Woot! Great time. One blown up KA motor chalked up for me! Turns out headgasket problems can really mess up quite a bit.
We were in the 1995 nissan Altima (GO MEXICO) with the La Cucaracha horns. We had a great time in a car that we finished AT the track on Friday. THANKS FOR PASSING US IN TECH INSPECTION! We learned a lot by building our own car and we'll be ready for the November race (maybe even Houston, who knows?) with recommended fixes from the safety guy.
BUT, to my dismay, I have a few areas of question / improvement / lessons learned:
1) I didn't know that if ANY fuel spills from overflow etc of the tank while it's filling in the designated area that it's a black flag? This happened in the fueling area and I was trying to be careful with fueling, but it "gurgled" out of the overflow (I think from just filling it too fast - not from being totally full) and some got on the ground...turns out it was a BLACK FLAG! They were easy on us, and we were out of the running for any decent finish anyway (sorry I'm not putting a 23 gal fuel cell in the car or wearing diapers to run 3.5 hours), so it's just lesson learned.
2) Our 230k mile Nissan Altima was considered "Typical Japanese Cheaters" ?? (http://jalopnik.com/5528603/baksheesh-j … you-lemons) Wow! Team mate / friend of mine (read NO track experience) bought the car for the parts off of it (advertised ROD knock - doesn't run - no title). I actually wanted to put the stock intake, header, and exhaust on it for more mileage, but we really didn't have time to swap them from his daily driver Altima. SO, typical japanese cheater is a FWD 4-door family car w/ blown headgasket, that smokes constantly, is hard to start, can only finish 10 laps at a time before having to pit and refill with water and oil, and can only survive one day at that before throwing a rod through the block?? I saw a LOT of cheater cars out there...and ours wasn't one of them...We didn't even change the spark plugs for crying out loud (otherwise we might have caught the headgakset ). I guess I'm just confused by this comment...ahhh nevermind.
3) Where might we find published lap results? I'd love to know what times we turned and how many laps we were able to squeeze out of the altima before catastrophic failure.
Had a great fun, until next time!
Patrick ALTIMATE ANNIHILATION