ukrbmw wrote:
[quote]Rob in VA wrote:
Same here Rob, I already spray painted the worn out mark on my rear bumper ;)[/quote]
I have no idea what you’re talking about. 
VIR October 9-10th
ukrbmw
#22
Oh, and one last thing. Ranger’s new engine is no slouch. In the fun race we came out nose to tail on the back straight and by the end he had almost a full car on me!
Ranger
#23
Tom Hall and I helped out in Comp School on Friday. In session 3 my engine started missing at WOT between 4400-5500, precisely where the DME pulls back timing. I exited the session early and reseated all the connectors in the engine harness, and checked that the CPS was tight and 1mm from the harmonic balancer.
I finished in time to get out in session 4, but the problem re-occured after a few laps and I came back in, pulled the throttle body off and tested the TPS. It wasn’t signaling WOT and I didn’t have a spare. I called Jim Levy to put a post on the forums for anyone coming to VIR to bring a TPS, and I hunted around the paddock for one.
Shortly thereafter one of the comp school students hit Tom during a drill to practice passing. He was pretty unhappy about that.
I wandered over to DriveGear’s paddock area, the folks that rent SpecE30’s out of Philly, and Jonny Allen said that I could pull the TPS off of one of their rentals if I needed because it had been wrecked earlier that day. Over the course of the weekend I wore a trail to Jonny Allen looking for parts. I think he’d a happily given me a motor if I needed it. Jonny’s wasted on Philly, he’s clearly a SE kinda guy.
I was pretty desperate to fix this. If the problem sent me home I’d be screwed. I can’t simulate 5 full blast laps to get the engine hot, then WOT at high rpm at home in my garage.
I couldn’t find a better alternative so I pulled the TPS from the graciously offered wrecked Drive Gear car. It tested fine and it was on my car before dark.
Later, at the Drive Gear paddock mooching a fuel filter off of them, I attempted to regail Jonny with the story of poor Tom getting his car whacked hard by a comp school type and they said “that was our other car”. Dang. Two wrecked E30s. Bummer for Drive Gear.
Friday night Tom put my spare tie rod end on to replace the one that the Comp School student had bent, and used my toe boards to realign his car, really brother Jeff’s car I guess.
I went out for Saturday Practice with my functional TPS and it didn’t help.
I had to know for certain if my problem was fuel or ignition. I put my fuel pressure gauge on and it seemed fine in the paddock, but I couldn’t get the behavior to occur in the paddock so it wasn’t much of a test. What I needed to do was be able to watch fuel pressure while I ran hot laps. Hmmm. “I wonder if I could find some fuel line and rig up the fuel pressure gauge such that I could see it from the driver’s seat?”
I borrowed 6’ of fuel line from Chris Sneed and used the extra hose to allow me to flex tie the fuel pressure gauge to the windshield wiper. It was kind of a fuel pressure ghetto Heads Up Display.
I was a little worried they weren’t going to let me out on the track like that, but it had to be tried. 4 laps into Qual I was able to pull back into the pits pretty comfortable that fuel wasn’t the problem.
The next idea was to take the car to the dyno. “Maybe something would show up on the dyno traces that would help. Or…those dyno guys are pretty smart, maybe they’d have some good ideas”, I thought. I was pretty desparate to figure this out while I had a way to do hot laps. 45min later and $100 poorer I really hadn’t accomplished anything. On the 8th run the engine was hot enough to misbehave and hp dropped to 125.
At least I could be reasonably confident that the problem was ignition. So for lack of better ideas I figured I’d start replacing relatively new ignition parts. I pulled the plugs. They came out oddly easily. Certainly not at the spec’d 16ftlbs. And 3 of them had way too much gap. I mooched new plugs off of Jonny, carefully gapped them and put them in. Then I went out on the track entrance road and tried to do some WOT tests without getting myself thrown out of VIR. After 15min of that I figured I’d given it a decent test and I was getting more and more worried about the VIR management getting pissed at me. Critically tho, I couldn’t replicate the problem. When I got back to the pits Race 1 started. Figuring, “what the hell I might as well join them to test this”, I hustled for my gear.
By the time I got to the pits Race 1 was half over. I’m sure there were some folks on the front straight surprised when I roared out of the pits. And the problem seemed to be fixed.
I’m not sure what the problem was. Maybe it was the bad gaps, maybe the fact that they weren’t in tight enough affected the plug’s ground or compression gases were leaking out. Half as tight as spec on a warm head is probably 1/4 as tight on a hot head. Aluminum expands a lot more then steel plugs.
Saturday Race 2 was great fun. I started near the rear and because I’m miserable at VIR I don’t think I passed anyone, but the sun was shining, I was at VIR, there was lots of cars, and I was racing SpecE30. It was terrific.
The only downer on Saturday was that I punked ScottMc. I was supposed to bring him a set of tires and I had a stupid attack and failed him.
Sunday was the “Fun Race”. They inverted the field which put me at position 2. Tom Hall had position 1, but I figured his engine problems might be enough that I could take turn 1 away from him. At the Green I charged forward, got a little ahead of Tom, and as two cars tried to sneak up on the outside to make it 3 wide into turn 1, I made my entrance a little wide to make life a little less easy for them.
For the next 4 laps folks fought to get by me. I was ready to give the lead to the first guy that got me honestly, but they couldn’t quite get position enough to beat my mild attempts to not “roll over like a patsy”. Damn it was fun. After 15min or so we got our first of two FCY’s that ended up eating 20min of the race. On the second FCY the guy in front of me hit his brakes hard and I almost rear-ended him. Note to driver…FCY doesn’t mean hit your brakes. That was immediately followed by another SpecE30 passing both of us. Note to him…FCY doesn’t mean take 2 positions.
I did poorly at the Green that followed. I was in those turns just short of the front straight, watching the towers like a hawk. The flag guy turns to his buddy and kind of absently drops the double yellow about half way down. Not all the way, just halfway. It looked for all the world like he’d simply distracted himself talking to his buddy and allowed his arm to drop a bit. I spent two precious seconds wracked by indecision and suddenly heard the roar of engines. I managed to punk myself two places with that goatscrew .
In the laps that followed I got embroiled in the Miata race. That too was fun. There was lots of slicing and dicing due to traffic management, and to their apparent delight I was perfectly willing to help them along a bit. An idea that caused me some anxeity because I’d never done that before. But they seemed to really really want to be helped along a bit so I tried my best to help.
At one point I was heading into Oak Tree and I waved 2 Miata’s by. Just as we were two wide going in, two Miatas spun in front of us. One of them was taking up almost the whole track. The Miatas passing me went right and I went left, as if we’d practiced it for days. Nice.
The tow home. Just before I left Savannah Thur afternoon, I noted that a trailer tire was 30psi instead of 50. So I put some more air in it and bought a bottle of tire goop just in case. On Sunday morning I noted that the tire was back to 30psi so I resolved to put the goop in it and some more air just before leaving VIR.
On the way home I started noticing that the trailer wasn’t quite handling right. In my first year or two I wouldn’t have noticed it, but after 4yrs of towing I’m anal about the car being in exactly the right place on the trailer. If it’s off by an inch I can tell. And the slight amount of wiggling I would expect at 78mph was occuring at 73mph. I told myself that the car must not be quite in the right place, but resolved to check the tire’s pressure when I refueled.
2hrs into the trip I’m in some 'ville and I had to take a hard right. That allowed me to barely see the tire in the right mirror. The tire looked wrong so I pulled over. Shit, flat. The tire looked intact, which is better then a melted mishapened doughnut, but it was only barely on the rim. And I’m still 5hrs from home. Shit.
I started thinking how I might try to put the trailer’s spare on without removing the car from the trailer. It’s a light trailer and heavy duty axles, I figured 3 tires ought to be able to support the strain. I got the idea that maybe I could back over a curb to get the flat tire up in the air. And maybe use one of my ramps for a little more elevation. Worked perfect.
I had a good time hanging out with the Hall’s and their buddies, and also Sneed & crew. MidAtl bonding seems a little haphazard by SE standards so I didn’t get much chance to swap beers and lies with others. I’m grateful for Jonny Allen’s willingness to let me mooch parts. 
jtower
#26
we did that same exact fuel pressure thing on our lemons car last year, it would run great for 20 min then the “rev limiter” would start dropping until it was barely over 3k. we all thought it was ignition but the fuel gauge told us otherwise and we traced it to a bad fuel pump.
evan and i arrived on sun am to pick up tires from phil’s and watch the fun race. we didn’t know about the inverted field and were somewhat surprised to see ranger in the front row (since it’s not exactly his best track). but for the first several laps the field came into view and there he was leading the race, made us right proud. good job mate!
seconded on the drive gear guys, pity they’re so far away from the SE. jonny is a nice guy, great driver, and a damn good cook too.
RGrace
#27
Roller coaster of a weekend. Friday the car felt horrible, I’ll admit the only “maintenance” I did since nationals was replace the broken tie rod…I put the toe plates on it after the first session to find that the rear toe was out over a half inch and the front toe was in (odd since I set the front toe when I changed the tie rod). I adjusted the front toe back to where I wanted it but didn’t do anything with the rear because it seems that no matter what I do (set, tighten, weld, etc.) to the rear trailing arm bushings they walk on me (CAUTION: this may result in disqualification from national championship qualifying races that you win). My first off season plan is to put some legitimate trailing arm bushings in the car.
Anyway, back to the story…the car felt pretty bad and I thought that only part of it was due to the half inch toe out in the rear. It felt like something in the front end was loose or broken, in certain left handers (T10 being one of them) I would hear a “pop” as the car settled and then the car would skate on me. The issue actually made me go off in T10. Jonny Allen, Rick “Virgilio” Mariani, and Rick Coffer helped me search for the issue…it wasn’t until Saturday morning on the lift in the RRT trailer (thanks Bruce) that I found out it was a right front control arm…oops. It all made sense at this point…including why my front alignment was so far off from two days prior.
The nut was backing off, as a result of the movement the threads on the control arm ball joint were stripped out. We had to replace the entire control arm Saturday morning before qualifying. A HUGE thanks to Jonny and team DriveGear for helping me out with a spare control arm. Everyone went out for qualifying and I was still sitting in the paddock with jack stands under the car. Thanks to my dad we got the control arm changed and I was able to make it out, I was going 10/10th on my out lap hoping that I would be able to make it around before the checkered flag came out so that I could at least get ONE qualifying lap…and sure enough I got ONE lap…behind a 944 from the bottom of the esses to Oak Tree. Somehow it was good enough for P5.
Started P5, and was in P2 by the exit of T3. Spent a few more laps reeling in Cobetto, came out of Oak Tree bumper to bumper and then made the pass going up the back straight. Held on to P1 to get my third win of the season…/ever!
The grid for the second race was set by the lap times from the first race, as a result I was on pole with Cobetto P2. The race was pretty uneventful, it was Grace, Cobetto, Gagliardo at the finish.
I was happy about the wins but pretty disappointed that I lost the Championship to Cobetto by something like 10 points…just two positions or one more win somewhere along the season would have done the job. Congrats to Cobetto, he’s a great driver and I have learned a lot from him this year both on and off track.
Once the kegs were dry at the OG party, Jonny, Rick, Brandon, and I, as well as a number of our other NASA friends went back to the E30 camp in the paddock to build a campfire, empty some coolers, and celebrate another successful season.
It was while I was sitting around the fire with my friends and competitors that I realized as disappointing as a close championship loss is, I have come a long way this season. At the March event I got my first podium and led my first race (in the rain!) and six months later I finished second in the MA championship, had a proud showing at nationals, an awesome road trip to Utah with my dad, countless epic racing battles, and four race wins.
Props to you if you’re still reading at this point, I really need to thank my dad for making it all possible, he takes care of pretty much everything so that all I need to do is focus on driving. Also, a big thanks to the whole E30 crew. I have been bumming parts, tools, and advice from guys like Jonny Allen, Andrew Zimmerman, Bob Ott, Rick Mariani, Mike Davidson, Skip, Cobetto, and MikeSkeen.com and many others. If it weren’t for DriveGears willingness to help out with parts and advice I would have had three or four DNFs this season.
I passed on the Sunday morning Fun Run due to a combination of things. The fact that I had made it all season without bending any metal made me want to call it good and not test my luck. Also the rear alignment was so far off that the car wasn’t exactly fun to drive…but boy does it rotate!..especially in the uphill esses. I played the role of spectator, you guys put on a good show. Mariani and Gagliardo put on a good show. Carter schooled EVERYONE on the restart going from the back of the pack to P1, when the double yellows drop you GO! Carter held onto it and won the race, he is now 2-0 in the OctoberFAST one hour fun run. Congrats Carter!
Congratulations and thanks for a great season everyone! See you in February!
Patton
#28
Scott and Robert, thanks for the weekend race write-ups.
Robert, try dropping the subframe and installing the Ireland weld-on kit to the subframe. I replaced my RTABs with good ole BMW rubber bushings and the Ireland kit does a nice job of holding everything on the rear in place. Mark your toe/camber settings with yellow paint to make in-pit corrections easy.
Make the changes before the SE event at CMP in November and come on down to race with us.
Regards, RP