Topic: B-Team Kill Phil/Just Plain Stupid Arse-Sweat-Apalooza pics/issues
There will almost assuredly be no pictures of anyone else in here, but you can see photographic evidence of our trials and tribulations here (well, when we weren't wrenching on one or the other sh*tbox):
The whole set on flickr (about 50 pics):
http://flic.kr/s/aHsjAo2kE7
IMG_3993 by ChurchOfBK, on Flickr
At least the Lotus left with the same engine it had when it arrived. It also survived a thrown water pump belt & water temp readings above 300 degrees (iron heads have their advantages). No, there was no more water in the system at that point.
Problems at this race:
Gretta (our E30) decided to mix water & oil during practice. This happened on a newly-flattened head that we bent during the last race. New (junkyard) motor plopped in the back of a truck & shipped up from San Diego. (Thanks to Autobahn - who we share a pit area with - http://www.autobahnparts.com/). Arrived at 9pm +/-, was sorted, installed and ready to run at 4am. Sorting took a while. Some pains during initial start prevented us from starting the race on time.
Gretta's shifter got a ham-fisting & broke on Saturday. Welded up & back in the car in about 20 minutes.
The Chotus ingested quite a lot of sealant in the fuel tank which blocked the pickup, fuel line, and filter. 30' of new fuel hose and 3 filters were used throughout the race. A tank-cleaning is in order.
The Chotus's harmonic balancer became unbalanced & caused enough shake to start throwing belts. A zip-tie loop between the block and radiator hose (in the middle of the belt loop) acted as a catch & kept us from donating lots of belts to the track. Thanks for the tip, Caswell. New harmonic balancer helped the issue a bit, but something's still amiss.
The Chotus's radiator clogged mid-way through Saturday & needed to be replaced (it was in pretty sorry shape from a hammer-hit at a previous race). Oddly, it's difficult to find a 1974 Lotus Elite/Ecalt radiator in Bakersfield, CA. We ended up using left-over headlight mounting metal to fab up a new radiator mount for the much-too-large-for-Lotus radiator. This was finally finished at around 1am on Saturday & worked surprisingly well.
The Chotus's coolsuit motor started popping fuses. Luckily, this happened during the night & by the morning session, we figured out that if you just turned it on for the back straight, it would continue running - preventing death-by-heat in the newly-black car.
There were loads of other, little issues not worth mentioning.
The [not so?] funny thing is that we put *tons* of work in sorting both cars prior to the race... and I mean *tons* of work. Sadly, we didn't budget enough time to actually run the cars in anger prior to practice, so our motor issues didn't pop up until Friday. C'est la vie.
Despite all the issues, we had a great time, met some new faces, and were happy to see some familiar ones. Thanks to all who came by during our various issues in the pits.
Btw, it was *really* cool to hear all the random shouts of "CHOTUS!!!"
#72 "Pussy Wagën" E30
#74 "Llama" Lotus Elite, aka Chotus
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