Sadly, it was finally my time. There are 3 weekends at home between now and the epic roadtrip of 5 days at Mid-O and my car is all smacked up.
After removing and replacing my rear subframe to install a weld on toe/camber kit and install aluminum bushings, I didn’t know what to expect out of rear handling. I also tightened up my rear sway to the same point that became the standard up until last Fall.
What I got was a tail happy car. Saturday night I swapped front/rear tires to see if that was the problem. It wasn’t.
This weekend was also an experiment to see if a set of tires can go a 4th weekend. The answer to that is “no”.
Today I was fighting hard to keep position in a tail happy car. I was doing a lot of drifting, but doing my godawful best with what I had. And I was making it work. Until I didn’t. I looped it at the exit of 3 and went into the tire wall at driver’s left.
Worn tires or not, I was hauling ass when I exited 3. I figure that I exited turn 3 at >70mph and didn’t slow much before I hit the tire wall. I kinda hit at front-right, but the broadside of the car (passenger side) is what ended up stove in against the tires.
My head whacked into the right side halo pretty hard. My brand new first weekend right side halo.
Sitting there thinking “well this is really a bummer”, I reached up to unfastened my HANS straps from my helmet. And to my surprise, my left side was already disconnected or something because the strap wasn’t, uh, there. Since I hit on the right side, it was my left side HANS strap that had taken a hard pull when I hit on front-right. I was thinking “holy shit, what a bad time to not get my HANS strap on correctly in the grid. Thank f**king god for the halo”.
They red flagged the race. I felt bad about that.
Once the E vehicles got to me I got out of the car. I pulled off my Impact helmet and to my surprise the left HANS anchor was not fastened to my helmet. The damned thing had been pulled clean off.
I would later take it to show Discovery Parts Ron. He pulled off the inside HANS fastener and said “Ah, that’s one of the counterfeit ones”.
“What?? Holy shit! You gotta be kidding me”, I said.
Ron said, “not kidding. Back some years ago Impact got accused of installing counterfeit HANS studs in their helmets”.
“Hey, I do recall that. I’ll be goddamned. Thank god for the halo”.
I found the HANS hardware that pulled out. It looks to me like the stud pulled out and left the nut/washer with 3 damaged threads. The post was fastened in tight when I put the buckle on at grid. It’s easy to feel when a post is loosening.
Sadly, my front video seems to want to crap out halfway into races. I have driver vid of the crash, but that’s not all that interesting.
There’s a lot of sheetmetal damage and my drive train moved a lot. The engine took out the radiator, although I don’t really know if the engine moved forward or the rad rearward. One or both tranny mounts busted off and the drive train is shifted enough that the shifter came free of something. Sheetmetal is just sheetmetal.
Subject change. A bunch of us went karting today when Qual was cancelled because the DE’rs and TT’rs wanted to get their crashes in before mine. The karting was really fun. But Devinney paid for the whole thing. Any participant that fails to send Devinney $25 ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Later edit. I talked to HANS today and they say that they never made a shiny nut/washer. That would seem to confirm Ron’s appraisel of the HANS studs.
