Topic: Gingerman - or how I fell in love with the K car
Our experience with the K car began at Monticello. tSoG agreed to get the car for me and deliver it to me
here in Chicago. The night before he was to leave his truck threw a drive shaft so instead he kept the car
and did a bunch of work to it and delivered it to the track. When I saw it pull in I was excited. Then I got
hit with the "what have I done?" feeling. As we unloaded it and all it's extra parts in the arctic cold I
remembered that I said I would never race Gingerman in April again. We had quite a bit of work to do to
the car before we could take it to tech. We had to put new brakes on it since there was no pads on one
side, just a backing plate. We also decided to get some more tires so tSoG hopped in the K and Carl
and I grabbed the truck to hit WalMart but they wouldn't put the size tires we wanted on the car since it
didn't come from the factory with it but they would mount them onto the rims if they weren't on the car so
we went back to the track and pulled the tires off, threw them in the truck and I went back to WalMart so
they could mount them. When I got back I found that our friends from White Trash Racing gave us a
used set of Direzzas so the we kept the new tires for future use. We got everything fixed and rolled into
tech at 4:00 and came out ready to race.
Saturday morning we got to the track and scraped the ice and snow off the car and got our first driver
strapped in. I must say, the race itself was rather uneventful. All five drivers got a short 30 minutes stint
in with no drama, no exploding motors, no black flags, nothing. We started to go through our second
stint which we were planning on running longer, at least an hour. Somehow the math didn't work out
and I got in the car with 2 hours left. I tried to run until the end but was too tired and came in with 30
minutes to go. We finished day one and the car was still running strong. Well, as strong as a K car can
run. We did find out that we needed another set of front pads. There was no retaining clip on the
passenger side so the caliper twisted and the pads were shot. We phoned around and got some new
pads that we would pick up Sunday morning during the mandatory quiet time.
Sunday morning I went to pick up a trailer so we could take the K car home after the race and the rest of
the crew was going to get the car ready. Unfortunately we still didn't have that retaining clip so we bent a
strap and had one of the guys from Apocalyptic Racing weld it to the carrier to hold the caliper in place.
We ended up missing the green flag by a few minutes. Eventually the timing of our stints gets screwed
up again and I can't read because I thought the race ended at 5:30 when it really ended at 5:00. I was
supposed to take the last stint and our driver comes in at about 4:40. If he had stayed out one more lap
I was going to send him back out but since he came in we switched drivers. I got a total of three laps in
on Sunday and they were glorious!
I really want to thank the NSF guys for coming up with the K it Forward idea. We had a great time with it. I
also want to thank the guys from White Trash Racing who always make me feel welcome and always
help out whenever we need anything. Another big thanks goes to the guys from Apocalyptic Racing.
Great bunch of guys to hang around with and always willing to help out. The whole weekend was great
except for the weather but even that got better as the race wore on. All in all, a great experience like
every Lemons race is.
Owner of the Traveling Hat