Season Opener at Infineon - 04/04/04

http://www.sfrscca.org/Results/20040404/

Hi all,

Well how should I start?

I think I'll bore you with what we did in preparation for the first race of the season. I purchased a used tranny with Torsen L/S (limited/slip) from a World Challenge friend who raced an Achieva. I swiveled the rear subframe in preparation of installing a new tranny built with the new Torsen. Changed back to the stock 22mm rear bar. Put a 50# spring rubber in the rear. Took out the 50# spring rubber in the front replacing it with a 30# spring rubber. I cut splined ends off of spare half shafts to use in replacing the dodgy bolts in the front Grand Am bearing conversion. Vacuumed the car for dirt and debris. Unstuck the pages to my log book which had sustained some minor water damage. Changed the front nose and rear tail to reflect the fact that this is a Formula. Changed the tranny oil of the Fiero and  the differential oil of the Caprice (it was begin to chatter in reverse). Replaced the old and leaking radiator in the Caprice so that I might make it to the first race. I also thought about lots of other things that I could do but didn't. :-) Oh yeah I didn't get the tranny done in time so I unswiveled the subframe and bolted it back in place. I did have trouble finding someone to do the gear swap. The dealer who did the tranny 10+ years ago on my GT had done only two, mine being one, and had lost the oven needed to reassemble the gears on the output shaft. (I'll follow-up on this later)

Well I think that covers the three months of preparation for this weekend's event. So on to the details of the event. ;->

Jeff (son) and I left home around 9:30-10:00pm for Sears Point, after just wrapping up the preparations. We arrived later that evening to find few parking spots, but were able to eek out something that looked suitable for that time of night. I unpacked so that we would have space to lay out the sleeping bags in the back of the wagon. Jeffrey being the 9 year old that he is was easily moved from sleeping in the back seat to the drivers seat while I went about the task of setting up, back to the sleeping bag.

Bright and early Saturday morning, thanks to the generators starting up at 6:00am, we (or should I say "I") got up and started to look to see what we really had to work with. I went down to see what the status of registration was. Well registration wasn't open and wasn't scheduled to be open until 7:00am. What I did find was a pot of coffee brewing that need some last minute taste testing. I was desperate for some coffee so I volunteered. ;-> It was good enough to open my eyes and see that registration had opened, and few minutes early to boot!

After getting through registration we were ready to unpack for real. Our first practice was at 8:20am so we had plenty of time. ;-> Gary my crew and crew chief showed up shortly after helping me find a perfect spot near to where we had parked the previous night. We unloaded the car from the trailer and I put together the things I needed to bring to tech.

Tech went smoothly and I was ready to go out for my fist practice. First practice went okay and I turned a time of 2 minutes flat. The suspension changes felt really good and did not seem to effect the lap times. We did find one of the rear sway bar pillow blocks had lost a bolt. I must not have tightened them enough. The second practice I was turning a 1:59s. The pillow block had stayed in place but the rubber hose I was using as a spacer had worked free on one side. We fixed this and set the shocks from full soft to one turn off of full hard. This was done because I thought there was bit of a push and I seemed to be bottoming in some corners. We were now hopefully ready for qualifying.

Qualifying was later the same day, so it had been a pretty long day. I went out and worked my way through traffic trying to get a clean lap or two. I was getting in to the 1:59s again. During what should have been the last few laps of the session I entered turn 8 catching up quickly to a Datsun 510. I had just passed another very slow 510 so when I saw a black flag come out I thought it might be the car behind me. I was pretty committed to pass the 510 so I went around him out of 8a. As made the pass I saw a second black flag and realized it was mostly likely a black flag all. Which essential means I made a pass under yellow and with our rules it might mean I'd lose my qualifying times. The field came in to park in the pits waiting for my friends car to be towed in after hitting the tires. ;-( They let us back out for a the last few laps we had left. Since they hadn't talked to the other car or me that passed the 510 I thought maybe we'd be in the clear. I went out and luckily found some pretty clear track. I was able to get to a 1:59 flat. As the field came in at the end of the session I was sent to impound. Yep it looked like I was going to get a talking to. They let me know what they saw and told them that I did not see the yellow bet recognized to late that it was a black flag situation. I did not protest the ruling since I think we need to enforce these types of rules.

Sunday started too early thanks to day light savings time, but that wasn't something that I could do anything about. What I could do were some final preparations to the car before the race. I was going to raise the rear height to see if I could reduce the apparent bottoming. Also we had checked the weight on the scales and I wanted to even out the car a bit. (see below) We were gridded nearly dead last in 44th position. My strategy was to get up to the cars running in the 2:00s and hang there to see what would happen.

They rolled us out on to the course for our pace lap. Everyone lined up nicely for the start and luckily it was a slow start so I was able to see and hear the green drop. I weaved in through the crowd of cars and passed close 8 or 9 by turn 2. I was able to pass a total of 12 or 13 cars by the first lap. From here it was just a matter of picking people off during the race. The slow BMW ITS cars being the toughest as they could use their horsepower if the chose to block, which some did. I finally made it passed the last car turning 2:00s and one turning 1:59s. I had passed nearly 26 cars and finished 18th overall out of 45 and 8th in class out of 20. So all and all not a bad race, sorry no video this time, would have been neat. :-) I turned a 1:58.238, my personal best. On the down side the top two turned times in the 1:54s on the upside the rest of the top 7 were turning times in the 1:57s and 1:58s so I had a chance at a top 5 if I hadn't made the mistake in qualifying.

The scales had the car (no driver) at:

LF - 567    RF - 537

LR - 666    RR - 798

Total 2568 with ~ 4 gallons fuel

after the adjustment:

LF - 535    RF - 576

LR - 715    RR - 754

Total 2580 with ~ 6 gallons of fuel