Good Driving Trumps Rain, Cracked Cases & Brillo Pads
29Apr16; Fri. We roll onto CMP property about zero dark thirty, seeing Hawk and Slick are already there and sleeping in their dome tent near our assigned garage bay #22. Jamrod and Justin unpack. I sleep on my cot outside, under a fold-out 10x10 tent, and my poncho liner. The predawn winds are cold.
We spend the day organizing our parts, tools, and supplies in the garage bay, making the discovery the big, rusty, 1977 Chevy C10 pickup truck in the bay beside us is a high school project car from North Carolina and it is swarmed by a dozen (more or less) teen workers. Hard to count the busy little wanna-be racers. The LeMons tech staff is making them rebuild their roll cage so it has safely installed and welded spreader plates.
Justin, Hawkeye, Slick, and Jamrod take the BW through tech, all in full LeMons dress-up. Justin wears a very yellow and black striped "Killer Bee" suit, carrying a fake AK-47 with a bandolier of plastic, belted machine gun ammo slung around his neck. Hawk wears the horror movie version of the Cisco Kid's embroidered gay caballero suit, with black mascara around his eyes to conceal his skin.
Slick's costume is all satin as a masked, caped, bare-chested Mexican wrestler.
The frazzled high school kids beside us see it all and don't know whether to run or keep working.
30Apr16: Sat. Ambient temp mid-70's (F), 71 cars are in the field. I have the Kads on 36mm venturis, 44mm throttle bodies, and 160 mains. 1.5 psi fuel pressure.
Slick is first out, told to run an hour and a half if possible. Rain is forecast and Slick is a smooth and efficient driver. The green flag goes down at 0900 EST, and under gray cloud overcast, the field roars away. The Blitzwagen sounds strong and aggressive. We are on brand new Falken Ziex ZE329 P205/50R15 tires (Treadwear 400, hard compound) and expect them to be a bit slippery in the wet. We start with 26 psi front, 28 psi rear.
Within an hour, we have trouble. We have smoke streaming off the engine and Slick sees his yellow oil pressure warning light flash and stay on. He rolls to a stop and waits to be towed in. What had gone wrong?
Once off the flatbed and in the garage bay, we discover the engine literally full of oil. It had been blowing out the alternator stand vent to the catch can and out the breather there to spatter the exhaust (that was the smoke). The oil tank dipstick dry. Popping off the valve covers dumped a flood of oil into the big drip pan under the engine. The trapped oil had been being pumped to the engine but could not be pumped out.
Jamrod quickly removes the oil plate off the bottom of the engine case and reveals a big plug of foreign material blocking the screened oil pickup. The material, on close examination, is a soggy, very mulched-up mass of fine metal fibers, like a Brillo pad. We reseal the engine, pour in more Rotella 15-40 "Triple Protection" diesel oil (it has ZDDP), while we expend whole cans of Brake-Clean spray degreasing the engine. Amongst all this, we find the oil pressure warning light wire contact was loose, and tighten it.
We loose laps, but we are soon back in the race, no physical damage done. Slick reported oil pressure was a steady 20 psi while hot, and running at 220° to 240° F. Both of these were excellent with the dry sump & oil pump system.
We watch the kids. They are turning laps, going slow and getting in everyone's way, but making laps.
Rain clouds threaten. We are getting occasional sprinkles, so we keep Slick as driver. We are okay with rain. It covers any oil smoke that may burn off the headers.
Finally, Steve comes in with soft brakes. The Porterfield front pads are extremely worn. This is completely unexpected. We just have one race -- Barber in February -- on them. The Porterfield AP-30's we use in our rear ATE calipers usually last an entire season even in the front. We attribute this condition to the brakes being locked at Barber by the jammed brake pedal. We manage to find a track vendor with Hawk (brand) pads for our Wilwood Dynalites. Jamrod and Justin get them installed and the brakes bled.
Hawk goes out, and soon a car hits him in the right rear quarter panel, breaking the vented section of the aft fender, harming some wiring, and making both brake lights very erratic. Hawk never felt it. We see oil smoke again, think we have a seeping VDO dual-pole oil pressure sender (gauge and warning light), and tighten it.
The rain comes, hard, on and off. We postpone Justin's stint as he has never driven the Blitzwagen in rain or shine. Slick goes back out, running as hard as he can in the squalls, dodging spinning cars. When he evades an out of control Hooptie in Turn 11, he leaves the road with all four wheels, and is flagged in to the Penalty Box.
"Don't you know it's wet out there?" the judge's admonish him. It's the same thing they are saying to everybody. They think they're funny.
Justin takes his first driving stint in late afternoon as the skies clear. He is a motorcycle racer, and adjusts to the Blitzwagen quickly. The corner workers watch him drive, and deliver some harassment for the on-again-off-again tail lights, and the now-visible oil smoke we trail. Justin brings it in. The oil warning light had been flashing more and more, probably a signal wire issue, but for the first time, the oil temp was too high at 260° F. With the humid air, we should be running cooler. Justin is pushing harder than Slick. I retard the timing by two degrees. Jamie sees oil dripping from or near the VDO sender. I now suspect a cracked sender boss. We tighten it again as best we can and send Justin out again. The oil temp drops, but the smoke continues ... and worsens.
On our last refuel stop, we can see the small leak at the sender is now a steady stream. We remove the VDO sender, and the problem is exposed. The engine case is cracked between the cylinder #4 upper right hand stud and the edge of the case, leading toward (but not yet into) the oil sender boss. This is a bad place for a crack. It is directly over an oil galley.
As the checkered flag is whipped over the rasping, blasting LeMons racers, we are in the garage, removing sheet metal off the Blitzwagen's engine, hoping for a short term J*B Weld fix.
Oil problems aside, Hawk, Slick, and Justin agree the engine is running strong and the handling good. Our refuel stops have gone smoothly, and fuel consumption (pump premium).
As Jamrod works on the engine, Hawkeye, Slick, and Justin again don their Saturday Night CMP paddock party costumes, this time with Hawk mixing powerful liquors and energy drinks into three one-gallon garden spray bottles. They then take the spray bottles and roam about spraying pressurized shots into willing racer's mouths and cups, of which there are many.
Below: The wing, and engine sheet metal removed. There is no doubt. We have a cracked case.
-9877Above: The fan housing is back on the Blitzwagen. Justin is unconscious on his air mattress. Empty liquor bottles and a sombrero litter the car.
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01May16; Sun. The sunrise is lost in darkening clouds and chilly wind. No engines crank early, there is just sullen silence as the racers that can stagger back to their garages, reeking of tequila and Windex. The sky increasingly looks like the moments before Dorothy's farmhouse was spun up, up, and away, bursts of cold rain gust in waves as the driver's strap in. Momma Nature has lessons to teach those who partied too hard last night.
We again have Slick back in the Blitzwagen, 12-gallon fuel cell topped off, tire pressures reduced to 24 psi front and 26 psi rear, and the J*B Weld holding for the moment as the 2.2 litre engine warms on the pace laps. Jamrod has wired a shop rag over the case crack to try and keep the oil from spraying back onto the exhaust.
There is little difference in the pace lap speed and racing speed once the green flag is whipped above the cars. Rain is now falling in sheets, and crashes of thunder overlap as track area trees are struck by lightning.
The announcer has to stop the race, explaining their insurance covers rain, but not lightning. Corner workers might be hit by lightning. The drivers are not happy with this. After all, the corner workers signed wavers.
Eventually the race is restarted. Yellow flags from spinouts appear within minutes. Later, a corner worker would tell us: "I've never seen more close calls."
We cycle driving shifts through Slick, Jamrod, Hawk, and Justin, all in the rain, refuel stops are preformed routinely and without error. The oil leak from the case crack is slowly getting worse. Jamrod's sopping rain-wet shop rag diaper is keeping oil off the exhaust.
Our drivers are mentally exhausted from the stress. You can see it in their faces. But we keep making laps. Jamrod becomes the rain master, and takes us from 4th overall in C class to 3rd.
Finally, there is 45 minutes left in the race. The skies actually seem to be clearing, but there is so much standing water on the track the cars are still throwing spray three feet high as they run.
"We've got third if nothing happens," Slick says, reading lap info off his smart phone app. We decide to put Hawk in to take the checkered. He is nervous. Jamrod swaps out the shop rag for a new one to keep us from being black flagged, and he is more nervous. He manages to break off both the oil pressure warning light and oil pressure gauge sensor wire terminals, and there is no time to repair them."You've got no oil pressure indicators," I yell to Hawk as he straps in, hoping he understands we probably have oil pressure, but not instrumentation. "Just get out there and go, go!"
Some background is necessary here. Hawk started his road racing campaign here at Carolina Motorsports Park, in 2011. He wants to win. A top-three win in class, a podium finish, is a win. He knows if not for the mystery-ingested Brillo pad, we'd be winning C-class outright.
Hawk hurtled the Blitzwagen around the drying track, mentally aware he should be taking it easy to at least guarantee a finish, but his accellerator foot is not capable of reasoning with the impending checkered flag. At no point in this race was our power down, and at no point was our handling impaired. Hawk gives it all he and the Blitzwagen have.
And so it was at 5:00 PM, Hawk and the Blitzwagen flew under the flag stand, checkered waving in the sun.
Above: Jamrod meets Hawk on Victory Lane, crowd cheering, beer spraying.
Above: The kids finish. I'm not naming their school in case someone determines exposing the underage to LeMons is the same as contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
3rd in C Class. Genuine podium finish, if LeMons owned a podium.
Best Lap 2:08.37 (Slick)
174 laps completed
