It has been a really long time since I’ve posted anything.

Through much of March, the race car was home in the garage, with me doing pre-season prep work. All new brakes, change fluids, etc. First weekend of April was the season opener, a double regional at Thunderhill.

I left home Thursday night. About 15 miles from home, in Fremont, the oil pressure gauge on the Suburban dropped down to 0, although I got no warning lights or other indication that anything was wrong. I pulled over and checked the oil. Just slightly low, but not outrageous. Topped it off, started it, oil pressure was fine. That didn’t make much sense but I continued on my way.

15 miles later I was up and over the hill in Pleasanton, when the gauge started dropping again. Within the next 10 minutes it had crept all the way down to 0 again. Again, no idiot lights, no weird sounds, nothing out of the ordinary, but I got off the freeway in Pleasanton and called AAA. It was now about 9:00 at night and I was still in civilization. An hour later it would be in the middle of absolutely nowhere and it would be even later. This seemed smarter.

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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.

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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!

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As I posted last week, the turnout for the race this weekend was a little bit light, especially for Laguna Seca (many people’s favorite track).  The paddock had plenty of space, which certainly isn’t common.  I count only 193 starters shown in the results.

For me, well, I was the only car in ITR.  How’s that Prelude coming Mike?  I also have heard that the club’s new classification of the 5.0L Mustang GTs and the 305ci Camaros & Firebirds into ITR is causing at least one local competitor to do a used car search.  So I’m hoping for some more entries soon.  Rod even put a GDGR sticker on his Spec Miata and was overheard actively discussing ITR prospects and prices.  Here’s hoping.

But, just like in most recent races, Doug Makishima is very fast in his ITS E30 BMW, and even though we’re not in the same class, we’re really evenly matched.  We also both seem to turn up the flame just a little bit when we’re near each other on the track.  In Saturday’s practice session, our fastest laps were both 2+ seconds off of our normal pace, but only 0.144 seconds apart.  The track just seemed slick.  Laguna Seca for being finicky about weather, so that was probably part of it.  It was fairly chilly (well, chilly for northern California) and windy.

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This weekend was the 49th running of the Illgen Enduro, this time a 4-hour affair at Thunderhill.

The only endurance race I’ve ever driven in was the wacky “24 Hours of LeMons“, a play on the world-famous french race, the 24 Hours of Le Mans.  In LeMons, however, there is a spending limit of $500 on the car (i.e, they are all crapcans that aren’t likely to be able to make it through to the end of the race, in other words, “lemons”, and our race took place on the tiny “road course” at Altamont Raceway.

With the help of the LemonLappers team though, we were able to win that one.   But it wasn’t so clear that my Go, Dog. Go! Racing team, with me, Rod McLane, and Ali Naimi, would be able to win this one.  Because we were running in the “O” class, which stands for Over, which consists of all production-based cars with an engine larger than 1.7L.  In other words, a supercharged Corvette would be in the same class.

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This weekend was the double-points season finale for the San Francisco Region’s racing season.  Also this weekend was the 49th annual Illgen Enduro, which I’ll cover in another post.

I was looking forward to the weekend even though it was way up at Thunderhill, primarily because the track was repaved this summer and this would be our first chance to drive on the new pavement.  Quick review: the track is smooth and quite grippy.  The exit berms are also very gentle so they are easy to use.  Some of the apex berms are a little taller than they used to be, but nothing too dramatic.  In any case, I figured that most classes would set a new track record, although with the high air temps (upper ’80s) and new very black pavement, perhaps conditions weren’t optimal.

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The buzz leading up to the weekend was the weather — rain was forecast for Saturday.  This is news because here in sunny California, we pretty much never see rain during the racing season.  And that means that most of us don’t bother buying and carrying around rain tires that we’ll never use.  And that means that when it rains, we feel like we’re basically going to have a bad weekend.

But the forecast for Sunday was fine, and 2 of the 3 races were going to be on Sunday, so at least there’s that!

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Wow, what a weekend! Fantastic weather here in the bay area, a nice double race at my favorite track, and some intense competition … awesome, just the way I like it!

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This weekend was probably my only Thunderhill race of the season. I wanted to make it good!

I’ll bottom line it for you: weather was hot & smoky, earned my first ever overall pole, led the race flag-to-flag, made a couple of new friends in the paddock, and was still home by 1:30pm on Sunday. But keep reading for the details!

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Another fantastic race in SCCA SFR Group 5. This switch to group 5 was actually a very good thing for me. The competition is tighter (even if it’s with cars in other classes) and I feel like it’s raising my game by quite a bit. Group 5 is about the same size as group 1 (50+ cars this weekend), but the difference is that there are more cars at a very similar performance level, and we’re at the front of the group instead of mid-pack.

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