Readers will remember that with 2 laps to go at the last race weekend, I blew up the engine in the race car.  What a bummer.  But I’d been sitting on a spare engine that I got from a theft-recovery 328i for a year or so.  The intent for that motor was to build it up into a killer race motor, but prices were high and it was very hard to justify spending the money with the small ITR turnouts that we’ve been having.  So it sat on an engine stand in my storage unit for a long time.  Vic Sias helped me diagnose the motor with the help of my compression tester and his leakdown tester, and we determined that the #6 cylinder had no compression and it was leaking past the piston.  So, with only three weeks until the next race weekend, I decided to just put the spare engine in the car.

I signed up Edge Motorworks to do the engine swap for me because I knew that if I did it myself, I’d end up running out of time.  It’s not like I’m experienced doing that sort of thing.  I’ve done it exactly once, about 18 or 19 years ago, in a Fiat X1/9.  So it went off to the pros.  Unfortunately, due to a number of factors, they almost ran out of time themselves.  I was to leave for Laguna Seca early Friday morning, and Thursday after lunch, the new engine still wasn’t fully installed in the car and had not yet been started.  I was starting to be ready to throw in the towel but Gordon and the guys at Edge told me to hang in there, they’d have it done!  Sure enough, by Thursday night at 10:30, the car was finally loaded up in the trailer, running, with the hopes that all was well.  Phew!

So Friday practice and qualifying went pretty well.  In fact, I ended up qualifying in 2nd place overall, 0.25 seconds behind Doug Makishima, which is pretty much par for the course.  Both Doug and I were a good ways off of our best lap times at Laguna, but that track is always super-sensitive to weather conditions, track temperature, etc, so I’ve given up expecting that I can run consistent lap times there.  As long as I was in the part of the pack where I usually am, I had confidence in the new (used) engine.

Saturday saw the first race of the weekend, and it was the usual dogfight between Doug and me.  I was able to hang on his tail pretty well but couldn’t seem to get alongside.  About 2/3 of the way through the race we got into the thick of lapped traffic though and I hoped that this might give me the edge I needed to get to the front.  It did, but not quite in the way I’d hoped.  We were headed down the hill through turn 9 and trying to get through a huge scrum of lapped cars.  Doug tried to go to the inside, and either by getting slightly tagged or maybe just because he was on a slippery part of the track with too much steering input, he got sideways while he was passing another E30 BMW on the inside and whacked the back left corner of the passee with his own RR fender.  The impact left a pretty huge dent right behind the door and blew out the rear passenger side glass.  The glass simply exploded and went flying.  Spectacular to watch from my seat.  Everyone kept going and only Doug had any real damage, but he’d lost 10 seconds or so, and I was able to cruise the final few laps to the overall victory.

Late Saturday was the qualifying for Sunday’s race.  I unfortunately wasn’t paying a lot of attention in the time leading up to the session and so I failed to get into the qualifying grid at the very beginning.  When you’re one of the fastest cars in the group, that can be problematic because it’s hard to get a traffic-free lap, which is the key for a good qualifying session.  But I went out there and passed cars as fast as I could, waiting until it looked like I’d have a decent break until the next one … when that happens, I kind of slow down to stay in front of whoever is behind me without holding them up until I get to the final turn, then gun it hoping to get a full clean lap.

But there was an early black-flag-all due to a car stuck in the gravel trap.  So, we all pulled into the pits.  I didn’t end up too badly positioned, I think I was maybe the 12th car or so in line.  I could see Doug up near the front, so I knew he’d get by the cars in front on the out-lap and have an easy chance at a flyer.  So I wanted to make it work too!  I passed a few cars on the outlap and set myself up for a good fast lap on the first complete lap.  But then, I came around T6 to find that JD Morris, the Spec Miata in front of me (who had been a pretty good ways in front of me), had gone wide off the track at the exit and was off in the dirt.  I could see that the car was see-sawing a little bit off in the dirt but then he lost control and the car came flying back across the track, perpendicular to it … right into my path.  I had a brief moment where I could choose to go left or right and I chose left.  One of the “rules” in this situation is to go where he is now, assuming that he won’t be there when I got there … but something told me that wasn’t going to work in this circumstance and I’d be forced off into the dirt myself.  So I went left.

I *almost* missed him.  I managed to bleed off a little bit of speed but locked the brakes at the last moment, and my right front corner caught his left front corner, about a 1′ overlap.  I’m sure I was still going at least 60 if not more.  Although the impact made a horrible sound, from my point of view, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.  It really didn’t jar me much personally, but it knocked the car off course to the left side.  I could feel that something was wrong with the steering and I slid to a stop in the gravel.  I looked down the hill in my mirror and could see JD parked on the track, perpendicular to it, but facing the other way from when I hit him.  The front end of his car was not in good shape.  The workers were at his car very quickly and he got out of the car quickly, which was a relief.  I put down my net and waited for the workers to tell me what was up.  Another worker ran up the hill to me with a fire extinguisher (it’s a steep hill!), made sure I was okay, looked at the RF corner of my car, and told me I might as well get out.

It turns out that we were both physically totally fine.  In my case, absolutely no soreness or bruising.  JD had a headache for a little while after the wreck but it went away and he’s fine too.

Here’s JD’s in-car video.  I don’t have any from my car because, well, nothing interesting ever happens during qualifying so I didn’t get the camera in.  Whoops.

The Demise of JD’s #56 from JD Morris on Vimeo.

The first towtruck got there quickly and I watched them hook JD’s car up with straps through the front tires.  In my case, the tow operators suggested that I get myself up into the towtruck while they hooked my car up.  I heard them working the cables and whatnot, and then the driver came running up to the cab and asked, “Do you think we can lift your car from your front tow hook?”  My tow hook is an aluminum folding job and although I’d have no problem using it to pull the car out of a gravel trap or flat-tow me to the pits (that’s what happened when the engine blew at Thunderhill), lifting the whole car by it didn’t seem like a good idea.  I said, “No, I don’t …” but then before I could finish the thought, I heard the snap.  The hook had broken and now the car was rolling down the hill, with no one in it and nothing attached to it.  We were most of the way up towards T7 and there was a LONG way to roll.  Fortunately, the steering turned to the left and the car did a slow roll into the inside wall, damaging the rear fender, rear taillight, and rear fender.  They weren’t damaged in the actual crash.  I can almost laugh about it now but at the time, I was SUPER angry … and I don’t get super angry.  I barely even ever get angry.  I actually yelled at the tow crew.   I think the last time I yelled at anyone like that was something like 10 years ago.  Those who know me know I pretty much don’t yell at anyone, ever.  I wanted to throw my HANS device, still in my hand, at something but I looked down at it, looked at that fancy carbon fiber, remembered how much it cost, thought about how much I was about to have to spend to fix this car, and … carefully placed it down in the cab of the truck. 

So then it was a team effort between me and the crew to figure out how to get the car back to the paddock without a tow hook.  I told them to just use that fancy hydraulic thing that sticks out from under the tow truck but they told me they don’t use that at the track and they didn’t have the equipment necessary to make it work. Ultimately, they just did what they did with JD’s car … used big fabric straps through the front wheels.  They normally don’t like that approach because it tends to damage the front fenders, but in this case, the front fenders are really the hood itself, and the hood itself was already going to need to be replaced.  Didn’t make sense to worry about it.  I wish they’d done that from the get-go and saved the rear end from damage.

On the way down the hill, I apologized to the tow crew.  Shouldn’t have yelled.  They were just trying to clear us quickly so that the rest of the drivers actually got a qualifying session.  It was reasonable to assume that the fancy red tow hook could lift the car.   As it turned out, it took so long to get my car off the track that only a small handful of cars ever got a complete lap in that session.  As it turned out I qualified 4th from that very first lap before the first black-flag-all, but of course, I wouldn’t be able to drive in the race.

Once both cars were down in impound we had a chance to really look them over.  Rod and Sterling were there waiting and helped a lot.  And of course, JD was there with his car.  He was a class act.  Apologized to me from the get-go and just let me vent at him.  I told him that I really felt the whole thing was avoidable, that when he got into the dirt he should have just locked up his brakes and come to a stop before trying to get back on the track.  It was obvious to me that he wasn’t in complete control or the car wouldn’t have come back on at all.  Of course, it was an accident, he felt he was in control, and he was as surprised as I was when all of a sudden he was in my path.  I still think the lesson learned here is that just because you manage to slow down a lot off the track, when you’re in the dirt, it’s really hard to be in control.  It reminds me of a skier who has a huge fall, but tries to get up before they’ve come to a complete stop.   Inevitably, their tumble continues, much to their surprise, because they don’t really have complete control.

Oh well, it’s an accident.  They happen, especially when racing.  My car appears to be quite repairable.  JD’s, not so much.  The impact was perpendicular to the direction of travel in his case, plus my car is a few hundred pounds heavier, and I was moving a lot faster.  His car didn’t have a chance against the BMW.   On my car, the impact broke the aluminum bumper to the outside of it’s right mount.  That forced the front frame horn to the left so it’s now actually touching the side of the radiator.  Doesn’t appear that the radiator is damaged at all though.  The RF tire was forced to the rear, bending the lower control arm like a taco.   The wheel is far enough back in the wheel well that it won’t roll unless it’s turned to the left.  It can be turned to be pointed straight but it won’t roll like that, and besides, there’s a huge amount of toe-out so even if you do that, the left tire is pointed to the left.  That means the car will only turn left, which makes it pretty hard to load into a trailer.  Must have taken us 2 hours to get it into the trailer.

The car will be headed to the shop this week to get a real estimate, and I’m on the hunt for used front end Z3 parts.  New, it looks like the parts will total $4K-$5K, but there’s no reason to buy new.  Most of these parts are common to all Z3s, even the 4-cylinder roadsters, which can be found pretty cheap these days and aren’t THAT rare in junkyards.  In fact, the only coupe-specific part (and therefore hard to find used) that got damaged is the RR fender when it hit the wall after falling off the truck … and it’s not clear that it’s worth fixing that.  Maybe I’ll keep it with the minor dent as an homage to the wreck.  We’ll see.  Other than that, it needs the obvious: hood, front fender, bumper, bumper cover, headlight assembly, core support, suspension pieces, and wheel well plastic.  It’s not clear if the “wheelhouse” where the strut mounts or the front frame horn can be straightened or if it need to be replaced at this point.  The rear bumper needs to come off so we can see why it’s sitting off to the side … but I suspect there’s nothing incredibly serious damaged back there.  I will update you all when I know more!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 8:32 pm and is filed under Race Reports, SCCA, Videos.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.