When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
It was really really pretty. I wish that I had a video of my sunrise stint, it was unlike anything I've ever done, I suspect it wouldn't have done it justice though. Watching the sunrise over the course of 2 hours while racing was just....amazing.
The sunrise stint in a 24 hour (or 25...) endurance race is honestly one of the coolest life experiences any driving/racing enthusiast can have. Everyone should try it.
I’ve been blessed to have had a few at some pretty amazing tracks (VIR and Thunderhill), and am looking forward to the next one!
This race started off a little meh on practice day. I went into it with a bad feeling because we had worked on the car all of two days in between the 24hr. I had been busy doing things on the house and I just didn't have the time I wanted to commit to the car. We were also running on tires from the first race because my teammate was pretty much out of money for the car. Brake pads in the rear were also a bit worn down, but we were hoping we could squeak by with what we had. At the end of the day, we were just hoping to have some good races and have a good time. We picked up a set of take-offs for the practice day to conserve our legal tires for as long as possible, added a cool suit (that we didn't even use lol), and headed to the track. This weekend was a tournament style weekend which meant that the overall winner could come from any class. There were 4 races per day with an even amount of points and whoever had the most points at the end of the weekend won. Day 1 included a 6hr enduro, 2x 35 minute sprints, and 1x 2 hour sprintduro. Day 2 included a 2.5hr sprint-duro, a 3.5hr enduro, and 2x 35 minute sprints.
I still had to finish up the alignment in the morning and as I was doing toe I noticed a clunk in the front suspension. MOTHER ******* STRUT NUTS. They weren't tight and causing a clunk despite us torquing them to the appropriate torque and using alllll the blue Loctite. I had previously bought a new M18 Fuel 1/2 impact, so it was time to send those nuts to torque hell. As we were pulling the strut out, we found that the brake lines were pretty much toast. ****. This is exactly what I was worried about.
My teammate went to get some new brake lines and I worked on getting the struts not ******* falling apart. It also seemed like there was entirely too much rear camber on the left side, I should have just measured it, but instead decided to just pull some out and move on. We got out for the first time right after lunch. The car wanted to rotate and felt terrible, nothing like what it felt like at ORP or before. I was struggling pretty hard to get it to do what I wanted. We checked tire temps and we still had too much rear camber on the left, so we pulled more out and took some pressure out all around as well. My teammate went out and had the same reaction, "dude, wtf is up with our car?". We measured the camber finally and it was at 4* vs 1* in the rear. No idea how that happened, I had to wind the arm in about 6-7 turns. With that fixed, the car felt decent again, weird lol.
We did some stuff after the track day, Katy picked up some pizza, and we went to bed at 9pm. Woo, sleep!
The next morning we sent our rental driver out for practice/qualifying. He hadn't been on track in a while, but did fine time-wise and felt comfortable with the car. He went out for the first 2hr stint and all went well (other than the red flags and half of his session being under pace car lol) I went out for the second stint and I was feeling pretty good, I was putting down some decent laps and had a great battle with #67-an e30. The guy was a good driver and any time I'd make any sort of mistake he'd dart past me. Then I'd catch him again after a lap or two and I'd get by him, but if I made a mistake or hesitated on passing another car, boom, he'd be by me again. Made for a really fun time and we must have swapped places 5-6 times over the course of an hour. We were under safety car for a while and while we were on the backside of the track I caught a glimpse of the water temp-in the red. I wasn't going to be able to limp it back to the pits at the pace we were doing under safety, so I had to wait for a flat tow.
We got it back to the pits and found a rock had punctured the radiator. It was also at that time that I found out we had been in 2nd in B class. Bummer. We stripped the front off the car in a couple minutes (woo for making things easily serviceable) and pulled the radiator while our rental driver called the local auto parts store to go get a new radiator. When he got back, we threw it in and started to fill it with water. Little did we know, there was a plug we were missing that was hiding in the packaging. We wouldn't find that until we were cleaning the pit space later that night though. Instead, AR came through AGAIN with Martin selling us their spare radiator. If you haven't noticed a theme, he's now saved us three races in a row lol. By the time we were finished installing it, there were only 20 minutes left until the next race, so we decided to just chill, take a breather, and prep for the next one. We fueled up the car in the pits and I got ready for my first sprint race!
We weren't really aware that the sprints were just by who lined up first, so we were kinda far back in B, but that's alright, hopefully, we could make up some time. As I was heading out for the warm-up lap, the traction control started cutting power. Normally, from time to time, after start-up, traction control will get mad for half a second and then just realize **** is fucked and turn off. Now it was fully cutting power and sending the car into limp mode. The only thing I was able to figure out was to turn off the key but not hit the killswitch, this would allow the engine to run but also disabled all gauges and accessories. What I didn't think about was that this also disabled abs. Braking has been a very strong point for our car and we can generally brake later than other cars. I fought it hard. Any touch of trail braking would send the car sideways, any touch of wheel input under braking would send the car sideways. Downshift? Don't even think about it. All the car wanted to do was rotate. I slid through turn 8 fully sideways 4 laps in a row. All I could think was, "this turn station worker must think I'm a ******* idiot" lmao. I did kinda get a hold of it by the end of the race, I was doing low 2:04s at the end vs the 2:02s/2:03s from earlier. But it was very hard to drive like that, it took every ounce of concentration to keep the car straight.
At the very end of the race, there was a safety car and I tried some more things to get traction control to **** off. I finally came to the solution of ignition off, killswitch (battery negative) off, ignition on, killswitch on with clutch in, bump-start. That would successfully turn it off. Unfortunately, I wouldn't get a chance to catch up as the safety car would finish out the race. Another bummer, but I survived a car that wanted to kill me haha
Since I didn't do all that great, my teammate's sprint was started towards the rear, his results weren't anything too crazy either. Sorry Christian!
Next up was a 2 hr evening sprint-duro. I was a little jealous my teammate got to drive in the dark at the ridge, but he and the rental driver came in 4th! Solid position! We all went out to dinner together and got to bed early again, a few ups and downs on the first day, but once again the car showed its ability to be competitive, we just needed to do everything right one race and we'd hopefully podium.
The next morning I was up for the first session of a 2.5-hour sprint duro. Traction control attacked again during warm-up lap, but this time I knew how to defeat it! I successfully got it to turn off (Christian will be deleting traction control from the computer this year lol) and we were off. I was cruising that morning. I did a 2:00.4 and actually saw a 1:59:XXX on the predictive before I hit traffic (Time attack yo!!!11! Predictive lap times yo!!). I was feeling pretty good and then had a small contact with an A-class car. A bit of both of our faults. I was passing a c car on the inside and he was giving me plenty of room. I left a little bit of room for the A car since I saw him coming up quick but he didn't take it so I started to close it off near the apex and figured he'd just go by on the next straight that was coming up. He apparently decided to go for it at the last minute but as I hit the apex he ran out of room so he slightly nudged my back corner. Since LD has a strict no contact rule, we both got black flagged. He told the marshall it was his fault, but I felt like I was just as much at fault as he was. Regardless, I was let back on track while he got a small time penalty. Unfortunately, I had been in first and the black flag meant I lost my lead.
Since the race had started 20 minutes late which put it at a 2:10 race, I asked the team to go see if we could do a driver only swap. It was originally a required fuel (5 min) stop but that was when the race was 2:30, not 2:10. Little did I know, it wasn't actually verified, so when we came and did a driver only swap, we still had to come back and do a 5min stop. I was a bit annoyed since I had specifically asked to verify, but sometimes that's how it goes. Our results were unspectacular for a race that we had started out leading. Bummer.
The last enduro of the day was a 3.5 hour. Our rental driver started out but at the 1:25 mark a full course yellow came out. Since a 5min pit stop would put us in the 2-hour max driver window, we could pit under yellow, lose less lap position, and hopefully come out ahead. We pulled our driver in, put as much gas as we could in, and sent my teammate out with just under 2 hours to go. As he drove out of the pits I realized we hadn't actually gone a full 2 hours at race pace. And at the current rate, there was no way we could ACTUALLY do a full 2 hours. ****. I radioed to him telling him to short shift as much as he could and conserve fuel at all costs. He did an amazing job and finished the race with 2 laps left in the car and 2nd place. That pit stop paid off. First podium! ****. Yeah.
Since my previous sprint race had been a bit of a bust with the traction control issue, I was eager to try again. We acted as though the 15-minute break in between the two races was a pit stop and fueled the car as fast as we could and got into line. We were 4th in B I believe, nice! I got a good start as the flag dropped, getting by a person or two. I then found a place on the far right that would both get me by some people and put me in a good spot for braking going into turn 1. By turn 3 I was in 2nd in B with the 1st place car in my sights. I got by him on the inside through turn 6 and started chipping away at some of the A cars. An off later while I was running from one of the AR e46s broke my front wheel, and while I knew there was damage, I wasn't sure the extent of it. I kept on going, the rest of the race was largely not fine. I had a 350z on my tail for a while and then suddenly he was off in the grass 50ft away. He went off in a place where there's....not really a turn. So I'm guessing something broke, not sure, never did find out. I held my position throughout and finished first!!
I know that was wordy, and if you got this far, thanks for caring! Overall, crazy weekend and what I thought was going to turn out to be bad, turned out to be great! We also found out some seal on the caliper blew during my last race, so between the wheel and some sort of brake failure, we didn't go to the last sprint race. But man, what a weekend. Still blown away by what the car did in its first year. I've definitely improved as a driver as well, spent something like 20ish hours in the car this year, finally getting that track time! I'm feeling a bit more confident at speed and I'm hoping that translates well into Audrey which is, significantly faster than the bmw lol.
I've got some video I'll try to upload as well at a later date
FWIW, I believe it is possible to permanently disable the traction and stability control while leaving the ABS intact by disconnecting the factory steering angle sensor.
Yep, we will be. The only reason we hadn't yet was because it never gave us any real trouble prior. Christian had originally planned on doing it before the first race, but covid kinda fucked up our timeline this year. I guess it decided after 50+ hours this year it wanted to cause trouble
After ORP, I decided to work on the LS car a little bit. The first thing up was just a general fit of the transmission. I rolled under the car and started trying to get it in on my back. After a bit of swearing and confusion as to whether I was just not lining things up right or if I needed to cut sheet metal (likely), I rolled out from under the car. Sweaty, tired, and my hair covered in grease from that stupid cv joint explosion, I said, "**** this, I'm buying a lift." So I checked my concrete thickness, found what model I wanted, and bought one.
Aidan, being the awesome dude he is, offered to pick it up in OR so I could avoid shipping and tax. And also offered to help install it which was really cool. Hailey and Aidan drove up on a Friday when I was flying in from Detroit. We unloaded it that night and then called it an evening. Clyde was very suspicious of Daisy at first and followed her around, but eventually got used to her. She did a really good job of not being aggressive or scaring the kitties, 10/10 a weird cat, but a good weird cat.
The next morning, we moved the bmw out and started getting things set up. Excuse my disaster of a shop. I haven't been able to actually have a cleaning day since before ORP in July. We still have some house projects to finish up before the rain comes, but after that, it's time for a big organization day.
We moved the posts into position and then squared them up. After that, we drilled a bunch of holes in concrete and set anchors. That part wasn't too bad, but a little tedious trying to get the columns level. Hydraulics weren't bad and I already had the wiring from the fusebox run since I had re-wired the shop last year and knew a lift was in the future. We tested it and then put the arms on. Spreading grease everywhere was fun, using the lift as a ladder was great.
After that, we put the bmw up on the lift as a test! Success!! We then put the bmw on the ground to wrap up some wiring and I haven't touched it since lol. We're still wrapping up house projects before the weather goes to ****, but once it does, the Miata is getting transferred to full time on the lift and I'll be working on getting the car back together. I'm so excited to have car up in the air to work on it. It's gonna make so many aspects of building easier.
**** yessss! Looking sharp! Mad jelly about lift things
Also, dude, you need some shelving. Get that garbage off the ground! The heavier Costco/Whalen "Industrial Wire Rack" shelving units are a solid buy. Buy 2x, steal a shelf out of each and run them 3 wide along the wall with the 2 shelves as a "bridge" so you have storage underneath. Totally worth it.
I should probably just actually use the empty wire shelving on the other side of the shop For real though, I pulled everything off them and moved everything around the shop to wallboard and haven't reaaaaaally been able to re-organize/clean up. So that's a big part of why the shop is still such a mess. I also need to finish hardlines for the air, once that's done, the shop is pretty much finished as far as what I'll be doing to it, then things can find permanent places. It's been a process lol.
I did miata things this weekend. I switched the bmw and miata positions in the shop and put the miata high enough to walk around under it. What a glorious feeling. I also put the flywheel on for slight lols. My buddy and I tried to put the trans in, but it looks like I need to expand the shifter hole to the left a bit since the shifter is offset. I'm still finishing house stuff, so I'll probably do that in the next couple weeks. I also need to buy a trans jack so I don't have to balance the transmission on my shoulder.
09-30-2020, 12:22 PM
1
Get that garbage off the ground! The heavier Costco/Whalen "Industrial Wire Rack" shelving units are a solid buy. Buy 2x, steal a shelf out of each and run them 3 wide along the wall with the 2 shelves as a "bridge" so you have storage underneath. Totally worth it.
will add more later if I remember 
Really it's that I'm out of shape lol. Sitting at a desk all day has certainly not helped anything
