I guess I'm a bit latent on any updates. We had a rallycross at Summit Point back in May. I drove pretty fast, but not fast enough and Nick won, with Mike Golden in 2nd in his SR class MR2 spyder.....fast thanks to running on tarmac rally tiers on the hardpack sun-baked surface. Was pretty pleased with my speed, actually, and the car ran fine.
For the early June event, it was supposed to be a doubleheader at Summit Point again, but got rained out. The reschedule was the next weekend with sketchy weather as well. Even before the event, Day 2 was cancelled, so only a handful of people showed up for Day 1 with morning rain on the way there that actually made the course pretty great initially.
Unfortunately, with only about a dozen drivers per run group, and the threat of heavy afternnon storms, Adam decided to just do one session per run group. As we worked first, the other group did 20 runs as the day warmed up, plenty of people having car issues, etc. I think only half that morning session finished as the course started getting rougher and the Subarus started breaking. Then it was our turn. By then the temps were in the muggy high 80s with full-blast sun and the course baked hard and getting very choppy as Summit does.
For the first 6 runs or so I was leading the class, and then had a bad run that probably put me in 2nd or 3rd, not sure....because we were hot-lapping with so few cars there was literally 10-20 seconds to actually stop between runs, so only checked times a couple times. At some point Mike Golden blew his engine (spun rod) and Nick and Stephen were laying down similar times to me so we were all pretty close. But the constant "GO" was wearing on me, and on the 13th run the car just didn't feel great, the course was rough, and I wasn't feeling great (had been sick the previous 3-4 days and maybe a bit low on energy). My oil temps were about as high as i've ever seen them, same with coolant. And my one decent set of gravel tires were starting to get hot and "melty" which I also didn't want, since I'd like them to last the season.....Both still in the "ok" range but higher than I like. The engine sounded kind of loud, like the oil was so thin. After that run I just called it a day, wasn't having fun and stopped caring, and was sweating my ass off with no time to even take my helmet off between runs in this hot car. Nick was fine in his A/C-equipped car and he and Stephen battled out for the lead for 7 more runs (Stevie ended up beating him by almost 6 seconds...dude is still fast as hell). I drove the car directly to the trailer and started packing up before the rain.
Then noticed....
Some pooling oil on the trailer and lots on my skidplate. Couldn't locate the source at the track, and the dipstick still showed it at the low end of the OK level, so wasn't really that much and shouldn't have caused any real issues I hope. Examination in my garage reveals its almost certainly the oil filter assembly gasket between it and the block - a known failure point on M50 engines (but one that's never failed for me previously). So I have a new gasket and o-rings on the way (and a new VANOS line, since that looks to be seeping a bit as well, and it's another known failure point.
So I guess it was fortuitous I actually stopped early, since I almost certainly would have spit all the oil out trying to do 7 more runs.
Hopefully we'll get our attendance numbers up, this year has been a bit depressing from that standpoint and not really enough to pay for the venues we use, I dont' think. A lot of the MR guys have broken cars, or other things going on and while more runs are sometimes fun, it's more fun to have a big turnout and a lot of friends to run against. The FWD classes are almost empty. They've never been huge in DC RX (but are in other regions) but we really need to do some recruiting.....because of all classes, there are more cheap-ass FWD cars on Marketplace than AWD or RWD, that's for sure. So we have about 2 month break for the mid-summer and I'll try to do some recruiting (and fix the car)..........
