http://www.sfrscca.org/Results/20030629/
Hello all,
Well we've
had our first race after the TPS (throttle positioning sensor, the doohickey
that tells the computer where your foot is) was "really" fixed/replaced. So your wondering "Did it make a
difference?", well I think it did but I'll let the
times tell the story.
Practice I
ran a 1:51.8, qualifying I ran a 1:51.4, and during the race on Saturday I ran
a 1:51.288 running second almost the entire race. On Saturday qualifying I ran
a 0.00.0 (read on to find out why). For Sunday's race I ran a 1:50.735 the
second fastest ITA car on the track! So I guess the car is back to where we
started at the beginning of the year. In fact Steve Borlik,
who finished first and is first in points, commented that I scared him by
running so close with him on Saturday. :-)
Now your'
wondering what happened to get me a 0:00.0 or really a no qualify. Well what
happened was that I was running around the track in a comfortable second place
not really able to challenge for first since that restart in fourth gear where
I should have been in third really put a gap between Steve and I. I also had to
pass the ITS cars that passed me on that restart making first even more
elusive. Oh yeah back to what happened. Well like I was saying I was running a
long comfortably in second place when all of a sudden, okay not really all of a
sudden but within a couple of turns, the lower ball joint (lbj) and the front knuckle decided to separate. Now I
didn't give anybody permission to do this so I promptly parked the car off of
the track and gave the ball joint a real talking to. Well maybe it happened
like that or maybe not the result was the same. Five minutes before the end of
the race I found myself with a car in last place.
The car was
towed back to impound. We pulled the wheel off and discovered that the castle
nut was gone. Some how the cotter pin that is supposed to prevent this was gone
and the castley nut had worked it's
way free. As it turned out, what looked to be an easy thing to fix wasn't. The
threaded part of the lbj was bent preventing us from
just replacing the castle nut. We took that car back to our paddock spot to
replace the lbj. As we struggled to press the lbj out of the lower control arm (lca),
with out success, I discovered that this was my backup lca
that had the lbj welded in place. We had to take the lca off of the car and take it to a welder. Luckily there
was one at the track. Unluckily someone had assembled the lca
off of the car and now that the subframe was on the
car I found that someone had put in one of the bolts the wrong way. We had to
cut the bolt off in order to get the lca off. The
above process needless to say took some time and we were not able to make
qualifying. At this time we still hadn't taken the part to the welder.
I did
finally get the part to the welder who said he could have it done by
Later that
Sunday morning I checked with him. He was just finishing up and by