TARP Blog

It’s late, we’re home, and I’m beat, so I’m going to bed. We’ll have photos and more details up later, but the results from today were fantastic. The alignment that we did really, really worked well. We were able to run all day on Sunday and got zero black flags! I don’t think that we even had an off or spin that they missed. My big goal for the weekend was to get through without blowing up a motor or a major mechanical failure and we not only achieved that goal, but to get through a whole day of racing with no black flags is far better than I ever imagined. We were not fast, and we’re terribly inexperienced, but at least we kept it on the track!

As Herm Edwards would say, we can build on this!

More tomorrow.

Race Analysis Author: Pat

Wow, what a day. I’m pretty tired and need to get some sleep rather than blogging, but I want to at least get down some thoughts that I can come back and fill in later this week.

We had a great day today, and yesterday too. The guys at Jalopnik liked our car enough to feature it in their first post about the North Dallas Hooptie race. I’ve got a bunch of photos that I need to edit, but here’s one good one from Jalopnik:

All the credit for the car decoration goes to Rachel. A couple of weeks ago I came into the house and asked her if she could come up with some good theme ideas, and boy did she ever. It looks tons better than I ever would have thought. Everybody who sees the car loves it!

We got out on the track for quite awhile today, and had some mishaps too. I’m going to just hit some bullet points to fill in details about later:

• First green lap, Integra lunches its engine right in front of me. His accessory belt goes flying while his car barfed oil all over the track, my windshield and car, and sent me spinning into the infield. Fortunately, nobody hurt and I didn’t even get black flagged.
• I spun it and got a black flag, Matt spun it and got two black flags, and Erik missed a shift, got rear-ended (very lightly) and just missed a black flag.  So we parked it early since 4 black flags in 1 day means you’re done for the weekend. We get to start clean on Sunday
• We did an alignment on the car in the garage for about an hour on Saturday. Not too hard to do, I should write it up as an Instructable. After that, it handled much better. Matt still spun it though

Misty Watercolored Memories of the Way We Were, Race Analysis

Our Northern Division team competed at the American Irony Detroit-ish LeMons race last weekend and had a marvelous and successful time. Here’s a photo of what the car looked like as it was going out on the track on Saturday:

(click the photo for a bigger version)

And here’s one of Doug on the track:

They rebuilt the motor that we blew up (and by we I mean me) at Nelson Ledges last fall. Apparently Stevo got a penalty on Sunday (he claims it was the other guy’s fault, LOL) and the judges made him dress up in drag, including 3″ stilettos, and engage in a footrace versus the other driver to see who got to go out on track and who had to serve the penalty. The other guy was in flats and won, but I’m surprised after the Pinewood Derby at Infineon that Stevo didn’t think of just knocking him over and then cruising to the win. Here’s a cellphone photo that one of the guys took of Mark in his Sunday best, reclining on the hood of the car:

Stevo wrote the following report and sent it out via email last night, and I’m republishing it in its entirety below, without his permission. That’s what he gets for taunting me about not sending me the swirl pot. I haven’t read it all the way through, so I hope that it’s not too blue:

American Irony is done.  We placed 19th, but more importantly, we finished a race and learned a lot of valuable lessons.   Little things like transponder placement and big things like the new fender rule. The new motor ran flawlessly.  The oil cooling, swirlpot-ing, dethermostating cooling combination is POTENT.  A huge big thanks to Bender and Stick Figure Racing.  Murl, I don’t hardly want to give that can up.  I’ll ask Big Pete if he wants to copy it before we send or if we can wait to get it back.  At the least I’ll draw a plan of it.  Our short race summary:  the car was fabulous, black flag disease owned us.  I myself racked up 2.  I’ll say I deserved them at Infineon.  I cooked into a chicane x2 and got my just desserts. Gingerman was me driving good clean stints and getting hit by cars trying dumb passes.

Wow, what fun.  Big Pete said he reached to shift gears driving into work this morning.  Little Pete says he’s feeling it today where the car beat up on him all over.  My shifting arm is a bit sore from the seat support on that side.  I can’t complain though.  The seat is comfy for this frame as long as the belts are good’n'tight.  Wow, I picked some sucky restaurant food up there.  Mega thanks to Dusty for riding up and supporting the team in a whole lot of different ways on the weekend.

Ginger Man rocked.  Not bumpy as advertised.  Did I have that mixed up with Gratten?  Some complained of the surface nuking their tires. We had no tire or brake issues. Still need to look over the brakes postrace.  It looks like we used up most of that set that is on the car.  We could go back there.

MyLaps has the race data but we can’t log in and we don’t have our transponder number.  Even if we get the # it may be hard to log in with it depending on its status.  I have an email in with Nick at Lemons and a post on the forum trying to get some help.

I haven’t had enough time to go thru films yet.  Day one there is just one film about 25 minutes long.  It is yellow pace laps, then 4 jackasses trying to move a transponder around on the car.  Right at the end Pete is driving his fisrt green lap and the video stops at turn 7.  Thanks to PK hooking up some juice for us, we have most of day 2.  Dusty, Doug and I watched some of Big Pete’s runs from day 2 over dinner on the way home.  Big Pete is superbly competent at many things.  Driving tops that list.  I have watched my vid. Unfortunately stops before I get pegged in turn 10 by the #11 car, it may very well be JUST before and the camera shuts down from the knock.  Anyway, you wouldn’t be able to see a shot from behind given the current camera position which brings me to another idea.

If you think of ideas to do things differently next go, let me know. Try to jot them down now while its fresh.  A few of mine:  More mirrors.  A camera bracket that runs way out back behind the spoiler at the driver’s eye level.  We should get a wider view forward, a look at the steering wheel, tach,  AND rearview if we find the sweet spot. Sweet Jesus, you have no idea what I plan to write on the back of the car for the next race.  Also, we need a new theme idea.  Bonus points if it includes a lot of Kubota Orange rattle can.

Ok, I gotta go to bed and do more work and Dad stuff tomorrow.  The whole set of films is 8.5GBish, LMK if you want the whole set.  How hard is it to host ginormous files for free on the internets?  Or if you are local go buy a keychain flash drive if you don’t already have one.  I’ll try to edit things down but it will be SEVERAL days for that finished product.  That will prolly hit YouTube for your ease of consumption.

Misty Watercolored Memories of the Way We Were, Race Analysis Author: Pat

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.

Race Analysis, Team Strategy Author: Pat

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 Author: Pat

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.”

Race Analysis Author: Pat

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 Author: Matt

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!

Race Analysis Author: Pat

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.

Race Analysis Author: Pat

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!

Misty Watercolored Memories of the Way We Were, Race Analysis, Videos Author: Pat