First post since early August.  What happened?

I guess a really tough racing season made it such that there really wasn’t this great desire to share.  To summarize:

• I missed the first race weekend due to a medical issue.
• Round 2 went fine.
• During round 3 (May 23rd), I blew the engine in the car.  Bent valve w/piston damage.  So I missed round 4 the following day.
• Frenzied engine replacement with my junkyard spare
• Just made it to my 3rd race weekend, rounds 5 & 6, in which I was in a pretty bad wreck (June 20th).  Round 5 went okay though.
• Accident repairs caused me to miss the next race weekend, round 7, but at least it was an opportunity for new graphics.  Photo below.
• At the next race weekend (September 1), the car overheated.  New radiator trackside.  Still overheated.  Was caused from the June accident.
• Made it out to the next race weekend with another new radiator, but engine still overheating.  Limped around but drove.
• Thinking I finally licked the cooling issue, so took the car to the dyno to test before going to the finale at Thunderhill.  But the electronic throttle was stuck, so I didn’t learn anything.
• No time to fix the car for the finale, so … season over.  That means that I had exactly one “good” weekend (Round 2 back in April.)

The new look

The throttle is now fixed and I think I’ve licked the cooling problems, not sure though.  And I also noticed that the caster adjustment on the LF upper strut mount had slipped, maybe that explains the lousy handling I’ve noticed the last couple of times on the track.  Neither the handling nor the power feels quite the way it did before the accident.

Now there’s plenty of time before the next season but of course, that will be gone in a flash.  Need to figure out what to get done between now and then.  Do I rebuild the blown engine?  And do I just rebuild it, or do I really build it for max power under the rules (which means spending even more $$)?  What maintenance really needs to get done?  What am I going to do next season to get faster?  Is it finally time for data acquisition?  I never did get the new video camera working well for me.  And trailer maintenance — it needs new tires, new wheel bearings, and a bath.  And the broken marker light fixed.  And some way to tie down the golf cart.  Sure would be nice to have a quieter generator … ack, the winter thinking gets expensive!

If I really want to spend some money (I don’t), the other school of thought is to switch from ITR to STU.  In STU I would need to spend a lot of money.  All new engine (a highly build M50 or M54 2.5L makes the most sense), aerodynamics, lightweight body panels, lexan … it would add up.  Or I could just replace the car with this one.  I’d still need to switch out the engine though.  So of course that idea makes no sense.  I really do think ITR is going to take off, and I have at least one more year of patience in me.  I think.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Updates.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.