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.
A friend recommended that I take a look at the NASA (this NASA, not that NASA) club codes and regulations, specifically the instructions/explanations about black flags. We were instructed by Chief Perp Jay Lamm and maybe by Sam that a furled (rolled up) black flag pointed at a car means “hey, you! You’re black flagged, bring it on in!”
However, it turns out that the NASA rule is a little more subtle. An open, unfurled black flag means to bring it in, but a furled black flag means “warning, you are driving in an unsafe manner or you did something wrong. If you continue to do so, an open black flag will be shown to you.” Those furled black flags are pointed at the discretion of a corner worker but don’t mean that the car need exit the race.
In other words, the NASA rule and the LeMons instruction were precisely contrary to one another. My recollection may be inaccurate, but I’m pretty sure that on at least one of my phantom black flag incidents, I came in as a result of a furled black flag pointed at me.
I’m sure the corner workers were more familiar with the NASA standard rather than the LeMons standard. Not to whine, but in an ideal world, these rules would be identical; I suspect that’s really the intent, but Jay is erring on the side of caution. For future reference, I think we shouldn’t come in unless and until we see our car number on the black flag number board.
And we really need to figure out the frequency that race control is using at all tracks we race at so we can monitor that frequency and let our driver know when they’ve actually been black flagged.
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.
As you may or may not know, LeMons races have always allowed both single-digit and zero-digit car numbers. There have often been cars numbered both 8 and 08 in the same race. Apparently starting with the Spring Carolina race at CMP, LeMons is no longer allowing 0x numbering. Why? This question was posed today on the LeMons group mail list. The answer, straight from the mouth of Chief Perp Jay Lamm, provides a plausible explanation for the surfeit of false black flags suffered by the TARP team during the Spring Houston ‘09 race:
“No more 0- prefixes. It just confused the timing/scoring and flag people too much.”
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.
Thanks to the help of our friends at TraqMate, I was able to get the start/finish line on the TraqMate data to roughly correlate with the start/finish line at MSR Houston. The times from the AMB transponder system at the track and the data we have from the TraqMate unit are now about as close to synched as I can get them; most of the times are within 1/10 of a second difference, but there is the occasional outlier. We’ve seen that the TraqMate recorder can go funky every once in awhile (by way of example, look at the entry times for an oddball skip every now and then). That said, the unit provides some fascinating data that we wouldn’t have otherwise, and I just can’t say enough about the support they’ve given us. Any time I had a question that I emailed to TraqMate support, they answered it by the next morning and their advice was always spot on the first time. This is a pretty complicated piece of kit and they’ve done a great job putting it together and supporting it.
So, where’s the data? Click this link and you’ll get the file in .xls format. I tried posting it to the Google Docs, but for some reason all of the lap time data was automatically rounding to the next full second, which is pretty useless for racing. The .xls was bad enough because the data only went to the nearest 1/10 instead of the ten-thousandth, which it shows in the native TraqMate data. I could probably figure that out too with TraqMate support, but I’m not going to sweat that for this race. It is LeMons after all. Show some respect!
So refill your coffee and pour over the data. Enjoy!
With the help of our friends at TraqMate, I was able to get the start/finish line on the TraqMate data to correlate with the start/finish line at MSR Houston. I’ve put it all together and it’s quite interesting. I have one more bit of knowledge to add to the mix tomorrow, and then I’ll post the link to the file so you can examine it for yourself.
Here’s a tease: everyone on the team had at least one of the top 30 fastest laps.
Thanks to uber-dedicated crew member Stevo, the first highlights videos of our first LeMons race are up and on YouTube. He broke it up into three parts; the first one is embedded below, but here are links to videos two and three. Enjoy!
Ladies and germs, I have uploaded the TraqMate data to our Google Docs page. Each of our drivers has access to the data for now. I haven’t uploaded it as an excel file but will probably do so later tonight or tomorrow. For some reason when I re-export the list out of the Google Spreadsheet function it throws the lap times into a mess. I have the original on Excel at home, just not at the office. But this is an interesting first stop and I’m pretty sure that you can manipulate the data on Google Spreadsheet pretty much like you could on Excel for fast lap times, etc. I’ve also noticed that we’re missing some data (like the second-half of my drive and some of Matt’s drive, maybe some of Brad’s too?). This data is all from Saturday, BTW.
I plan to do a little more analysis on this data, like throwing out obvious full-course yellows, so we can get some better accuracy on green flag avg times, etc., but this will get you started. Enjoy!
Oh, one thing of note. I’ve tried to cross-reference our track position, but it seems off by a few laps at the start of Sam’s run. I worked backwards from lap 58 in my drive because that’s where we know that we lost a lot of time due to the false black flag. If Brad could get the LeMons guys to get the MyLaps guys to let us have full access to their lap-by-lap data as part of his research for his story, I could get this chart a little more cleaned up. Hint.
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