This weekend was the 2008 season opener, and it was a lot of fun and a little bit exciting! The weather was absolutely fantastic for any time of year, but especially for February. It was only in the low 40s early in the morning, but 70 in the afternoon, and bright and sunny all day with a very gentle cool breeze. Beautiful.
Among other new things, this was the first time I’ve ever raced with NASA. I have written up some thoughts about the two clubs in another post.
I arrived dark-and-early at the track, at about 6:15 Saturday morning. It was still dark, so trying to find a paddock spot was a little tricky. It seemed like the paddock was nearly full already, but I headed back to the back corner, near the new Russell school buildings, and there was plenty of space back there. Once it got light I discovered that there was plenty more space closer, tucked between other people, but it wasn’t worth moving at that point.
I unloaded the car and headed over to tech. Now, I had an annual inspection and a NASA logbook, and a self-tech form that I’d filled out, but I was told that I also needed to have a tech inspector sign all of that. Supposedly they didn’t need to see the car since I had an annual, but apparently occasionally sometimes they do ask to see the car, so I decided to take the car over there just in case. I breezed through tech (they really didn’t look at the car at all, but then, it was dark after all). However, I still didn’t have a NASA patch on my suit or NASA decals on the car. I was told by the NASA office that they would be available at tech, but the tech inspector said they didn’t have any. He made a note on my tech form that I was okay without the decals, and off I went. He suggested I arrive at grid early for the 8:00 practice session just to explain that.
It got light and I discovered that when I took the paddock spot, I had partially usurped some space from a group of 944-Spec racers who had set up camp the night before. I apologized but they told me I’d be fine. Thanks guys! They turned out to be a really nice group of folks who sort of adopted me for the weekend. It was nice having some friends there who knew how NASA operated. I didn’t have any family or crew with me, so the company was nice too! Too bad they were in the same race group as me, otherwise I would have recruited one of them to be on the radio with me.
At 7:45 I went over to pre-grid for the 8:00am practice session. It was still quite cold out. I was surprised, when I got there, to find absolutely no other cars on the grid. There were three people standing around a pickup at the front of the grid so I explained that I was new to NASA and one of the guys was very helpful and welcoming and told me how grid worked. He also told me that he had NASA stickers and patches that I could put on the car and my suit, and gave them to me, but told me not to worry about it until qualifying.
The rest of the group did arrive just in time for the 8am start, and off on track we went, with me in the lead. There were a few faster cars but for the most part they were slower … I think I was 8th fastest of the 50 or so cars in the group. It was cold, so traction wasn’t at its best, and I was on very old tires, but I still ran a lap time about 0.6sec faster than I had run last summer, before I gained all of the power from the exhaust system and dyno tuning. Not bad. I was feeling like I could get at least another second off of that just from fresher tires and warmer temps, so couldn’t wait until qualifying.
After practice I put tape over the SCCA decals and patch, applied the NASA decals, and sewed (I think they right term is “basted”) the NASA patch to my suit.
Time for qualifying. Decided to leave the old tires on, thought I’d save the new ones for Sunday.
Unlike SCCA, the track is yellow when you head out for qualifying, and doesn’t go green until you come around to start/finish. On the first green lap, I’d had a fairly open track with fast cars in front of me, so was thinking that this could be a good lap. I was flat out in 5th gear in turn 9, a fast left-hander, probably 110mph, when it happened … the car suddenly jumped about 10 feet to the right and the steering got very mushy. That’s the best way I can describe it. I could still feel the front wheels under me, but they weren’t terribly responsive. I didn’t lose control, but that’s a scary spot for that to happen. Turn 10 is an unforgiving, fast turn, with a wall on the outside. Fortunately, I got slowed down enough to get through turn 10, and then I dove into the pit lane.
At pit lane speed, probably about 30mph, the steering actually felt okay. I began to wonder if I’d imagined something. I didn’t really want to go park and get out of the car to do an inspection … it was only a 20 minute session and I knew that if I did that, I probably wouldn’t have enough time to get back in and get any qualifying times. I considered going back out just to get a time on the books for qualifying, but then I decided better safe than sorry. I drove the car back to the paddock to inspect it.
Imagine my surprise when I got out of the car to discover that the right front corner was sitting about 3″ too low. The tire was tucked way up into the wheel well and was not pointed exactly straight. Clearly, something was seriously broken. It was shocking that it drove just fine back to the paddock, with no funny rubbing noises or loss of control. But somehow, it felt just fine.
I opened the hood and discovered that the strut tube was not there! The camber plate was still there, and the nut that bolts the top of the strut tube to the camber plate was sitting there, but there was no strut visible!
Okay, clearly no more reason to rush. I went and changed out of my race gear, got out the jack and tools, and went to work. I jacked the car up and the wheel just fell down and straighted out. I took the wheel off, and found the strut, totally intact, just sitting there in the wheel well. However, it was fully compressed, and not rebounding on its own. I removed it from the upright to find that it still had some resistance in both compression and rebound, but just wasn’t coming back up on its own. Surprisingly, the threads on both the strut and the aluminum nut looked absolutely fine.
I decided to just bolt it all back together so that I could drive it into the trailer and call it a weekend. But as I was doing that, I changed the strategy … decided, what the heck, let’s race anyway! If it goes back together okay, I’ll just be racing with a blown shock. That will clearly not be optimum but if the car still feels decent, it should still be fun.
So, I bolted it all back together. I eyeballed the ride height and camber settings, got a quick bite to eat, and it was time to race!
I figured I’d be starting all the way at the back due to the lack of qualifying times, but NASA doesn’t work that way. They group every class together, so I was starting at the back of my 2-car class, but not at the back of the entire field. On the warm-up lap the car felt totally fine, so I was feeling pretty good.
It was a fairly uneventful race. I passed the other PTC driver at the end of the first green lap, and he never presented more of a challenge. I was about a second slower than I had been during the morning practice (before the strut failed), but the car felt absolutely fine. Due to the way that they grouped the classes together, I started behind a lot of slower cars (slower drivers in faster classes) so there was a lot of passing to be done.
However, about 10 minutes into the race, I realized that during the frenetic repair of the suspension, I had forgotten to put gas in the car. I doubted I had enough to make it ’til the end. Lap 7, the low-fuel light came on. Lap 9, the car sputtered in the carousel. Start of lap 10, there was the other PTC car, parked off the outside of turn 1! Phew, that meant that, assuming he couldn’t resume, that I could quit early and still win the race. That lap it sputtered in several places, so I pulled into the pits and quit with 2 laps to go. But hey, a win’s a win!
The car felt just peachy, although the lap times were a little slow, so I decided to go ahead and run it the same way on Sunday. I qualified first in PTC for that race. Unfortunately, although my competition had repaired his car and it ran fine in practice and qualifying, he had a mechanical issue on the warm-up lap and wasn’t able to even start the race, never mind finish it. So, I was handed the win in the 2nd race (but I had qualified much faster anyway.)
It was altogether a great weekend, although not without a mechanical issue (and some repair $$ to be spent in the next few weeks). I also made some new friends in the 944 camp, who were really a great pleasure to hang out with this weekend. See you next time!
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