn the track (none of us had been here before), do a great shakedown on the car, and give us good practice pitting.

We had dropped off our stuff the night before things sure had changed since then.  Over half the field was taking the opertunity to run during the test day.  I love the pits during these events.  The energy is awesome.  Time for us to get started!

One of our drivers, Gabe, ended up being sick.  He dosen’t travel well.  He wasn’t able to join us.  The hope was that he would be able to make the race if he took a day to get better.  Another driver, Nick, was still in transit.  So that left the four of us who came up with the car (Ryan, David, Rob, and I) to setup and run.

Ryan was the first out.  Our plan was to give each of us 30min in the car driving at 80-90%.  We didn’t want to wear out the car before we asked it to race continously for 24 hours.  All that drama with the radios payed off too.  They are working awesome.  Clear as a bell and never failed us. 

The cool shirts worked awesome too.  It’s a very strange feeling.  It’s almost a clamy feeling.  It makes such a huge differance though.  Espechally when you have to wait in the car in the pits.

I got work from one of the race officials that our car was spraying fuel (you would be suprised how common that is).  Radios saved our bacon there.  We were able to radio ryan in right away.  He got about 4 laps out there.

It looks like all the fuel was leaking near the outside of the car.  Somewhere out of the filler neck.  From the frame rail in was dry.  Our regular readers might remember all the trouble we had with this thing.   Since fuel leaks are so dangerous there was nothing to do but remove the whole assembly and inspect it.

It’s a farely complex piece of tube. 

After putting it all back together it was my turn.  I got all suited up and headed out.  I got about 2 laps in and started smelling fuel.  I stayed out another two (bad idea) and then came in.  Same problem .  This time more drastic measures were called for.  After confering with everyone modification was the best choice.  I cleared it with Lloyd (the chumpcar chief tech) and we got started moving the filler cap.

During the work to move the can, we discovered a tiny slit that was cut in the metal assembly that holds the gas cap.  It must have been put in there when the restrictor flap was cut out.  At least now we knew for sure what the cause of the leak was.  Luckily nick decided to bring his welder!  Since we were almost done with the modifications to the filler cap, we went ahead and finished it. 

This made fueling a bit more of an issue.  We had to extend our fuel jugs to reach.

You never really know when you are full so you pretty much have to wait for fuel to slosh out.  Out of the car it was easy to catch in a pan.  Inside the car it meant catching it with a towel and some fairly messy spillage.  We will be changing this before the next race. 

Nick was the next out.  I went up to the tower to watch.  This is a poorly sticked panorama of the front stright (which also doubles duty as a drag strip).  He got a full stint in without issue.  While I was up there, I also got some shots of other cars testing.

Shark car was back!  They hit the wall in portland pretty hard.  It must have taken some real work to fix this thing.  It was looking great out there.

GI SHO!

Beach dudes!

They look familar .

Free range had a hand full of random issues on the practice day.  It’s pretty hard to consitrate and enjoy the driving when you are constantly fixing the car.  I felt for them.  The rest of our drivers got their practices in.  No complaints at all about the car.  I’m sure glad we got to flush out the fuel issue before the event and get some people more comfortable with the track.

While the team was out running I went to work on the wireless network to get it up for live timing.  This is a view for the start/finish tower/shack where the timing equipment was setup.  You can see the stand at turn 4 there as well as the pit entry road in the front.

At 4pm the practice day stopped and official tech and registration started for the event.  This is a line of compedators and their teams lining up for inspection. 

It came time for us to tech.  No issues at all and we got 2 bonus laps for theme.  Woop!  I’m sure the hats helped (thanks Mom!). 

Ali really pulled it off the best.

Our cap was already turning into a disaster and the event hadn’t even started yet!  I think this is one of the best things about the enclosed trailers.  You actually have some place to store all this junk.  The ground was our shelves.

Everyone was tired.  It was hot, really hot.  Most of the crew took off for showers and a/c refuge at the hotel.  I struck around with Nick and Ali (who were camping at the pits) to wait for night fall and aim the headlights.  I’m satasfied with out they came out.  The apex lights are nice. 

Tomorrow we race.