Holy cow. This race is literally going to be the biggest in LeMons history, as 136 cars are entered for our little Houston love fest. Here’s the nearly-complete list. Yikes. This is going to be crazier than ever.
I can’t wait.
We filed our application earlier this week for the October iteration of LeMons in Houston — entitled “Yee Haw It’s LeMons Texas” — so keep your fingers crossed that our application gets accepted and we get to try it all over again.
The race in February — the Gator-a-Rama — was run on the 1.7 mile track at MSR-Houston, cutting out the two long straights on the backstretch. The 2008 Yee Haw race was run the same way, with the main goal of the short, twisty track being to keep down the speeds. The unfortunate side effect of having 100 junkheaps all on a short track is that it gets pretty crowded, which leads to a lot of banging and full-course yellows.
A rumor is going around the LeMons forum that they are going to let us use the full MSR-Houston course this fall! That would be a lot of fun. Two longer straights (the “Front Straight” and the “Back Straight” plus a nearly hairpin turn get added to the track, and it converts the “tires” corner into a really tricky and entertaining chicane called “Bus Stop.”
Keep your fingers crossed, but it sounds like there’s a great chance that this will happen this year. Nic Pon, LeMons right-hand man, commented thusly: “It’s a definite possibility pending an agreement with the racetrack and a few trial laps to make sure it’s still safe. You Texas boys have come out in force every time, so we’d love to make room for more of you.”
Tally ho!
Thanks to the ever sainted Mrs. Mulry, I spent the better part of the weekend under the TARP Special and the ‘87 out in the driveway trying to figure out how and why the inboard joint tulip went bye-bye during the race. That’s the part of the car that disappeared during Dave’s drive on Sunday morning.
After fooling around with the remaining functional half shafts on the other two cars, it became abundantly clear that the joint tulip failure wasn’t caused by Dave’s getting run over by that 280z. The reason that the inboard joint disappeared is most likely due to a crappy bolt-up by the prior owner when he “fixed” the transmission oil seal leak. We know that he’d done a bunch of work on that side, probably even going so far as to at least attempt to drop the transmission and differential from the car. We know that because he did a crappy job bolting the transmission back up to the rest of the car, including the engine mount on the left side of the car, among other critical failures.
It never occured to me that he might have failed to bolt in the inboard joint to spec, and it’s not like it’s hard to do, either. My speculation at this point is that he didn’t wrench the bolts hard enough to get the heads to seat (they’re splined, so you do neeed to apply some force to get them to seat properly). And if that’s the case, then it was just a failure waiting to happen. Which it did.
In other TARP-related news, I just got the post-race valuation back from Chief Perp Jay Lamm. I think he must have just finished off his morning crack pipe smoking, as he valued the car at $400. I guess we’ll have to duct tape it back together for the next race to stay under the $500 cap.
Knowing Is Half of the Battle!, MR2, Misty Watercolored Memories of the Way We Were, Race Analysis
Go to about 7:50 and watch Dave get whacked:
Also, interesting to watch someone else driving a car similar in performance to ours (thankfully, though, we didn’t have any clutch slippage). Notable that they just plain stay out of trouble: pass when possible, but generally drive conservatively.
Driving Tips, Knowing Is Half of the Battle!, Race Analysis, Videos
Race advice from the LeMons mail list, courtesy of “fishdood1234″. Read at your own risk:
“Me and a few friends wrote this “book” back in 2004 when we started racing off-road trucks and most of it applies to Lemons cars also so I thought I would post it here for everyone to see.
It is 100% true and it all happened over our years of racing….
In today’s edition of the LeMons Video Documentary Series, we see the footage that the Group of Foolz put together starring their e30 at the Thunderhill race. As you can see, there is plenty of foolery for the entire family! That course does look like it would be fun to drive, what with the elevation changes and all. MSR Houston looks like it’s about as flat as a schoolgirl. Cue the video:
Advice from Other Teams, Driving Tips, Knowing Is Half of the Battle!, Videos
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:
The Lemons Experience - Thunderhill 2008 from rnair on Vimeo
Knowing Is Half of the Battle!, Team Strategy, Tomfoolery, Videos
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.
Advice from Other Teams, Knowing Is Half of the Battle!, MR2, Race Prep, Team Strategy
Being New Year’s Day and all, now’s the time to make those pesky resolutions. As most gyms know, peak attendance for the year is from about January 2 through mid-January, at which point all those “get in shape this year” resolutions start to fall through.
As TARPers, we have a better reason than illusory and abstract concepts like “heart disease” or “obesity” or “early onset of racing-car-based-demensia” to keep to our workout resolutions. Research shows that a race car driver’s heart rate gets as much of a workout while racing as if the driver were on the exercise bike, but the entire body gets an even harder workout due to coping with the mental stresses that are present, for example, when driving junkheap cars in a mass of other semi-suicidal junkheap car drivers. On the other hand, prolonged auto racing shows the same physical benefits that come from other high-activity athletic endeavors, such as better cardiovascular fitness and reduced atherosclerosis.
In other words, it would behoove all of us to be in good fitness for the race. Or at least better fitness than most of us are in now (Dave and his running habit are probably fine). So I’m going to use that to motivate better (and hopefully more) swimming sessions between now and the race.
Advice from another team that was getting their car ready for the Arse-Freeze in California at the end of next week that I thought might be pertinent to those who are thinking we might want to add a turbo to New Blue:
“A week from the race and our Corrado is still in pieces after a minor “detonation event” cracked the #1 cylinder in 3 pieces. Good thing it happened, because it turns out the piston skirts on 2,3 and 4 were broken off! Considering there’s no shrapnel in the oil pan, we’ll attribute the damage to the previous hooligan who owned this basket case. If I was a bettin’ man, I’d bet against Z Red Baron even making it past day one, but don’t tell my teammates!
A word to the wise - If you wanna win, much less finish, NO FORCED INDUCTION!!”
Advice from Other Teams, Knowing Is Half of the Battle!, MR2
Recent Comments