Topic: Big thanks from Monger Garage for an EPIC weekend at Stafford!
What a crazy, emotionally and physically exhausting, spectacular time! My team was awesome, the car ran beautifully and while most of it held up well, we returned with a f-ed up suspension, 4 blown shocks, no remaining tires, oil leaks galore and some dents and dings. What an awesome f'in time.
Friday: crunch time. spent all of Friday getting the car ready and fix things that we needed like mounting the fire extinguisher, getting the kill switch to work, mounting an exhaust, putting on the vinyls, and tons of little crap. We finally finished at 11PM. had th car loaded on the trailer and left NJ at 1AM. We arrived at the hotel in CT at 5AM, giving us 1-2 hours of sleep.
Saturday: make it to the track, unload the car and get it ready. Get thru inspection fine....we were pretty nervous about that as this is our first "race" build....spent alot of time on the cage and safety equipment. Then comes the BS inspection. Of course being the newbs that we were....we tried to bribe them with the lttle cash for lunch and a t-shirt. If I had known they liked whiskey, I could have grabbed a couple bottles of Maker's Mark or something from my house! we basically showed up in a cheap car that looked like a rally car. Instant 250 lap penalty. brutal. So we start with the biggest penalty of the weekend, not a big deal. We were just happy to make it there at this point, the car was giving us all sorts of trouble. Anyway, we have the drivers meeting, check out the track and away we go. Awesome! The car ran great and we all beat the crap out of it. 3 drivers in we almost lose a wheel with Craig driving. He pulls into the pits and all 5 lugnuts are loose. that cracked the rim so we swap tires and continue. We got pulled in a couple times for 2-wheels off, and got into a little contact with another car that spun right in front of us....I think it was one of the e30's....sorry guys we stood on it, didnt mean to smack into you. Other than that we had a pretty clean race....after 10 hours of driving we went from dead last (65ish) to 34th! We put the car to bed for the night and head back to the hotel for some dinner and much needed rest.
Sunday: Well rested we make it to the track and watch the People's Curse get beaten up. It wasn't us! Awesome! get back to the car and jack it up to change the oil and check things. uh oh, passenger wheel bearing is shot and ready to fall off. Good thing I drove my junker Legacy up. We rip the car that got us there apart to fix the race car and get her back on the track. Car is ripping and we only lost 30 minutes of time until an hour later we see Marco almost go into the wall due to his wheel falling off! He drove the wheels off the car, literally. The whole center section of the wheel was secured to the hub but the rest of the rim seperated! Thanks to marco's skill though he kept the car out of the wall and safely came to a stop with an untouched car! Unfortunately the ball joint was done so Craig goes to work again as we had a spare ball joint but the bolts are f'd and we can't get it apart. Hit up another NJ team with better tools and they welded the control arm back together and we finished the race that way. BIG THANKS TO CRAPTATION, you guys rock, and are the only reason we finished the race! The bad hub went back on my car and it did make it home so all was good. ended up 38th but if we weren't penalized it would have been 24th. If we had the 2.5 hours back from repairing the car even better... but we did awesome regardless and had so much fun. The drive home was even good, reminiscing and such. A long weekend for sure (got home at 12:30) but so much frackin fun.
