Chronicles of a Lemons Daytona (Page 6 of 9)

I've been slacking hard recently. I have a NH recap written, but not posted. I"ll get to it soon.

for now, I've been cleaning the Mitubishi turbo that I murdered last year so I can turn it into a lamp, and I found some fun things on the compressor wheel.

Look close and you'll see a cracked fin, a crack in the base, and two damaged leading edges on the far fins. Really curious where those pieces went......

I suspect we may have been getting some compressor surge.

This is about 3 months late, but better late than never.

Part 15 - Redemption at Loudon Annoying 2013

This is the third time we've run the Loudon Annoying race, and we've been seeking success since our first failure three years ago. I think I can finally say we've found it. But lets not jump right to the end.

I've long since given up trying to predict how our weekends will go. I just can't tell anymore. This race was even more of an unknown. I fired he engine for the first time Thursday, and only ran it for a total of about a minute. After finding bearing pieces in the engine head while assembling everything I filled it with cheap oil (after cleaning it out as best i could), and said we'd run it for a while Friday to flush it all out and do an oil change Friday night.

I woke up at 4:50am on Friday, finished packing, and waited for dad to show up with the trailer. We got the car loaded, and headed north. Arriving at NHMS we found our garage, unpacked, and set to work finishing the last few things on the car, the largest of which was a poorly sealed water pump with a tiny leak. (my fault, used the crappy gasket that came with the new pump). We also installed the greatest shift light of all time. I’ll get a video up when the car is back together and running, but basically we installed a cheap shift light in the corner of the windshield, but wired in a couple LED strips from Autozone. When you hit 4700rpm the light comes on, but the LED strips start flashing and running up and down. These are attached to the edge of the dash, and there is absolutely no way it can be missed.

By 3 we were through tech with our typical C class zero laps assignment. Judge Phil asked why we're still running this car. I thought he loved terrible cars. The answer is i'm really not right in the head.

Flushing out the oil cooler revealed an amazing amount of bearing pieces and metal flake. Looking at the oil drain pan you would have thought we were panning for gold. Exactly why we were running cheap oil and flushing the system. New oil in and the oil cooler re-installed we were ready for a night of goofing off, drooling over the 3 Peddle Mafia Rolls, and GT5 racing.

Saturday morning came, we installed cameras and radios throughout the car, and waited for the drivers meeting. At 9:30 I climbed in, fired it up the car, pulled into the queue headed to the track, and rolled out to the opening caution laps.  The green flag dropped, I punched the gas, listened to the turbo scream, and off we went. The car was still amazingly terrible, but after this much time i've learned to make it dance. And dance it did. The Pirelli tires were a little more squirrely than the star specs, but suited the car really well. I was actually holding onto cars and not being passed by everything under the sun.

Then, about 3/4 of the way though my stint, disaster. I had just come down the hill, and was mid corner crossing the oval surface when the car just went into a 4 wheel skid. "what the hell was that?!" A glance at the oil pressure gauge told the story. Zero pressure. Something had failed and coated my tires. "EXPLETIVES!!". I killed the car instantly and parked it on the grass, just before the pit out. I got pushed in, jumped out of the car, and discovered one of our oil lines to the oil cooler had ripped out of it's fitting. Awesome. At least i killed it quickly....

A little over an hour later we had all the oil lines rebuilt, the car topped off, and the front bumper area cleaned out. We put the next driver in and sent them on their way. No complaints through their stint, but as they came in for a driver change the front driver's side tire was very clearly flat. "hit something on the last lap, no idea what". Great. Off came the fronts and on went some used star specs.

The rest of Saturday was generally uneventful. We has a minor incident with the boat, knocking our front bumper cover loose, but 5 minutes in the pits sorted it out. The real blow came when mid afternoon we lost a whole bunch of gears. No reverse, no first, no second. What the hell. Well, just run it and make due. To be honest not having those gears wasn't terrible. Burn the clutch a little in the pits, and suffer up the hill, but the rest of the track was fine.

The rain on Saturday just made the car more exciting. It was a giant game of Russian roulette guessing if the tires were going to lock if you tried to go deeper before braking, or if the front would hold trying to go that little bit faster through the corners. In a word, it was fantastic. I've never had so much fun in our car. Not having second just forced you to take the corner into the uphill faster (something a lot of people could learn to do). Amazingly the engine in our car just kept going, and going, and going. Saturday ended and we had turned 168 laps. Not great, but we had spent most of the day on track.

Inspection of the car that night showed that we had lost a c-clip on the transmission linkage and we just weren't able to move the selector shaft in or out. We needed a 7/8" clip, but only had a 3/4". Nothing a pair of pliers and a hammer can't fix. We then discovered something hilarious. When we grabbed the used star specs, we accidentally grabbed two from the same side of the car. So one was on backwards. Amazingly, that didn’t seem to have affected the car’s ability to deal with rain, since we set fastest lap of the day in the middle of the wettest period. With the transmission working and a vacuum leak fixed we enjoyed another night of goofing off.

I couldn't have asked for Sunday to go any better. Other than second not liking to go into gear still the car was perfect. It just ran, all day. Water temps never went higher than 200, oil pressure was rock solid, and it just kept running. We upped the driver stint times and plugged ahead and slowly up the standings.

When I came off the track at the start of the race with the blown oil line we were in 35th place. When we went back out we were in ~85th. Over the weekend we fought out way up to 48th overall and finished with 336 laps, shattering out last record of 286 and 68th place.

I honestly couldn't have asked for a better weekend. I had fast and reliable drivers, a car that somehow held together, and a ton of fun. I was even able to drive the car off the trailer and into the driveway.

So where do we go from here? Well first i'm checking the engine to make sure it's really still rock solid and not just delaying a huge failure. Then, we start getting creative. We're installing a fuel cell to get longer stint times. We're making a wing and splitter, to hopefully get a little more grip and stability. And there is talk of making a wide body just for the hilarity of it. Phil claims we still have a shot at IOE, so we're going for it. The larger goal is C-Class win, but that's going to take a perfect weekend and a car/plan that can do much longer stints than we've been running. Time to make it happen.

I was out in the boat from 2-4:30 on Sunday, and had some fun battling with the Daytona, especially early in the shift.  It's so great to see it out there running more often than not, after all of the sadness of the first few races!

It was great to meet you in person and to see the car on track mostly all weekend.  Good job, now on to WORLD DOMINATION. 

Part 17 - A dash of hubris
I had high hopes for this race. After October when we came so damn close to a perfect weekend I think i let a little bit of hubris set in. I didn't start prepping the car until a couple weeks before the race, and even then, the engine went in on wednesday. Once it was running we found leaking oil cooler lines, so we didn't run the car at all. That should have been a sign.

Thursday - travel day.
I threw the last things in the truck, and set off to meet my dad and sister for the drive down. We made a detour to stop at Driving Impressions in Dover NJ to pick up a new set of belts for the car. NJ doesn't allow SFI belts more than 2 years old when everyone else allows 5.... but so be it. I finally got to meet robert, and he gave us a tour of the shop, even letting my sit in his Lancia Delta.

By 5 we arrived at the track, only to find us being held at the gate until 6:30. A non-issue really when the track has an on site pub. Once we were allowed to drive in we set up the Futility Motorsport Shanty Town, fixed a few things on the car, and called it a night.

Friday - beginning of the bad luck.
After ripping out my old harness we discovered that the new one was a pull up design, not put down (which doesn't work with our seat and where the mounting points are.) and also had 2" shoulder belts instead of the required 3". We were told it was 3" pull down when we bought it and never thought to check. Hooray... Thankfully Lemons people are awesome and after talking to some friends I had my hands on a Scroth FIA certified belt that is good until 2016. Unfortunately by the time that was done and all the other things were fixed on the car it was almost 2pm and not worth it to sign up for the test day. So we filled our time and eventually called it a night.

Saturday - race day.

I've said that the first time I suited up and strapped into this car I felt real fear. That fear doesn't go away. Sitting on the pre-staging grid, and then lapping under yellow my stomach is always in knots. Thankfully my fear has moved from "oh my god what am I doing I could get killed" to "oh my god what could go wrong this time." But as soon as the green drops, all that goes away and you're just enveloped in the insanity of racing. At least a 150 cars all seeing the green flag at once, it's mayhem. My first 5 laps were awesome. I was passing people. I lapped someone! The car was down on boost, but it was surprisingly quick around the more gentle corners of NJ. I was loving it. Right up until I looked at the water temperature gauge.

225 degrees. What the hell? In October the car sat rock solid at 190 all weekend. What was going on. I backed off immediately. 4th gear, half throttle, cool the damn thing down. After probably 3 laps I had it to 205. Another 2 and it was at 195. Nothing I could do about it now, any time in the pits is time lost. So I settled in for 2 hours of slower lapping trying to keep the car cool.

Next in the car was my sister, who has a grand total of about an hour's worth of driving time on a track, and absolutely zero seat time in the daytona. During the mayhem of refueling and swapping drivers I shouted some instructions about keeping it cool and sticking to the left side of the track as to not hold up faster cars. Oh, and third is being a little funny, make sure it clicks in before letting the clutch out. Off she went. 20 minutes in I checked to make sure the water temps were ok, they were. An hour in:
"how are you doing?"
"the car is fine"
"No, are you doing ok?"
"I'm fine"

She's never done this before and she was already running a stint longer than I had for the first two years racing the car. Two hours later we lined up with fuel jugs and the next driver and she came in. But the passenger door won't open. After Dad is in the car and we're back in the shanty town pulling gear off I mentioned the door.
"oh, yea, someone bumped me a little bit."
"Did you get black flagged?"
"No, I was looking, but I never saw my number."
"Lets go check just to be safe."
Turns out there was a flag called on her, but it was for 4 wheels off, which she claims didn't happen, but it's best not to argue with the judges. We settled our debts to Lemons HQ and continued on.

I started thinking about the cooling issue. Turns out the local parts store could get me a new larger radiator by 5pm so we said lets do it. We were so focused on cooling that I missed a warning sign on the car when we swapped Dad for Ben at 4pm. Just before he set off from the hot pits I noticed the selector cable had popped off the gear lever. I dove through the passenger window, snapped it back on and sent him on his way. I should have been more curious.

That night we set about installing the new radiator, moving the intercooler, changing spark plugs, and fixing the door. My sister pounded the door into shape with a hammer after we pulled it off, thereby rectifying her slight contact incident. And later that night as a rave was running in the middle of the pits and my 500 glow sticks were starting to spread their way through the hundreds of people we buttoned up the car and called it a night.

Sunday - Frustration day.
Everything started off ok. The car was better, it still was getting warm, but by coasting the second half of the straight you could keep the temps at 210 or lower. Finally I was getting to thrash the car a little. Coming out of the chicane after putting more than 50 yards on a BMW 2002 who couldn't keep up I was giggling like a child. (Oh course he caught me very quickly on the straights where I had nothing.) Finally, 20 minutes before My stint was supposed to be over we came to a stop for a yellow, and the shifter linkage popped off again. I grabbed the cable, got it in first, pulled to the side and stalled it like a pro. I tried to restart it but the whole car just lost power. No electricity to anything. "What the actual hell just happened?!"

After an embarrassing tow in power magically came back, I found the shift cable end bent so I fixed it and put it back on, and we sent my sister back out. Everything seemed fine until my dad called in mid afternoon with "No gear shift, I'm getting towed." I expected the cable to have just popped off again. Instead it was attached, but the linkage on the transmission wouldn't move, at all. After almost an hour we found the selector cable had once again melted and killed itself. As soon as I pulled it off the transmission linkage I was able to click it into third, and we sent our last driver out to finish the day and keep us from plummeting in the standings.

We got black flagged on the second to last lap (we still don't know why, sheets were gone before we could get over there), but the car made it to the end. This was far from our best race, but amazingly it is the longest distance we've driven in a single race. We finished with ~275 laps (I need to confirm that), which puts us at over 600 miles of racing. Final position was 74th, which is right at the middle of the pack.

Moving forward
I still think we might have a shot at C-Class win. maybe. And I really want to go for that. I have no idea if we have any prayer at IOE anymore, I think 8 races with the car might have moved us out of the running. But C-Class win might be possible. The engine seems to finally be sorted. It isn't leaking oil, and it's running well (other than some weird stumbling during partial throttle that I think is electrical based). We need to solve the shift issue (heat shield the cable), get the car to boost above 5psi again, and install a fuel cell so that we can run at least 3 hour stints. I'm also going to upgrade the brakes. The RX7 in my driveway has 4-pot brakes, which I think i'm going to try and adapt to the daytona. Lets see where that gets us in october.

Congrats, and thanks for streaming the video. It looked great.

The Boat wins C and you win IOE.  I picked the wrong time to not go to Loudon, or maybe the right time for The Boat.     Good job on the IOE and get that class C win next year!

Oh Yay, I'm so happy for you!

Super Congrats!

Well done guys (and girl)!

Congrats! There's no feeling quite like when Jay starts describing a car that sounds like yours.

Nicely done Chris, well deserved to you and the FMS crew!

Seems far away. How about NJ. It's about time we played with more boost. I know that at around 8-9psi I stay ahead of the brickhouse on the straights.