Home of the Toxic Asset Racing Program! Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale about the misfit adventures of a derelict Toyota MR2 and the mostly ill-informed attempts to un-derelict the car in almost certainly futile attempts to run it in endurance racing.
Jesse drove over with the car trailer on Saturday morning to retrieve the TARP Special and take it out to the barn/shop out at his farm/ranch in Granbury, which is anywhere from a 90 minute to 2 hour drive from my house. By mere coincidence, the farm isn’t far from Motorsport Ranch, which is a fairly new road race course. We are endeavoring to find out how we can get some track time out there before going down to Houston. I have a friend of a friend who is supposedly a member there, so I’m going to try to work that connection.
Jesse’s farm is a very special place. As you can see from the photo below, he’s collecting quite a few different vehicles on site. I think my favorite was the 1946 Chevrolet truck that he has out back. It looks a lot like a train from the front, but has a huge wooden box bed. Pretty cool looking truck. Hit the jump to see photos of the ranch and the truck, plus more action photos of the TARP team hard at work:
Apparently one thing to bear in mind — scratch that — to etch into your permanent memory as the driver of a mid-engined sports car is that if you are in the midst of a high-speed turn, you don’t want to lift your foot from the throttle. Lift before the turn and at the end of the turn, but not right in the turn.
This advice comes from the same guy who did that video below. He was driving his Lotus Elise at a HPDE event at the road track in Reno and spun off the track into the gravel at 95 mph. Why? He entered the turn too fast and didn’t realize it until mid-turn. He lifted his gas foot, which causes a weight transfer to the front wheels, releasing the rear wheels at a moment when they’re already wanting to slide. Thus, the car rotates and leaves the track.
We really need to practice before the race. And to read up. And to pray. Lots of praying.
Courtesy of our first official team sponsor (well, first official team sponsor other than MulryLaw.com), the TARP Special will be sporting some innovative Formula One technology come race time. ChaseCam produces an awsome in-car camera video recording system that utilizes two bullet cams and a solid-state recorder that pushes the raw data onto a memory card for later editing and playback. As certified MR-2 nuts, they’ve agreed to loan us one of their 2-camera setups In exchange for ridiculous stickering of the TARP Special and the use of whatever video we produce. Awesome! If you go to YouTube and search for LeMons and Chasecam, you’ll find some of the videos produced with their equipment. Really very cool.
Thanks to Randy Noll and the folks at ChaseCam for getting on board the TARP train. You won’t regret it! Or at least you won’t regret it as much as we do…
Now we just need to get to work at finding sponsors to loan us radios and race driver suits/gloves/long johns/socks. My limited experience indicates that in-kind sponsorships may be easier to find than cash sponsors, although that would be nice too.
Just went out and hooked the battery up again to see if all of our lightness-adding activity had negatively effected the starting and/or running of the engine. I’m proud to say that it still started right up and idled just fine. Looks like the accessory gauges all still work too, including the tach. The speedo cable isn’t hooked up to the transaxle, so no speed. But honestly, it’s the other stuff that we’re really concerned with, isn’t it? We could always clamp a datalogger on the car to get the speed stuff, G’s, etc.
Also got the brake master cylinder bled of the nasty old fluid that was in there and flushed out the front brake system. That got a little messy as I hadn’t tightened all the bolts up front quite enough, but nothing that a little oil-dry kitty litter stuff can’t handle on the floor. Got the front brakes bled out and the wheels back on. Still haven’t changed the rear pads or bled out that part of the system, but I’ll either do that tonight or we can work on that on Saturday in Jesse’s shop.
In related news, the race seat, mounting brackets, and racing harness all arrived yesterday, so that’s good news. I just learned that Recaro makes some sliding racing brackets that allow for re-positioning of the seat for different driver heights. I put the factory seat back in the car last night in prep for driving it onto and off of the trailer on Saturday and realized that we should probably look into that, since our heights are pretty varied. I’m just about 6′0″, maybe a little under, and it would be less than ideal for me to be sitting the same distance from the wheel as my 6′5″ brother. Or however tall he is, he still needs it further back than I do.
Team Formula BMW ran an e30 at Thunderhill last December. One of their team members, Rahul Nair, created an entertaining and instructive mini-documentary that’s well worth watching. It’s 25 minutes long, so wait until you have some time to take it all in (I watched it during lunch). It goes all the way from car prep (wouldn’t it be nice to have a full-service Lotus shop prepping our crapcan?) to transport, tech and judging, and then some of the race itself. I found the judging part to be most instructive, but you may have other favorite parts.
Here’s the link to his blog, which also has the video, but I’ll embed the video below for your convenience. Enjoy:
From a comment by LeMons BS Judge Murilee Martin regarding the motorcyle-engined Geo Metro that won Thunderhill a couple weeks back:
It needs to be mentioned that this car was far from the fastest thing around the track; its best lap time of 1:36.298 was the 12th-quickest of the race. What the Metro Gnome guys did to win was avoid breakdowns, black flags, and contact with other cars. The car’s tiny size was a real advantage when it came to staying out of trouble in crowded corners, and the great power-to-weight gave it batshit acceleration coming out of turns.
Keep in mind that the #5 car- which finished just 11 laps back- had a best lap time of 1:44:649, which made it one of the slowest cars at Thunderhill. Had the cars in front of it caught a single black flag and/or mechanical problem, the Bigfoot Hunter Escort would have won. Staying out of trouble is way more likely to get you a LeMons win than anything else.
Free Range Racing, another MR-2 LeMons team, advises on their website that their radio setup was crappy; I’m trying to confirm that they were using a FRS/GMRS setup, and if that’s the case, that confirms our other intel that the cheap walkie-talkie method is insufficient.
Other sources confirm that a rock solid radio setup is the best way to avoid getting black flagged, as passing under the yellow is a black-flag offense but is often very difficult to know as a driver unless you have solid radio contact from a spotter telling you about the yellow flag.
Paul of Stick Figure Racing, a fellow MR2 LeMons outfit, emailed me with an excellent tip: we should pick up some electrical conduit from Home Depot and bend that to make template forms for the cage, then take that with us when we go to bend the DOM steel for the real deal. Should minimize bending mistakes. I’ll pick some up and bring it with me on Saturday when we move the car to Jesse’s shop, then we can fab the mock-up before going to the bender.
The V-RAM guys have a very useful Picasa gallery showing a lot of their roll cage fabrication, as well as some other stuff. I like the cherry bomb muffler install, we need to copy that when we cut out our existing cat and exhaust setup. Their blog also has some very useful background info (like to get to the track early to minimize stress.)
Also, here’s a useful site with some photos of another MR-2 roll cage fabrication. I’ll try to print these out in color (as well as with some of Paul’s photos), as that should be useful when we’re modeling our cage. One thing that I notice in looking at those photos is that this cage is not up to 2009 LeMons spec, in that it’s not a 6-point or better cage. But this at least gives us a good starting point on the main hoop. I think we’ll want a better door bar on both sides, plus we need the rear diagonal braces and the windshield hoop too. It’s encouraging to see that we’ve stripped out the interior of the TARP Special to a greater extent than this team did at the time these photos were taken.
BTW, the silver Snowspeeder car finished 17th at the LeMons race at Thunderhill in December. If we can keep our car running and on the track (a/k/a not black flagged for collisions), we could be a contenda.
Just got off the phone with a guy building a roll cage for one of the other MKI MR-2’s that is entered in the Houston LeMons race. He said that his best estimate is that the cage will use about 50 feet of steel, but he ordered 75′ in case he screwed up. And he said he did screw up the main hoop right off the bat, so there’s that. He suggested that we would probably be better of fabricating the cage from scratch rather than taking measurements off the one that they’re not using (which was my original plan), as that dis-used one is, as he put it, a “sloppy fit.” Thoughts?
Here’s some interesting video from Arse-Freeze-A-Palooza, the LeMons race that ran the weekend after Christmas. Let’s just say “hilarity ensues.” Enjoy:
By the way, I ordered our race seat and harness today, as we’ll need those to get the roll cage in correctly. Pretty soon here we’ll have ourselves a race car…
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