So We Did This Race

OK, it's the new year and we're excited about the new racing season and new projects. Dusting off the blog I realize there's a bit of a back log of posts to work on, namely the September 2012, 24 Hours Of Lemons at Thunderhill.

Mostly I needed an excuse to post this photo.

We hadn't been to Thunderhill since 2010. Personally it's a favorite track where I've had a lot of seat time, and I usually have few driving errors there. I was looking forward to seeing the MRolla perform there with the long fast front straight and several other high speed sections.

The only significant change to the car was the spiffy little kick-down lever we rigged up for the rear automatic transmission. Readers may recall that combined manual and automatic shifting dynamics are one of the more complex, interesting problems with the twin-engine MRolla. After too much thought and not enough testing we had settled on a static kick-down cable position that left us wanting more RPM on some steep track sections. For this race we rigged a simple bicycle brake lever mounted to the manual shift lever, and connected to the automatic kick-down cable, allowing us to grab another thousand RPM when we felt a little greedy. On track this worked great and gave us noticeably improved acceleration and climbing.

Unfortunately the rear engine was not up to the task of the additional RPMs. It puked oil and coolant from the seals and head gasket before the two hour mark. We opted to finish the day on the front engine only. We were out of any serious competition, but the car was handling great and front engine running like a top. At the end of day one we decided to just finish the race on one engine and start drinking rather than attempt any overnight mechanical heroics.

Image from www.murileemartin.com.

There were no other mechanical problems during the race and we placed a surprising 56 out of 166. I was impressed with how stable the MRolla was as a front wheel drive. I think much of the stability I had attributed to the all-wheel-drive is actually a characteristic of the nearly even weight distribution.

And Will did this. Image from murileemartin.com.

Oh yeah, and Joe/Bow/Randal ran the Snowspeeder. Finished 11th. Really it was the Snowspeeder's best finish ever, given the large, competitive field of cars. It placed 9th at ORP 2011, but that was against only 37 cars.

Miscellaneous Debris

Much going on lately. Here’s a run-down:

Joe, Bow, and Randall ran the Snowspeeder at the debut race of The Ridge. They had a blast, worked through a few issues, and placed 15 of 45.

We’re prepping the MRolla for the September Thunderhill race. Other than checking compression and fluids, no maintenance, much less upgrades, have been done to the front engine. The water pump held on through the Denver race but was dribbling, so this weekend Paul and Will got to work on that. When they opened the covers they discovered that the timing belt was far gone. Very lucky this didn’t fail on track. I’ve never seen one so worn and still functioning.

We often find ourselves struggling to get the main pulley nut off our 4AGE engines. This time we fabricated a tool allowing us to hold the pulley and still torque the nut off with a breaker. It was handy this weekend and should be in the future.

While Paul and Will did the water pump and timing belt, I started rigging a new manual kick-down control for the rear automatic transmission. I used a bike brake lever and cable, and shortened the shift lever in the process. What you see is the manual shift lever for the front engine’s manual transmission, that also has a grip lever that will control the shift RPM of the rear automatic transmission. It will shift at about 5300 RPM when the lever is released, and at about 6500 RPM when the lever is activated. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but we are optimistic this will improve our climbing and low speed corner exits significantly. Our secret (but published on our Farcebook page) weapon!

In non-racing news, I’m getting a new garage. In the last two weeks my old shack has been demolished and removed, concrete pumped, building and roof erected, and electrical installed. Some roofing, hanging the doors, and parking concrete will complete the project. This will allow me to house the “nice” car, as well as a project car, and a bunch of bikes. The additional concrete will be used for additional parking and parts car storage.

Knowing an increase in capacity is forthcoming, I have already obtained enough vehicles to surpass the additional space. I picked up a rusty but straight Corolla FX which is wimpy, carbureted, with disposable brakes and suspension, but has some body and interior parts that will be useful. Then in exchange for deliver of a giant old V8, an AE82.net fellow gave me an FX16 GTS, which looks like a good candidate to receive all the best parts from the three hatches.