Our Crappy Race

From the write-up I did for our Opel friends, and probably to be published in the Opel magazine (which I edit.)

The hot shower reactivated all of the smells from last weekend. I probably need to wash the sheets now. I wish I could wash parts of last weekend's race away.

My solo ceremonial shower after a race is always a reflective time for me. Philosophical, even. Often it boils down to finding the word that describes our race weekend. "Fun" never expressed how the good weekends went, because when you are out there with your team, racing your friends, and doing better than we ought to, something deeper is needed. "Terrible" doesn't quite do it for the bad weekends either, even last weekend. That word would discount Zep's smile when he showed to on Friday to help set up and do final checks of the car, or Jon's eternal optimism and his making us breakfast and lunch, and the Thanksgiving dinner our pit neighbors and Lemons compatriots of Restart Racing shared with us. It especially would not do in describing the visits by Gil, and Anna, Eric's wife and her friends, my Cannonball co-driver Don, and Hans, and Monica, Tom and Iris and probably a few few others who were there to see the Tinyvette run. And of course Kurt who came with the single mission of keeping the Tinyvette racing, and Eric, who'd be getting his first taste of Sears Point. I'm beginning to think of it as a great party with great people and a great evening that went to hell after having bad sex with a person I should never have gone home with. I don't know if any of you have had that experience, but I have, and right now it kind of feels like that. Not guilt, not shame, and unfortunately, not something you can't simply wash off.

Coming off our double-Cannonball I felt really good about the car. Not that I wasn't stressing about things, the power of negative thinking and all has it's good side. I could always find fault with the car, but none major, and it was the best we had brought in a long time. We haven't finished a race in a year and we got hit pretty bad here last year. Our overall history had been one of finishing all but 2 of about 25 races, never hitting anyone, and never having been hit in our first four years, and maybe once a year since then. I have been blessed with a team of smart, patient drivers and I have to say a field of competitors who understand what racing is, and isn't. That might sound like an odd thing to say about the premiere crapcan series, but it's true. With some exceptions, they "get it."

Zep got the first stint and probably always will. He knows the car well enough to be able to detect trouble early, and this time the car was great and Zep was turning in some great lap times. Then he hit someone, drove under the bumper of a Volvo. They probably never felt it, but it made an ugly on the car and ended our streak of never having been the hit-ee in an incident. The damage was purely cosmetic, which of course is everything to the Tinyvette. Zep resumed his stint and around noon brought the car in for Eric. Eric's wife and friends were here. They needed to see him in his leading hero role.

I had not realized this would be Eric's first time at Sears Point. He's been with us this whole miserable year, but had crewed, not driven, at Sears Pointless last March. We only had a minute and I didn't want to overload him, but we got the track map out and I gave him a few pointers, the main ones being: be safe, have fun, and seriously, don't worry about your lap times.

Eric did great. I watched him from the grand stands for about a half hour and he was clean and even quicker than I expected. Watching him in the T9 chicaine told me a lot, and he really was taking my advice to exit the T11 hairpin wide to reduce wheel-spin and get back up to speed quicker. I radioed to remind him to take the defensive lines into T9 and T11, that no one should ever for one moment think they'd ever be able to get inside of him in those turns, that this line was not that much slower and would save us a lot of grief in door donut and braking-for-two situations. I felt pretty good and returned to our pits and was on the way to getting lunch with Gil when he sees Eric coming in, with a big door donut on the driver's side front. I hustled over to "penalty" to find out what happened. Apparently a Miata, easily two car widths off to his left, simply turned into him. He couldn't figure out why. Maybe the video will tell us something.

Jon was next and within a couple of laps he was reporting a bad vibration. We called him in. I was going through all the possibilities in my mind, planning how we'd deal with this once we had the car on jack stands. I listed things Kurt should check and other than a little play in the wheel bearing, which was normal, everything was tight. Jon told us again how the right front grabbed hard when braking, almost sending him off track. We checked, and it was severely flat-spotted. In eight years of racing we had never done that. Jon later described "having had a moment" that might have caused it. We swapped in another wheel and he was off again, the vibration gone.

A few minutes later Jon was on the radio saying he had gotten bumped from behind but was OK. He got BF'ed anyway. The damage was superficial, but would not be easy to repair. The judges advised us to take to car to our pits to inspect it but there was nothing of any consequence back there so we sent Jon right back out.

A few minutes later Jon radios in trouble, power cutting out, engine missing and backfiring. He limped it in and we popped the hood and started looking for the problem. Everything was clean, no leaks. The engine sounded OK at a fast idle. It would not idle normally. I removed the oil filler cap and it was puffing hard. I had noticed excessive blow-by during our Cannonball but once home it seemed much less. I attributed it to the cold making it easy to see the moisture puffing out the vent, although that explanation still bothered me. Anyway, we now had major blow-by, but how does that cause the backfiring, missing, etc.? The distributor was secure, timing had not changed, so we popped the distributor cap. There was a chip in the center electrode and in the top of the rotor, and the other end of the rotor was pitted and the plastic had melted in a spot. Kurt checked further and we had oil misted all inside the distributor. Diagnosis, blow-by was pushing oil into places it should not be and was fouling/shorting our distributor.

A compression test showed 170 on #4 and 150 on the other three. None of those numbers are bad. In fact they were very good, except for the 20 psi difference. The leak test showed big leakage on #1, 2, and 3 with the sound of the leak coming from the block, not the intake and not the exhaust. At this point I was thinking rings but was hoping it was the head gasket since we could fix that. It had been weeping water a bit, which did not concern me, we've seen that before, but it was still our next suspect. Still, how could a head gasket failure compromise 3 cylinders at the same time, and how could it do so in such a way that it leaked into the block? The only passage leading to the block was the oil drain for the head.

It didn't take long to get the head off. None of the seals around the cylinders were leaking, nor was there any issue with the seal around the oil drain. We considered every possibility, and I was even thinking of installing a new head gasket, cleaning out the distributor, and sending the car back out, but having not found the smoking gun and having pretty much decided we had broken rings, that the problem would return, that we could make things worse, we decided to call it a race.

I've already signed us up for all of the Lemons races for 2018, but at this point am seriously considering withdrawing from the March race at Sears Point. Last weekend was a very crashy race, and while we are not completely innocent here, getting hit twice in a race where six cars were totaled is a bit much. Other well known teams have already made the decision to not race at Sears Point anymore, for the same reasons. Add to this the 50th anniversary tour Gil is planning for late April and I don't want to be scrambling, and scrambling Kurt, who does the body work, to be able to make this event. As it is I've been working my tail off for a year, pretty much to the exclusion of everything else, getting this car to races. I was hoping we'd come home from this one needing little more that an oil change and wash. I could use a little time off, plus I really need to find some paying work.

That said, we'll be back.

Mike