Race Report 2/24/01

This weekend I took my T-83 Red Devil F500 out to Firebird for a NASA event (I treat these days as a test and tune session since we generally do not have that many cars that show up to run in the Open Wheel group).

I had just finished installing a new dash and a MY-CHRON Pro system and wanted to get it broke in for the SCCA Regional this coming weekend at PIR, the MY-CHRON worked fine it was my car that broke.

The field was made up of my F500, a Lola CF, two SRF a FM and a beast of a Lola (model ?? picture of it here –
http://www.nasa-az.com/PICS.html). A friend was supposed to bring his Ralt RT-5 FA out to run but a death in the family kept him seeing to more important matters. A couple other CFs were supposed to come also, but the trailer did not get here from out of state in time.

The forecast for the day had originally called for rain, but the moring came with a cloudless sky and temps in the 60’s. A beautiful day for racing!

My ancient Kawi powered F500 ate up both of the SRF’s (even on the 1/4 mile straight) and the FM – passed him going into the Tower turn under braking like he was sitting still. I was even able to keep up for the most part with the Club Ford (driven by the current Southern Pacific Region champ).

My Super Voyager is still in getting painted so I browerred a frineds Speedway Shark for the weekend. Man, the view out of the Shark is sure limited compared to the Voyager. Had not realized how much I have gotten used to the Voyager. Wearing the Shark I was unable to read any of my gauges while laying back in the seat which meant as soon as I cleared the Tower and was running up the drag strip I had to lean as far forward as I could to be able to look down enough to see where my temps were. Not the best situation. Fortunatly every time I checked the gaugess – start of the drag strip and just before turning in for T1 everything looked fine.

At about the last lap of the session I was just coming out of the esses when the motor sputtered and quit. The tow vehicle came to flat tow me off the track and with the strap wrapped 2x around my roll bar I was unable to let go before the strap pulled a mirror off the car. The guy had not paid attention to where the strap was when he ran to get back on the truck. With me yelling (lot of good in a closed face helmet) and waving my arm (still had to leave on on the wheel) we did not get stopped in time. Shit.

Back at my pit I found that a wire from my starter button had burned and replaced it but still the car would not start. I pulled the right side plug and it looked good, but when I pulled the left side plug I could see material down in the plug. Hope I can get it rebuilt before next Saturday!

That’s Racin…