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Drove 40 minutes one way to get to the one stupid gas station in all of Charlotte that has e85.
I have fuel drums so 30 gallons were procured.
Also this price was a complete rip off. There are some stations quite a way NE of Charlotte that have the delicious corn juice for a lt least $1 per gallon less.
You guys don't have the new Sheetz stations with e85 in Charlotte?
The closest one I know of is in Salisbury...maybe Concord?
If they have one in Charlotte now that would be great.
Sheetz is the place that I was talking about that has E85 at least $1/gal cheaper than what I paid today. I checked the last time I was on my way back from VIR. I had one of my drums with me but it had ~5 gallons of "bad" gas in it and I didn't want to mix...
I've been working on this war machine basically every night for at least a week. Trying to actually be ready for a race weekend before the day of the race for once...
New engine mounts installed:
Also built a super Miata spec intake (I think...I'm not so good at measuring):
I also spent a bunch of time trying to mount a spare seat in the passenger side so I could potentially take passengers at CMP...that has gone...poorly.
I hate mounting race seats in miatas. My first attempt at such a thing was more than ten years ago and it still sucks. Or maybe I'm not a good learner?
Street tuning E85 tomorrow, at least that's the plan. Dyno time before this Friday is unlikely so the initial E85 tune is going to have to be all street tuning...
If the seat passes the "shake" test I'll gladly give it a whirl this weekend. Riding with Marcus last time was a blast. How many horsetorques are you expecting to gain from the corn?
If the seat passes the "shake" test I'll gladly give it a whirl this weekend. Riding with Marcus last time was a blast. How many horsetorques are you expecting to gain from the corn?
I was looking at the seat last night really wanting to just say "eff it" and pull it out and bolt the ballast plate back in.
I'll have another go at it this evening but I'd say it's about 50:50 whether or not this thing has a passenger seat in it for the weekend.
Overdue update: Didn't do that well at CMP. Thought I could overcome the ~20 heat cycle Hoosiers and still be competitive, not really. Tires were okay the first session or two, but got worse and worse throughout the weekend. E85 tune was way lean up top, not sure why. Anyway, decided to pack up my toys and say screw you NASA (for now)...
We'll be racing with ChampCar next weekend at Barber. I've been working on the car to make it more enduro ready. I bought this car because I thought it would be less work but all I do is work on it all the time...
Enduro prep included: Swap to OEM radiator, swap back to Bilstein dampers, brand new rear hubs from Mazdaspeed, re-pack and check front hubs, new RS-4s on new 15x9 wheels, installing a full fire system, installing a radio, fluid changes all around, fixing a leaky rear diff seal, adding a flex pipe to the exhaust, adding front brake ducting, swapping back to 93 octane, and on and on.
We'll be running as a 540pt Chumpcar (aka ChampCar starting nowish) as basically an un-optimized PTE car on street tires. So...we're going to have fun, not to be competitive. 540 pts means we'll have to start with penalty laps, and I don't even think we'll be one of the top 10 fastest miatas...
Pics:
It's hard to tell, but behind that rusty brake rotor is a shiny new delicious rear hub from Mazdaspeed. The "life" of the previous rear hubs was unknown. Now I have a starting point for lifeing these parts. I'm thinking 100 hours or every year, whichever comes first?
New 15x9 Konigs with 225/45/15 RS-4s. I'm eager to try these tires out.
Liquid motivation.
Gold foil wrapped intake = +0.03 horsepowers!
Last edited by Efini~FC3S; 12-02-2017 at 10:49 AM.
Reason: More typos than a post from an iPhone...
Endurance racing, YES!!! It's a **** ton of work, lots of sitting around, but really fun too.
Focus all your attention on weight, the more you save, the less stress goes on your brakes, tires, fuel, etc. I guess the stock radiator does technically help with that...
Focus all your attention on weight, the more you save, the less stress goes on your brakes, tires, fuel, etc. I guess the stock radiator does technically help with that...
Unfortunately, weight has not been a priority for this car to this point as I've had to ballast up to make PTE weight. There's definitely some low hanging fruit in this regard but there's not time for this race. It will definitely be more of a priority going forward.
Stickered up with 2018 ChampCar required stickerz:
New kitty is unsure
Race prep is almost complete... main thing left to do is install the new 2.25L fire system.
Unless you watch the weather channel religiously you may have had no idea that parts of Alabama were hit with snow fall of biblical proportions (well, for the deep south at least) last Friday.
So, I finished race prepping the car Thursday late. Which included an emergency front lower arm replacement along with some welding, etc. Annoying things to find when you should be loading the trailer. Loaded the car and parts/spares/tools/etc. late Thursday and left Charlotte Friday around 10AM heading towards Birmingham.
Then this happened:
That video was taken somewhere around the Alabama/Georgia border on I20 heading west...Friday maybe 3PM.
Some pics from Barber at the same time:
Needless to say, the tow from Charlotte to Birmingham took much longer than expected, but we got to Alabama and got the car tech'd by ChampCar.
Friday night I noticed the alternator was overcharging the electrical system, so we changed an alternator Friday night in the FREEZING cold and finished wrapping up pre-race preparation (bled brakes, checked alignment).
Saturday morning we were up at the butt crack of a snowy dawn to get the track, get the car warmed up and head to the 7am driver's meeting to see if the race would start on time. The sun was out, the track surface was clear, but it was cold and there was snow everywhere.
Surprisingly, ChampCar and Barber were ready to go at 8am Saturday morning after an apocalyptic southern snow less than 24 hours beforehand. None of the other drivers were especially excited about trying out a new car on a new (to them) track in 25 degree weather with snow and dampness everywhere, so I was voluntold to start the race. We did quite a few pace laps to get everything up to temp, and surprisingly the track wasn't too bad, and the RS4s warmed up okay and handled the cold condition without issue.
The green flag flew at 8:07AM Saturday morning and I promptly drove around 20+ cars who were (understandably) timid in the cold conditions. In our rush to get the car ready we did not set up a camera Saturday morning. I wish we would have, it was a blast driving around people on the outside of corners with a winter wonderland in the background.
It's hard to express how bizarre and simultaneously amazing it was to drive Barber with a white snow back drop. Dropping a wheel off track wasn't really an option, wet snow waited everywhere. Cars spun off and sprayed delicate explosions of snowflakes everywhere. Clipping apexes sent clouds of snow dust into the path of following cars. It was bizarre. It was beautiful. It was something I never thought I would experience racing. It was awesome.
By the end of my 1 hour and 50 minute stint I was running 3rd or 4th overall. I had no idea what position I was in, but I knew there were only a couple cars on track faster than me. One was an SC300 that was driving extremely aggressively and crashed promptly about 30-40 minutes into the race. The other was Tom O'Gorman (PWC Pro Driver) in a K24 Honda Fit that could not go very long on brakes/tires/fuel, and the other was a 160hp+ Porsche 944 that handled as well as any miata and was well driven (Team "Cone Crushers").
My cousin got in the car after me and drove conservatively, but quickly. We promptly took the lead of the race Saturday about 11am (we were car #353):
My cousin drove well, had good pace, and kept us in the lead for some time. At the time I thought timing & scoring had forgotten to add our penalty laps so the leaderboard must have been a false positive. We should have been 5 laps down at this point.
~2 hours later my cousin came to the pits and we put my uncle in the car. My uncle is not as fast as my cousin and I, and he had literally never sat in a miata until Friday evening, but he got in the car and headed out. He quickly got up to a reasonable place and kept us in the top 5 for the next two hours. Last to go was our slowest driver...we pitted about 2pm in I think 3rd or 4th place. I still thought our position was falsely reported because our penalty laps had not been recorded. Our fourth driver went out on track and was running extremely slow lap times. He called in after a bit and said the car wasn't revving over 4000rpm. It was missing, and running poorly. We brought the car in and I noticed the lower alternator pivot bolt was completely loose and the alt. belt was slipping.
We pulled the car into the paddock and tightened up the alternator, added a bunch of red loctitie and hoped the car would run for the last hour or so. It did, but our renter never really got comfortable in the car and we finished poorly. The alternator fix cost us ~35 minutes and something like 20 places.
But we finished on Saturday, and much fun was had by all:
Saturday night we "fixed" the alternator by switching the lower pivot bolt to a through-bolt and nut solution and did some other work to get it ready for Sunday's race. We would actually have video and lap timing for Sunday...like a proper race team.
Sunday morning was another ridiculously early morning, and was even colder than Saturday morning. But there was abundant sunshine by 8AM and the track and other roads were clearer than Saturday. My cousin would start the Sunday race, followed by our renter, my uncle, and then I would bat clean up and see what we could do in the last ~two hours.
Sunday morning pre-race:
Due to a random drawing and a reverse grid from Saturday we would start Sunday's race in ~40th place. Air and track temperatures were even colder than Saturday but ChampCar did only two warm-up/pace laps before throwing the green. Undeterred my Cousin put his head down and start clicking off faster and faster laps. After about 90 minutes he had gone from 40th place to 4th place. We should have video from this stint. I will hopefully post later.
After 1 hour and 50 minutes my cousin reported he didn't think he could make it two full hours on fuel. We got ready for our first pit stop and waited for him. He came into pit lane and stopped right at pit entry. I sprinted down half the pit lane and pushed this stupid POS a few hundred meters into our pit stall. We fueled the car up and put the renter in the car. Amazingly, even after pushing the car half the pit lane length, we finished our pit stop with 30 seconds to spare. The new driver went to start the car and...nothing. I cycled the master a few times to cycle the fuel pump...still nothing. We cycled more times, checked everything, cranked the car more times...still it wouldn't run. Finally, more cycling of the fuel pump got the car running. We sent our driver out and hoped we hadn't lost too much time in the pit.
The new driver's times improved drastically over Saturday and things were looking up. It didn't last long...40 minutes into his stint he called in saying the car was running poorly again. We pulled him in and I check all the engine sensors. The cam position sensor seemed a little loose, so I snugged it up and sent him back out. 2 laps later and the car died on course. We had the tow truck tow him back to the paddock.
We spent basically the rest of the day working on the car. We never got it running right. We found an enormous exhaust leak and had to do some welding. We thought maybe running the car dry on fuel had clogged the fuel filter or messed up the fuel pump. An auto-parts store run scored us a new fuel pump, but swapping it didn't improve the situation. By the end of the day, the car was displaying some bizarre electrical issues. It was running super lean. It would start up and run fine, then the dash lights would flicker and it would randomly die.
Anyway, we never really got back on track Sunday...it looked like this mostly:
A disappointing end to the weekend, but really, a memorable one and we've had worse??
So in summary: The car was awesome at Barber. It's not ChumpCar optimized at all, not even close. Still, we led the race on Saturday for over an hour, and ran in the top 5 for basically 6 of 8 hours. We had the 10th fastest (out of 50+) lap on Saturday, and the 7th fastest on Sunday. Turns out we never had any penalty laps. ChumpCar re-did the points value on the 99-00 miata at some point and now it starts as a 450 point car. With the bilsteins, coil-overs, and AWR engine mounts we were at exactly 500 pts. The 225 RS4s on 15x9 tires had tremendous grip. The tires and brakes look great even after ~10 hours of running. Everyone loved driving the car and talked about how much fun it was to drive and how much mechanical grip it had.
Unfortunately, we probably threw away a podium finish due to some BS electrical issue...likely a ground or something simple like that.
I'll post video later as soon as it's posted.
P.S. - Our fastest lap on Sunday was 1:46.815. The official TTE record is 1:46.0xx on Hoosiers...
Besides the annoying drive down, that looks like a lot of fun! I'm surprised that setup fits so easily in Chumpcar, makes it a lot more appealing. Driving the track with the snow as the background at Barber does sound amazing, super jelly.
Originally Posted by Efini~FC3S
P.S. - Our fastest lap on Sunday was 1:46.815. The official TTE record is 1:46.0xx on Hoosiers...
That's a soft record with a hack driver set in July . TTD record was reset the same weekend at a 1:43.599. The unofficial TTE record is 1:43.9
11-04-2017, 05:43 PM
0
. TTD record was reset the same weekend at a 1:43.599. The unofficial TTE record is 1:43.9 
