OTHER crap can races? (Page 5 of 7)

Same here, I have 2 friends who have balled up cars there in HPDE's and I have close to 30 hours on track there.  You wont see me in the grid.

We haven't won, nor do we intend to but we do have the engine out of our car so I wanted to answer your question.

I think we're gonna make a coffee table out of it

How about specifics? What's wrong with Rockingham?

You won't get anywhere close to a lap record on street tires.
Lap records come on slicks, which can be as much as 10 seconds ( or more ) a lap faster than streets on the same car.

The fat Goodyear slicks I ran  were [b]10 seconds[/b} a lap faster than Toyo RA-1's, which are much faster than 190tw+ street tires.

And...We're not running a 'cheater car'.

KT

WARNING!!!! This may be a personal record for long posts.

Deep within to bowels of our dubious L28 just beyond the flux capacitor lies ... a Quad rotor.  That's why it's fast ... but still blows up.

I would not consider our motor a cheater, let alone an epic-cheater but it has been out twice and is likely to come out a third time.  We did re-ring the 200k+ motor and replaced the bearings.  Putting a bearing in wrong resulted in the second engine removal, oops.

Now we have low compression on a couple of cylinders most likely due to a blown head gasket.  Depending on what we find, the whole motor may come out or just the head.  Since the head gasket is probably screwed due to running hot, the rings may have gotten screwed too. 

The head was never flat to begin with either.  I don't have a machine shop and the one I use does not work for free but they will probably be shaving my head this time for $40.  So I may need to spend up to $150 fixing the motor. 

If I had a car with a small block Ford or Chevy, I'd call PAW for a cheap rebuild kit.  That buys a lot of reliability.  Without that, I still recommend opening up a motor, cleaning things up, Loctiting and re-gasketing the thing.  Re-gasketing alone can help with the leaks which are becoming more frowned upon. 

I think the stacked RX7 went through several tubes of RTV trying to stop the oil pan from leaking.  I am not sure how successful they were but they kept getting black flagged for leaking.  So there are becoming some limits on craptitude. 

So where does a built motor get you?

While our motor may seem impressive, many of our drivers have been less than impressive.  We have had many penalties, a couple of clutches and transmissions too.  As mentioned in the above quotes, good driving is a HUGE factor in winning!!!!

Reliability is your friend:

I have talked to John Condren, Chief Chump, personally about some parts on cars like clutches.  His basic comment is they don't make you any faster so who cares.   Everyone should care, I certainly do.

My car went through 2 clutches in the first 2 races, mostly due to the drivers.  However, cheap hot clutches work about as well as cheat hot brakes, meaning they die. 

A good clutch like Performance Friction or ACT would probably be a huge improvement in my car.  They start around $300.  Fortunately, the clutch in the car now has made it through the last two races and is a generic lifetime warranty clutch so I only had to buy it once during the first race.

A good clutch may not make you faster but it will probably buy you more laps and go undetected.  I know we would have finished better in the first two races.  Since it doesn't make you faster, who cares?  Reliability is worth far more than speed, especially in Enduros.  So everyone should care.  A shiny water pump is worth more than a shiny turbo.

I don't know how affective a lie detector will be surrounded by racers.  It will just go haywire and blow up faster then an SHO.

The comment about Jonny and Phil being corrupt judges and not providing a good model for Judging is kind of an insult.

The Chump forum referenced the 2005 Mini at MSR as a blatant cheater.  The reality is the car has to be destroyed and those guys are in some kind of salvage business.  They probably already made money on the car and were within the $500 rule.

I watched their tech and BS inspection.  While I think they missed the point on their choice of car and did not quite understand the tech stuff (Zip tie mounted kill switch and window net).  They fully understood and probably took notes on Theme and Bribing.  It did them no good and they got 1066 laps, if I recall correctly, which was more or less arbitrary.  I don't think you can overcome a 10 lap penalty at this point.

If you followed the letter of the rules on salvage sales bringing down the car value, you could probably race a very new but wrecked car like the Mini, in Lemons and especially in Chump.  You will get burned in Lemons BS but should pass Chumps tech.

This would be much easier if you could buy wrecked cars directly from the insurance companies.  This is similarly advantageous to having a machine shop. That's where you get into less fact based assessments of BS and why Miatas or Minis get burned a lot in Lemons.

Realistically, there are lots of cheap Miatas and many have upgraded suspension stuff.  Throw in the huge Spec Miata field in SCCA and NASA and there are lots of cheap upgrades.  Miatas are a great platform and receive a lot of scrutiny due to the availability of upgraded parts.  In Chump, I think Miatas will see more lenience.

I know of a Black Widow Miata owner looking forward to Chump and TMS.

So does the Lemons BS inspection provide a more level playing field than Chump's more fact based tech, it's hard to tell.  Once Chump makes assessments due to "intent" or "spirit" of rules or any other subjective matter, you are now in BS Inspection land. 

Penalizing cars like the Volvo based on the assumption of cheating because they have a machine shop is exactly what BS is all about.  Since Jonny and Phil have a weakness for Volvos, they probably would have gotten away with it though.  Chief Chump John felt all cars were 100% legit and all the Volvos machine work was free anyway.  Whiners felt differently.

I gotta get back with my guys at the machine shop about sponsoring us.  Free machine labor for advertising on our future Crap Can rocket could be huge.  My head really only needs about $200-300 in machining to make it bad ass.

While I am involved with Doug @ Awesome Z, everything we did to my car could have been done in my garage and a lot of it was.  Other than putting the flywheel on a brake lathe.  I may be a bit more equipped than the next guy but there are plenty more equipped guys than I am.  A compressor, MIG welder, parts washer and basting equipment can really go a long way when building a car.  Cleaning, inspecting and re-lubing as many parts as you can seriously improves reliability.

Once you get into machining a motor, even if you have the equipment, I think you're over the line and should count it toward your budget. 

If you can buy cars from insurance companies, I think that's cheating too.  Cars should be bought in a public format.

I have lost track of my rambling so much, I hope this makes sense.

I ran the 240Z at a Test & Tune for SCCA at TWS a while back.  I was faster than the first gen RX7 guys.

Tires do make a huge difference.  We tried an old set of Azenis and lots 5 seconds a lap.  Slicks are AWESOME!!!!

Spec Miatas run low to mid 1:50s racing at MSR.  Lemons fast laps were around 2:05 but the Integra managed a 1:57.

The 1:21.6 laptime was not an official lap.  It was timed while driving through paddock.  That lap is listed as a Pit lap(on Mylaps) as was the lap before it.  So technically, the car came down pit road, past the timing loop, and turned into the paddock, and then re-entered at the beginning of pit road, thus driving back over the timing loop on pit road getting credit for a lap, but never driving the 2 mile course.   That was the case for all penalties and anyone who went to paddock.  Basically, anyone who went into paddock, got credit for a lap that never happened.  Could have messed up final results here and there, but if you were in the paddock you had problems anyways.  The lap timer loop should have been before or after where cars enter the paddock, not in between.
As a side note, charlie foxtrot racing had a 1:22.8(I think) laptime that was legit.

You mean they run on the oval?...I'd have thought they'd make a tight infield course....no tire walls? With concrete I'd want a HANS which is a little spendy for my level of involvement, i.e. getting racing stuff past my wife....

No, they're saying that the slowest IT class cars can almost be caught by the fastest Frankensteined Lemons cars.  Not that much of a stretch, really.

Yeah, that kind of thing would NEVER happen at a Lemons race.  Hint:  look at the black flag log for the reason "organizer's discretion"... I've seen it, even asked about it, and was told that Jay wanted to make the finish closer!  Not saying it's a bad thing, it makes for good racing and an exciting finish.  Nobody ever said Lemons was fair.

I've seen guys get a "Jay" penalty which was just because they were driving a bit aggressively.

Regarding lap times and Lemons v SCCA or NASA, we are close to them and with comparable tires would be very interesting.  A turbo on a Miata makes way more power than a Spec Miata.  A grippier tire could give a Lemons Miata enough of an advantage of a Spec Miata.