If you have foam in your fuel tank in order to prevent slosh, and you let your car sit for four years, the foam will deteriorate. When you bring it back out of hibernation and fill up the fuel tank, the little bits of deteriorated foam will then clog up your filter, giving you just long enough run time to drive to the track and do about 10 laps.
Easy to fix, but not the triumphant return to active duty I'd been hoping for. Also, the RA1 may be a long-lived tire, but when the production code is 3106 it's probably time to start thinking about replacements.
Yep. Foam doesn't last long at all.
Especially with modern fuels.
Hmm foam should have been good for 5 years.
I had a similar issue but turned out to be 20 yr old screen filters in the carb that had never been cleaned. Nothing like hitting a 4K RPM wall down the back straight. D'oh.
My RA1's were 10 years old.
Good for 15mins and then they get over heated and I'd start losing side grip through the turns.
I ran on some new R888's in June. I went slightly faster on these tires then my best prev with the RA1's. What I was told the old RA1s would be a faster tires since they were more or less slicks so the R888's look promising.
I'll be monitoring the wear as well.
BTW Fuel cell or just foam in a tank?
I'm reminded of the team next to us at the Lemons race I entered. They had an ancient cell. They were plugging filters so quickly that they stopped replacing them and just started backflushing them.
OTOH they finished, and we broke before the first driver change...
It wasn't new foam when the car went into storage. I think it was originally purchased for the Open Track Challenge, which was 2002 or 2003. Foam in a custom-built tank.
As soon as I started to feel the car go soft at 7000 rpm, I knew what was going on. Not that I could do anything about it, of course.
Slightly less worrying then losing a spark wire. That scared me when I lost power. New engine so first thought was OH NO I've killed it.
