Paddock car sabotage overnight at Sears...WEAK!! (Page 4 of 5)

The water in the tank sounds like the end result of someone being drunk wandering the grounds w a bottle of water looking for a place to dump it. I've stayed late at a few Lemons races when racing is done for the day, some people are absolutely hammered when it's only 11pm. I can believe someone completely hammered doing something like this.

Totally agree (funny how that happened)

And yes, none of this would have happened if Judge Scott had been there - - - or, it would have been a completely worse clusterf**k had he been there.  I'm betting on the former; bring Judge Segway EAST (along w/ another Summit/NJ race)!

Nick, again, if you need further direction please being let us knowz!

That is all.

Doug! !

I hear there's some guy named Lucas who sets fire to Brit electricals!  He must be stopped, that villain!!!

I'm glad the fuel door on my Maserati still has a working release that even I still have a hard time remembering the location of. Not that anyone would have messed with our super competitive Maserati racing machine!

Sometimes we assume foul play when there is another explanation. I was totally convinced until this morning that someone had siphoned fuel out of my van that was parked all weekend in our paddock spot. I had filled it up just before getting to the track and when I left the track I had only 2/3rds of a tank. However, a review of my credit card puchases show that the station I filled at just before going to the track only billed $75 to my card. This means that it shut off automatically at $75 (Don't you hate that?) and I did not realise the tank was not filled. It take over $100 these days to fill my van (Don't you hate that even more!?)

Someone stole the pcv valve off my car overnight at the Buttonwillow race and replaced it with a cap.

After theorizing on this (i was watching trekkor's feed when someone mentioned it) I can pretty much write off all the listed pranks/sabotage as possibility for crew error...well, maybe except reorienting the eyesore miata and the water in the tank incident. at least with the T-GT the gang did some forensics on their fuel sources and filler jugs. I could definitely see someone being jealous of it. Not saying any of the wonderful guys I've come to know through Lemons would do anything like that, though. It doesn't just doesn't add up right. My initial impressions would have been that there was some water in a fuel jug that got topped off with fuel, then poured into the T-GT's tank. other than that, I don't believe any legitimate pooling/condensation theories on the basis that they probably would have been off-track with fuel problems on Saturday. dead battery, we have these nifty red LED eyes in the dragon's head that feed directly off the kill switch. Awesome for hot pits, night racing, and buttoning up for the night because you can tell from 40ft away whether the car's dead or not. plug wires come loose from vibration, Doug and I know this from Southern discomfort this year. Nothing some bad ass zip-tying can't fix. Needless to say, but i would be -VERY- on edge coming back in the morning and seeing my car re-oriented. We probably would have scrutinized the entire car top to bottom over it. A sticker on the lemon, or a chicken wing in the grab handle, yeah, ok, But I'm in the "don't mess with my racecar" group, so movement, changes to the car's orientation gives me more cause for alarm. It's all over, so lets move on, and next time it happens, we'll just have to show'em where waste water goes.

If rain water was able to get into the T GT's tank, I think it would have had some problems keeping the fuel IN the tank. Sound slike obvious sabotage. That's not funny, not cool, and not acceptable. It's pathetic and un-LeMons.

I agree. Not here.

IF (and that's a big if) there were any hijinks in the pits Saturday night I think/hope it would have been due to a 2am inebriated lack of judgement rather than any inherent malice or character flaw.

There is always the one (or two) drunk guy/gals in a group who can't tell the difference between funny and f@&#ing stuff up, usually followed by a sudden violent reversal of their newly pickled digestive track. There WAS some unusually rambunctious partying going on. 2 stints in the Navy overseas showed me just how Jekyll/Hyde people can get with that magic elixir C2H5OH.

The bigger that Lemons gets and the wider net we throw, the larger variety of characters we include so it's a good lesson in caution if nothing else. Our tight-knit community is as vulnerable to interlopers as any other group. Even so I'd be surprised if we ever saw it again. Too much heat to go unnoticed - which is a good thing.

But as the saying goes, a good lock keeps an honest man honest. Move on, but keep your eyes open for your friend's sake... just in case.

In general, of course it's 100 times more likely to be a tired team's mistake.  I don't think that is in question at all.  Many times I've personally had things STOLEN!!! from my pit space only to find them in my support vehicle the next morning, right where I left them.

I happen to have personal knowledge of only one of the "incidents" so that's the only one I can comment on.  We spent hours trying to figure out what we did wrong so that we could learn from the mistake and make sure it never happens again.  We weren't looking for any excuse, nor do we blame our results in even any small way on the fact that there was water in our fuel cell.  Either someone put water in our fuel cell (and if they did, I give it a 99.9% probability that it was a drunken act of stupidity, not a malicious act) or we made a mistake that we weren't able to uncover after hours of investigation.

Assign whatever probability you want.  Have a vote.  Take a poll.  Sign a petition.  Call me directly and tell me we obviously screwed up and to stop being a bunch of whining pussies.  I think there's a 51/49 chance it was us, but that doesn't matter either, because:

We're going to be even MORE more careful in how we store and fill our fuel jugs.  We're going to redouble our efforts to examine each fuel jug before we pour fuel into it and it into the car.  These are the precautions in case WE messed up.

We are also going to be a lot more careful about leaving stuff unattended overnight.  This is the precaution in case of the 1% chance (that seems to be the popular vote, right?)  that drunk idiots wander by our car when they need to take a piss or empty their water bottle.

We'll never know so we're learning from all the possibilities.  See, this was a GOOD thing!

Cheers,

Dean

I can live with this.

x2

-Matt