I have been meaning to put this up here. It's a recap of the fall CMP race from my perspective only, no teamates were consulted before jotting the notes down. I actually wrote it the week I got back, so this is about a month ago:
I got to the track, and the car was mostly ready. Unfortunately, the race organizer did not agree. Even though our admittedly goofy looking fuel cell mount was OK's by him personally last race, he used a number of expletives to describe it this time. Matt and I rode into town and bought $200 worth of angle iron and Mike welded up a suitable mount for it and for our next door neighbors - tons of cars had this same issue.
Saturday morning had me nervous as crazy, I tried very hard to relax, as I was first up for the seat. I got in, belted in, and started the parade laps. The brakes were terrible. The pedal is a low ratio, the booster is high boost, and the master is pretty small. I figured I had two inches of pedal travel. There was no feel at all, it was just breathing on the pedal for an inch before the tire locked. That was not a mistype, just the passenger side locked. My nerves were not getting calmed. The parade laps last about 10 minutes. Sometime in that ten minutes I remembered that the pads were never bedded in, so I did that much to the confusion of the folks behind me. This smoothed things out, but I only got a lap or so before the green flag flew. I monkeyed around with different approaches to the brake pedal, but nothing was super good feeling. Another car has not tightened their tranny fluid cooler lines, so they spun out in their own ATF and caused a wreck between two cars which brought out a full course caution enabling me to bed the brakes in fully. This helped a lot, now I had 1.5 inches of travel and both fronts would lock at the same time. Much better. Still no feel, though. The suspension felt tight, the engine pulled hard, the tranny shifted every once in a while. Maybe 45 minutes in, I started going fast. Not as fast as last race because of the brakes being ridiculous, but very fast. Pretty much the top cars could pass us readily. Nothing else could get a fast enough lap at the right time to get past unless I wanted to let them to go by.
Then, at about one hour and change out of an attempted 1.5 hour stint, my belts came loose. I must have hit the latch with my elbow. I radioed in, told them to hurry, finished another exceptionally dangerous lap and pitted at 1:15.
The pit stop went well (hot pitting for the first time), we were calm and not rushed. Full fuel and driver change in a bit over five minutes, out went our fastest driver, Matt.
Matt radioed in to tell us that everything was fantastic. He didn't talk much on the radio, and came in at 1.5 hours to let our senior driver, Rob, out. Another excellent pit stop at 5:45 and off he went. Matt chatted with me about water temp. "Brian, how hot did it get, right at 220 for you?" "Matt, I never saw it get over 185" :: blank stare ::
I went to look at the standings. Matt had not bettered my best lap of 2:15, but he had climbed to 16th place out of 108 cars. We were easily winning our class, "C".
So we were confused for a bit, but when Rob came back in on the hook, it was obviously overheating very badly. He said over 250. I added water with the engine running and I saw it bubble, I looked at Mike and we both simultaneously diagnosed a bad head gasket. Luckily we had a set. Unluckily, we couldn't unbolt the exhaust manifolds, and the exhaust was a hopeless mess. Mike bent a pushrod taking his head off, and McCall ran for parts. We were buttoning everything up, ready to finish the raceday, several hours later, and I began adding water only to find it pouring out of the rear intake manifold bolts which should have been coated in RTV. So we removed the intake again and plopped it back on, well after the raceday ended.
The next morning, Mike got in the car and it ran... badly. It knocked like crazy, even after flushing the crankcase with three oil changes (lots of water was in there). At least one piston welded a piece of its ring land to the top. We probably had a rod knock or two as well. We made five laps and Mike drove it back in, it was hopeless, the engine would need a total rebuild. So we grabbed the spare engine and set to work. The spare engine is a 400M, and the good engine was a 460. Different mounts, different exhaust, different alternator mounting, different fan mounting, different power steering mounting, different carb, different radiator hoses. We finally got it buttoned up and sent McCall out for an hour to take the checkered flag. We apparently underfilled or pinched a tranny cooler line during the swap, because he was coasting for most of the straights as the tranny was slipped badly the entire time.
I was still in my pajamas when the car rolled in. I spent most of the day under the car. I drank 10 Gatorades and I didn't pee once. I think my eyes are sunburned. I broke a 3/8" extension torquing head bolts and hit my hand against something and hit my funny bone so hard part of my hand is still numb as I type this. I won't be able to see straight, or have a night without dreaming about working on the car in a fury for a week. I probably won't smell right for at least that long. At the end, we won our second "heroic fix" trophy, nobody killed anyone else, and we took the checkered flag.
That's me in the blue, crouching beneath the engine
