Monday, February 8, 2010

Infineon video clip

Here's the first video clip we have from Saturday. My first of two spins:

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Infineon is a blast! But quite challenging...

Darryl, Aric, Dan, and I descended upon Infineon raceway today for testing out and breaking in the new motor. The car ran great! We were keeping up with the V8 volvo Lemons car out there like we're usually able to do at Lemons events (depending on drivers). The rain this morning made it really challenging but really educational. We racked up quite a few spins between us. We had to get towed back onto the track twice (a first for me) after going off into the mud.

After lunch it dried out for a little while and we got some really fun session in. My "best" one ended with a spin coming out of turn 8 and going sideways and backwards into a tire wall. The right side is banged up, but nothing another $5 can of spray paint can't fix! Well, that and the sledge hammering we had to do the rear fender to re-flare the rear fender away from the tire (it was originally flared by sledge hammer too).

This will be a race of attrition...and serious numbers of black flags racked up! I hope we can drive clean. Today's practice will really help that...if we got the spins out of our system!

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Motor back in the car! Goin' testing at Infineon!

Well, long story short, we sent the new JY rods to a shop to have them resized after putting in ARP rod bolts and the F'ing Post Office screwed up and we didn't get them back until last Wednesday. We re-assembled the motor Thurs & Fri evenings and got the motor in the car on Saturday. When we went to start it that evening we saw a shower! A Golden Shower to be specific... The fuel injector O-rings were all leaking so badly that they were spraying fuel in streams across the top of the motor. I guess that's a good thing instead of a non-obvious leak that resulted in fire! We replaced the O-rings the next day and she started up great!

We replaced the front hub bearings (that we bought during the last race at the track but could not install them w/o a press) on Sunday but even that had drama as we overlooked the bearing circlips buried in the grease. Oh well, after breaking that hub we got another from the JY and got it fixed up.

We took the car parking lot testing Monday night and she runs fine. We're going go to Infineon for a track day this Saturday to break her in and learn the track ourselves. Should be a blast!!