Due to an upcoming business trip, I planned to only do the first of the two races this weekend. Practice and qualifying were Friday, and the race was Saturday.
Things went pretty well in practice. Although I was over 1.5 seconds off of my personal best lap time at Thunderhill, the car felt great and I was fastest overall. The new video camera and lap timer worked great.
Qualifying wasn’t quite as good. I was slower than I was in practice, and ended up in P2 overall (P1 in ITR, being the only entry) behind Doug Makishima. Still, I actually kind of like being in 2nd place. Hunting down the car in front of me is a ton of fun. Trying to run away from the car behind me is a lot more stressful!
However, throwing a curve into the plan was Larry Cooper, who returned to racing last season after building an all new ITS Datsun 240Z. He’s a great driver and the car is top-notch, very fast. He was 3rd overall and not far behind in lap times. The hope was that Doug would take off, I’d stay on his butt, we’d get ourselves away from 3rd and 4th place, then at some point I’d pass him, and win 
Unfortunately, a couple of things didn’t go quite according to plan. First of all, the grid workers gave me a little bit of a hard time about my camera mount. With the new tiny camera, there was no good way to strap it down, so I had only the tripod mount, and although the one grid worker didn’t have a problem with it Friday, Saturday’s checker had a little bit more trouble with it. I need to figure something out. However, in all of the exitement around that, I forgot to turn the camera on. So I have no in-car video from the race.
Then it turned out that the new Blind Apex lap timer wasn’t working. I think the T&S crew forgot to turn on the transmitter or something. Oh well. Was looking forward to see how it worked in a race vs. qualifying.
And then, Larry had no trouble keeping up with Doug and me for the first 3+ laps. So I was trying to keep up with Doug and keep Larry from passing me. But he was having quite a battle with the 4th place car, and their battle let Doug and I get away. Finally, after 5 or so laps (not sure), Doug was starting to overdrive and was making a couple of small mistakes. I got a good run on him through the esses and pulled alongside on the back straight. I didn’t totally have the corner but fortunately he locked up his brakes and I squeezed in there. Once I was ahead, I slowly opened the gap. Getting through traffic was interesting and there were a couple of times when Doug capitalized and got close, but generally speaking the slower cars were cooperative and I stayed a couple of second in front.
But then … with 2 laps to go, I went through turn 1 and got back on the gas and SLAM! something happened and the car had no accleration and the engine sounded awful. By the entry to T2 Doug had caught up and I pointed him by. The car wouldn’t accelerate and something was very wrong. I realized I wasn’t going to make it over the hill in T5, so I pulled off the track between T2 and T3 and watched the end of the race from there. The car stalled when I pressed the clutch. I could restart it, but it wouldn’t idle and it sounded extremely rough.
I was facing the start/finish line and so saw Doug take the win with a healthy margin over Larry in 2nd. Once the race was over, a tow truck came by to pull me back to the paddock. From there, I was able to limp it the remaining 500′ to my trailer under its own “power.”
Good thing I was planning to skip Sunday’s race! In any case, the car is safely in the trailer and I won’t be able to spend any time on diagnosis until I get back from my trip next weekend. Not a lot of time before the next race (rounds 5 & 6, Laguna Seca, June 19-21) so I’m hoping it’s something easy like a vacuum leak, as opposed to something hard & expensive like a sucked valve. I’ll keep you all updated!
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