My first trip to VIR. What a great track! Very challenging, decent run-off room, and just great fun. I can see why everyone speaks so highly of it. It was also interesting to see how a different NASA region runs an event.
Had a long drive up there. Freeway construction added 4hrs to the roadtrip Thur night so 7hrs turned into 11 and I didn’t pull into VIR until after 01 Thur night. 11hrs? For god’s sakes I could probably make it to mid-Ohio in 11hrs.
Tom Hall went out with me for my first session and that helped me a lot. Later in the day I did a couple laps with Cobetto driving his E30 DD. Man is Cobetto fast.
Saturday morning had a crisis. About halfway thru a session the motor started missing, seemed to get over it, then missed a bit and died. I was thinking “this can’t be happening. I can’t possibly lose another engine”. But the symptoms struck me as gas or spark, so I was optimistic that I’d be able to figure out the problem.
After I got towed back to the paddock I poked around a bit and noticed that the gas lines to/from the rail seemed too soft. They should be fairly hard because of residual pressure. “Can I be out of fuel?”
The car only ran 4 laps at CMP in Feb so it’s tank should have been full when I got to VIR. And I didn’t really get that much time on the track on Friday so I figured I should have almost 1/2 a tank. My gas gauge can’t be trusted so I’ve always just put gas in once it started hiccuping, or after a hard hour, whichever comes first.
I put in more gas and it fired right up. “WTF, over”. And then I realized that I’d not accounted for all the engine running I’d done in my garage. First troubleshooting the failed motor, then troubleshooting the spare, and finally running the spare around to make sure everything was ok. I’d simply run out of gas. Idiot.
My next session was the last Saturday session. It was the shortest session ever attempted. We started our 25min session 10min late, went out on our first lap behind a pace car, and then ended the session 10min early. I think that I got in 2 good laps.
Sunday morning I finally got in a good dry session and I started getting more comfortable on the track. At that point I started thinking “I could race here”.
Which is when disaster struck.
In my second Sunday session my oil pressure warning lights, which under low-light conditions will burn your retinas right out of your skull, flared on like aircraft landing lights. “HOLY SHIT” I exclaimed and my eyes were wide as saucers. I did a quick check of my OP gauge and it was at 0psi. I shifted to neutral and fearing that I was pouring out oil I headed for the grass. As soon as I was off track I turned off the engine. I figure that it took me 2 seconds to get from stunned disbelief to neutral, and then 3 more seconds to get the car turned off.
I got towed in again. A quick inspection didn’t show any obvious problems so I was thinking that maybe my oil pump died. I talked to Jim Levie and he suggested a failed oil filter as another possible cause. Jim also said that it’s likely that I caught the OP loss fast enough that I didn’t toast bearings so he told me that maybe I shouldn’t immed replace the bottom end, which was the plan I was putting together. Maybe I should just fix the problem and then see what OP I get.
Obviously oil pumps get replaced when engines are rebuilt, but I’ve not actually heard of one failing before. I ain’t blaming this one on me just yet. We’ll have to see what the problem turns out to be, but I didn’t remove the oil pan on the spare so it’s not like I failed to threadlock the oil pump bolts. And the oil filter is a Mobil1, as I recall, not some POS.
