What a great time!
We had, for Roebling, a big field. With the exception of a couple special IFU weekends over the years, it was the biggest Roebling field ever. 22 signed up, 2 no shows and 2 engine failures hurt our #'s, but one PTE 325e guy (Savannah based Bud Scott) kindly joined us so we could get back to 19 for deep Toyo Bucks.
We all went out for chow Friday night. Fred and I headed to the Mx place a little early to reserve a table for 15. Ultimately we had 30, count them 30, of us. It was terrific!
The weather was beautiful. Saturday had folks running some really fast times. I don’t have a feel for what happened around the field, I was struggling with some problems, but Rob Eskew won. We had some confusion at Impound that the new tech guys and I have to sort out.
I was losing oil pressure on left turns. The car was behaving like it had no right-side baffle in the oil pan. Oil pressure would consistently drop to 20psi in turn 3. I could make the behavior happen by simply scrubbing my tires in a L turn on the outlap. Hopefully I will find that the problem is indeed the my baffle has simply fallen off the side of my pan where I glued it 4-5yrs ago with JB Weld. Yes, I really did that. . I got impatient with the local AL welder, and my own attempts to weld AL were unimpressive.
After Sat Qual I put in an extra quart of oil. That is to say, I was 2 quarts high. This made the engine unhappy and after filling up the bottle I have connected to the rocker arm vent, some excess oil wetted down the underside of the car and got on my tires. In my Sat race video I got so sideways in 7 that, for the very first time ever, I had to put in 360deg of steering to keep the car on the track. I had a GTS2 guy right on my bumper and I’m sure he thought me a madman.
I also had big power problems in Saturday’s race. I wasn’t able to hit 5th gear on the front straight until braking zone marker 5. Once I realized that I’d been blowing oil, I pulled out my spark plugs expecting to find them oil-soaked. But no, they were fine. The only other theory I could come up with was that the oil had soaked my O2 sensor. I was left in “hope” mode, hoping that the problem would go away. I figured that if the problem was indeed an oil-soaked O2 sensor, that maybe the oil would burn off. For some reason it had not occurred to me to watch my F/A meter to see if maybe the O2 sensor was leaning out my mixture or something.
Hope mode worked. The problem was gone on Sunday.
Saturday night we had great low country boil for chow at the banquet. There was tons of food. Everyone was kinda tired so we, uncharacteristically, didn’t go out for chow.
Sunday I figured I’d hope for the best re. oil pressure. Sure, I wanted to race, but I also wanted to go home with a block that didn’t have any big holes in it.
My old tires were pretty bad for Saturday’s race, so I put on a different set of old tires for Sunday. To my surprise, one of them had no air in it at all. I figured that one of my kids had been fooling with it. I put air in the tire and checked it’s pressure after a couple hours. The tire seemed fine.
I started Sunday’s race in the back with Robert and Fred. I got a good start and zoomed past a few folks. But after a few turns I started having problems keeping my rear under me. I felt it out for a couple laps, and finally decided that it was likely that the damn tire wasn’t so fine after all. I was 3 laps into a 40min race. I figured that I had time to go in, sort this out, and get back in the race. So I headed for the pits.
What followed was agony as I tried to get the pit-in guy to check the tire pressure on my LR tire. We could barely make out what each other was saying, and he was clearly not emotionally prepared to switch gears from “pit-in official” to “find a fucking air pressure gauge guy.”
Pit-in official patiently explained that he was sorry but he didn’t have an air pressure gauge. I encouraged him, at the tops of my lungs, to kindly ask one of the 6 guys, standing in various places on the pit wall with an air pressure gauge hanging out of their pocket, if they could spare a moment to check the motherfucking air pressure in my LR tire.
I worry now that I may have been a teensy bit too assertive re. enlisting aid.
The tire was at 10psi. So I hustled to SpecE30 land looking for someone that could change my tire w/0 me having to unstrap. And there was Danny Parkhurst. Danny didn’t have to shift gears at all. It took 1sec to explain the problem and he raced to find some tire, any tire, jack, gun and torque wrench. In 60secs I was turning around and heading back for the pits.
It was one of Robert Patton’s tires. Let me state it now for all who gather here, Robert is really much faster than his lap times would have us believe. I’ve now raced on one of Robert’s tires and it’s truly awful. I went from drifting with big countersteer because of a flat, to drifting with big countersteer because of a Robert tire.
Race blown, I just went looking for folks to fool with. And that turned out to be plenty of fun. In the relatively consequence free environment that is Roebling, I had a good training session on dealing with lots of slip. I’d fight with a couple folks for a couple laps, and if I fell back and if it just seemed impossible to keep up with the traction I had, I’d just back off and putt-putt for a minute so another group would catch up. The last lap I fought it out with BillZ and we had great fun.
I’m usually a bit wary of going 2-wide turn after turn. I usually make a decision early on as to who is going to come out best, and if it’s not me, I back out instead of fighting it out in the high risk situation probably for naught. But I was feeling plucky at RR and spend a lot more time then usual 2-wide in turns. Heck, there was a lot of that everywhere. It was really cool, it was really fun. I saw a lot of friends fighting it out together, but being careful to give the other guy enough room to make it work if they could. It was really a great commentary on SpecE30.
