Turbo-4 '89 Mustang roadrace coupe.

[horsewidower]

Re: Racin in '09 or its for sale.

Saddling up for the LeMons race this weekend. And...its raining.


So, 168 shitboxes on 3 miles of road course, green track, and probably fog, in a car I've never driven before and I'm the first driver in the morning.

Should be fun. ;D

[Brian Lohnes]

Re: Racin in '09 or its for sale.

Have a blast!

[mustang13]

Re: Racin in '09 or its for sale.

Best of luck Bob!

[rightpedal]

Re: Racin in '09 or its for sale.

I agree this is one of my favorites.

Good luck at leMons. Snap some pictures, I mean when you arn't driving. (or when you are ;D)

Steve

[horsewidower]

Re: Racin in '09 or its for sale.

WooHooo, what a craptastic weekend. If anyone has the opportunity to attend/participate in one of these LeMons events, do it. What a riot. What an unexpected pleasure. The feeling of camaraderie, sportsmanship and just racing for the fun of it was a revelation. I am definitely doing this again.

It began with pulling into the pits late on Friday (got stuck at work finishing some things up). The pits were full for the first time this year, with a strange mix of junkyard asylum escapees. The usual e30 BMWs, and thinly disguised Miata cheaters. But, how about a near perfect knockoff of the Batmobile, with all the participants in perfect character costume. The crazy guys with an s600 V12 Mercedes, that was as stock as they come (Jay Lamm, for the first time, used his $500 claimer rule to take the car at the end of the race). A Corvair, VW Beetle, Dodge Caravan, Jeep Cherokee. How about a Geo Metro with a motorcycle engine in the passenger seat and a chain driven rear end. The same group put together a Honda 600 with the passenger seat taken up with a Honda V4 shaft drove. Both were angry little cars that went like stink, when they worked. There were a number of cars that you simply could not tell what make they were when new. Crazy stuff.

Our team, the junkyard kats, ran a 280zx turbo (check out the December issue of Grassroots Motorsports, the article about Lemons has the car front and center as the lead photo). I've been very reluctant to join, as the idea of driving a junker on a road course in anger gives me the willys. My cars are immaculate, safety wired, checked and double checked. Fuel cell, in car fire extinguisher etc. Pretty much the polar opposite of crawling into this thing. And, its a car put together by autocrossers, not road racers. That's not an indictment of either, just an acknowledgement of the vast difference in the way cars are setup and prepped.

But I was wrong. I should have done this sooner.

Saturday was cold and damp in the morning. The drivers meeting was attended by the largest number of people I've ever seen. There must have been 500 to 600 drivers. 158 cars represented. And the difference in experience was vast. Tommy Kendall was there (famous Trans-Am driver) down to folks that had never been on a road course in their life. The interesting thing about LeMons is that you don't have to have a license from a sanctioning body, they will sell you one for $50 for the season.

And you ask yourself, how can that do anything but cause mass chaos? Well, I wondered that myself. But, the spirit of the event helps greatly, so do the penalties for infractions that wouldn't even raise an eyebrow in a real race, and the fact that no one really knows who is ahead. You see, they assess penalty points at tech inspection for cheater cars, or cars they don't like, or for any arbitrary or capricious reason. As Faab Fouzy(Kendall's fake name for the event) said in the drivers meeting on day 2 "I don't respect the judges, but I fear them.

So I suited up Saturday morning, set in the car for the first time and started her up. For those of you familiar with typical road racing starts, this isn't. There is no qualifying, no grid. everyone just lines up and goes out on the course. Full course yellow. I unfortunately came out behind a 240z that was wildly rich. Gaggingly nauseatingly rich. And the guys had warned me that it some times takes an hour of riding around before they throw the green as they checked to make sure all the transponders work. (Transponders are little devices that strap on the car, when they cross the timing loops they signal that the car has crossed.) The green flag is dropped randomly, so you may have the good fortune of being first, or the bad fortune of missing it by one car and being dead last. Two laps under yellow and they dropped the green flag, great. But, I was just exiting turn one. We had to be 149 cars back, crap!!

More tomorrow.

Bob

[Scott Liggett]

Re: Racin in '09 or its for sale.

Can't wait. Please, oh please tell us you got some pics and videos of the chaos.

[horsewidower]

Re: Racin in '09 or its for sale.

Jalopnik coverage:

http://jalopnik.com/people/murileemartin/posts/

In heroic fixes we are pictures 14 and 15.

[rightpedal]

Re: Racin in '09 or its for sale.

So cool...... this and a demo derby trailer race are my dreams.


Steve

[horsewidower]

Re: Racin in '09 or its for sale.

So, lets step back for a minute. The team's core is a group of National level autocrossers. They are good. Lee and Mr. Bob prepped the car, and did a great job with what they have to work with. Tom, Chris, and Jim are really good and have numerous years of working together. The car itself was on its third Lemons race. 1st race it blew a hose and toasted the head, warped beyond repair. Second race they landed in the top 50. They worked hard on bettering that record for this race, going so far as to build a rear wing and test it. I loaned them my corner weighting scales, they built a wind tunnel in Lee's garage, supplied it with every fan they could find and could say definitively that the wing provided at least 12 lbs of downforce. Ha.

So anyhow, Saturday comes bright and early, we get through the driver's meeting and on the track only to have the bad fortune of having the green flag wave with us at the back of the pack. It was cold, damp and I'm out there with a bunch of lunatics. The brakes are spongy, the tires are greasy (25 psi rear, 44 psi front, cold) it tends to wallow in the turns but the engine is fantastic. God I love turbos. We could pull anybody on the straights, its just in the braking zone it was an adventure.

I soon found myself dicing with the Batmobile, truly a surreal battle. I'd pass him on the straights and he'd eventually out corner me and squeak on by. Not content to just wait for the straight I tried an aggressive late breaking move into a corner pulling just up to his rear wheel well, which isn't good enough. He came across, which was his right, and realizing that we were going to hit and that I didn't have to brakes to get out of his way, I turned into him in order to keep from spinning. I radioed the crew that we had body damage (I could see something flapping on the right front) and that I was coming in. The guys yanked the offending body part off the car and I drove back out.

The rest of my hour and 15 minute stint was comparatively uneventful. It was an absolute blast. You quickly learned who was fast, who was slow, and who to stay the hell away from. It was interesting that when I was asked on the radio how I was doing and if I still wanted to stay out, how it screwed up my driving. It was like the adrenalin drained out and instead you start examining if you are tired, thirsty or need to take a pee. All of a sudden I was tire and thirsty, thankfully I didn't need to take a pee. Do you know that in pro endurance races that guys pee in the seats? That Nascar has more than its share of seat pee'ers, a couple of famous ones being Carl Edwards and reportedly Richard Petty. (from an article in "Racer" magazine).

So into the pits. We fuel the car, Lee jumps in the car and away he goes. One thing I noticed is that THERE WAS NO DAMAGE TO THE CAR! Yet, there was a bumper siting on top of the trailer. Apparently I had cleanly picked the bumper off the Batmobile, so cleanly that they didn't even know it was gone. Later that day they came over and claimed it, and thanked us for returning it. Hmmmm, this is a different kind of road racing event.

Lee drove smoothly and quickly, and had me by 2/10ths Half way through his stint, we'd moved up to 50th. With Lee's stint done, Chris jumped in. 15 minutes later our day was done.

Blown clutch, really blown clutch. It went out with a whimper, not a bang. Chris reached for another gear at the top of the hill on turn nine and came up empty. Rolled the car all the way through turn 14 and to pit out. We towed him over to the pit from there.

And the thrash began. Wasn't a hydraulic problem. Could only be a clutch disk or pressure plate. 45 minutes later we had our answer, we had enough clutch lining left from our new $30 clutch to fill a cup. What we didn't have was a new clutch. So, we needed to find an 83 280zx turbo clutch in or around Willows California. On a Saturday.

Chris got on the phone and found one in Marysville, about an hour away. Lucky for us, two buddies were coming up from Sacramento and a couple hours later we had our clutch, 45 minutes later the car was whole, literally at the moment we buttoned up the car and got the driver back in, they called the race for the day.

While we were down, we changed to a different tire, and changed from a toe out front alignment to 1/8 of toe-in. We were trying to cure the greasy tire situation and cure the darty floaty feel of the car at high speeds on the straights.

The next day would tell if we'd made the right decisions.

[horsewidower]

Re: Racin in '09 or its for sale.

By the way, went over and removed the Mustang from dyno jail.

I need to find out how much it'd cost to trailer it out to Omaha Nebraska.

[TheSilverBuick]

Re: Racin in '09 or its for sale.

I'm enjoying your Lemons story

[mustang13]

Re: Racin in '09 or its for sale.

Bob, this is awesome. Some of the best racing story telling I've read in a long time. This is the type of event BANGshift members need to apply our coast to coast, border to border resources to, and show up in droves for. Think of it, a whole sh-- load of flat black beaters with a BIG red and white BS on the hood. With dam near 4000 members, we should be able to pull it off.

Can't wait to hear the rest, Good Luck!

[horsewidower]

Re: Racin in '09 or its for sale.

The dawn of Black Sunday.

I love black cars with mile deep paint. Who doesn't love a woman in a black dress? But I hate black flags.

Road racing has a bunch of different colored and multicolored flags. There's green, and black and white checkered, we all know what they're about. There are yellow flags, they can be standing, waving and doubled up. They all mean don't pass as there is a problem in front of you, a problem right in front of you, or there is a problem that is really bad so everyone on track needs to behave. Any time a yellow is displayed, you can't pass a car until the flag is gone. It can be at the next corner station, or it may take a while. There are white flags, doesn't mean what you think it means in road racing. Here it means that there is a safety vehicle on track. There are blue flags with yellow stripes, somebody faster is on your butt, move over. The black flag with the orange or red ball means somethings wrong with your car. As Jay Lamm says (the 24 hour of Lemons promoter) the meatball flag (black with the ball) is usually followed by the red and yellow striped flag which means that you are now running over the crap that fell of your car. Yellow and red stripped really means that the track surface has changed, whether its parts, oil, mud etc.

And then there is the black flag, displayed with your car number. This is never good. It means that you get to go talk to someone about your behavior. At LeMons, you go to the penalty box. You don't want to be in the penalty box; you damn sure don't want to be in the penalty box four times (or as it turns out 6!).

Remember how we discussed the differences in talent and experience amongst the drivers at the event. You've got everyone from a professional highly acclaimed race car driver, Fab Fouzy (in his day job He's known as Tom Kendall) all the way down to someone who has never turned a wheel in a racecar, let alone on a road course. So, LeMons has developed a rather strict policy for black flags. Many things you can do in a normal club race, you get black flagged for at LeMons. And 4 flags in a day and you're out (well, unless you bribe the judges or are properly contrite?or?) Roll a car and you are out, at least three cars managed this. One, I'm told, managed a half twist with the roll, which earned them style points, but still managed to get them banned from the track.Body contact is a black flag (ummm, but Bob you took that guy's bumper off the first day...Ayup, should have been black flagged, they missed it) any wheels off the surface is a black flag (not an uncommon occurrence in road racing, some corners are just faster if you "drop a wheel") "spinning" is a black flag (and not just the 360*, a good tank slapper will get you the "spin" label) overly aggressive driving will get you a black flag. If they just think you're being an asshole, its a black flag.

Anyhow, we all met up the next morning. Chris was the first driver slated to drive. It was beautiful weather. Sunny, a little cool, no fog. A great day for racing.

[horsewidower]

Re: Racin in '09 or its for sale.

Of to the 25 hours of Thunderhill tomorrow evening. I volunteered to crew for the car that won the E2 class last year. Thought it would be a great way to really understand how to endurance race. I'll serve as a fueler and help my buddy Scott do the cooking. And whatever else comes up. Thankfully we have two full crews so we can switch off during the race. Starts at noon Saturday, ends at 1:00 pm Sunday.

http://www.nasa25hour.com/

I'm working for 3d racing.

Bob

[fast Ed]

Re: Racin in '09 or its for sale.

Pansy ... when I fueled for a friend running a 24hr Firehawk at Mosport, I WAS the fueler. Two full crews ... sheesh ... what colour nylons are you guys going to be wearing under those fire suits? :P


Seriously though, crewing at a 24 hour is quite an experience, ENJOY!!


cheers
Ed N.