Thanks for all the replies. The motor ran great and the shocks were even better. We had lots of little things go wrong besides me running out of talent once or twice....
Thurs...prerun,roll once,other than that all good. Got back from prerunning late. Barely had time to get firesuit and get in line to race/qualify for better starting position. Run qualifier...rolled in last bowl. Left me with last starting position of qualifying racers....no big deal.
Thurs evening. had to add some plates to rear tube to keep swaybar links from catching on tubework. Was bending over grinding on metal,noticed my buddy Kurt behind me. I said" you like that,don't you!". Go back to grinding,10 seconds later he "goosed me". Trip to Pottsville hospital and 6 stitches later we are back just in time for drivers meeting.
Friday/raceday....line up with Alan Woodson and a 380hp ls motor. He asks"you want out front?". I said "sure". He lied and I had no choice...We are kind of buddies from WEROCK days and I kinda thouht he might do that. About 10 seconds before the start I noticed my engine temp was about 10* higher than it should be...we had no cooling fan. We raced off the start and i asked Jason/codriver to tell me when we get to 230 so I can stop,hopefully just out of view of the startline crowds. We almost made it out of of the comp course area and had to stop and check it out. 5 min and we found a bad fuse and replaced it and we were off. Another 5 min later it happened again.Wasn't a random fuse blowing. Turned out to be a loose connection on the control circuit powering the relay. Another 5 minuts and were were off.
We ran about 1/3 of the high speed section pleased as hell about the increase in speed and overall performance of the Bilstien Coilovers. Right about the time we were talking about it over the race radios the car felt real loose in the turns. I got out and looked as though the torsion bar in the sway bar had broken and we moved on with ,more than desirable, body roll. More on that later....
We run the whole high speed side and cross back over the street to get back into the trail portion of the race.Again the car is feeling good just not great with the body roll. First big obstacle was "Jotters Way', a big slippery rock climb. Got to work and nailed it on the first shot. hit the checkpoint at the top and were on our way. I was able to go WAY faster in the rough stuff than ever before. After CP 1 was a lane and a half wide trail with stumps of varying sizes and rocks from the size of curbs and bowling balls to slightly larger than that. we were able to pick good lines and manage about 20mph thru there......UNTIL. I got a little off line and into the brush on the side and ....BOOM.The front end of the truck pops up in the air about 3 feet and we come back down into the other side and do the same thing just popped the truck up about a foot this time. I WAS HAPPY TO STILL HAVE THE PASSENGER FRONT TIRE STILL CONNECTED TO THE TRUCK! The only damage was a bent rim and cut tire on the DS, it was the PS that took the the hit that I think my mom felt in South Carolina. we ditched the spare on the trail and carried on...We finished the rest of that lap w/o issue, besides the body roll with left the off camber sections way less desirable than the faster stuff w/o a working swaybar. After running trails like,Crawl Daddy,Trail 5 Hillclimb,Cumberland Valley, we radioed in that we needed another spare, fuel,food,and a good checkover.
We came back into the start/finish with a first lap time of 2 hours +/-. Nat bad for what we went thru but not good for a qualifying spot.
We get into the pits before we head over to the high speed section. The got us all hooked up and even found a link nut fell off the sway bar and even got that fixed up like new.... well, way better than we were running with. WE WERE BACK IN BUSINESS. With a clean race from here we had a shot at a qualifying spot.
We get back out on the High Speed side out of the pits and the car was feeling great, we were able to drift the corners again with the cutting brakes and the rear ARB off. I was a happy camper being able to use the 5.8 we swapped in from a 5.0 we previously ran.
Well....about 1/2 thru the high speed side, we came out of a blind turn a little hot and ran over a a 2 foot long flat rock (usually try to avoid hitting anything loose @ speed). the front soaked it up great but that kicked the rock up and it got into the rear tire on the PS. It was another hit that was pretty hard but it was still moving OK. About 5 min later I felt the back end a little loose again and we stopped to check it out. Another 10-15 min of beating the rim back into shape and adding air to the Swamper and we were on our way.
The rest of out lap was pretty uneventful. Our second lap was still 1 hour +.
Lap 3 was going pretty well until about 1/2 way point. On the trail side of the park we were dropping into Cemetary trail and on out way thru the entrance we were passed by Bigelo and we followed a different line thru a relatively simple section, BAD IDEA. We got belly hung and the ARB line was leaking. we managed to work our way thru w/o getting out to the truck but the ARB was going to be needed for the climbs and Crawl Daddy. We got thru cemetary and some of the small high speed sections on that side of the Park and the rear was feeling loose again. We still needed to fix the ARB as well.We should have stopped then....we decided to run trail 5 Climb and Cumberland Valley before trying to make repairs.
Trail 5 climb was chore but we got up. Cumberland Valley was not so good. Heading down into Cumberland Valley we rolled on a simple off camber turn before the hard stuff. About 5 guys come running over and I said " don't even try it until you get at least 3 or 4 more guys". It was nice to see Bernie Kaiser and his son Bernie Kaiser in the team that helped flip us back over. i would much rather see my friends on the side of the course, not in the course like that. we also wound up winching up the climb at the top on Cumberland Valley.Off we go again.....
We pull over on a good flat section to work on the truck a little and found the swaybar link was loose and the ARB line had melted. We repaired both and were moving again. We called into the pits that we need a swapout of our Ultimate Air 2# tank that runs our ARB and we might as well take some fuel as well. We finish that lap and head to the pits. Got in and got all we needed and off again.
We got out on the high speed side and all was pretty good but the car was feeling loose again but not bad enough to stop. It was doing all we asked it just started to punish us in the choppy cross grain. We managed to run a clean last lap w/o pitting and it should have been a sub 1 hour lap.
As we were pulling into the finish, I started talking to Jason about what we can do to spice up a mediocre finish...... All we could come up with was a 45 second burnout to smoke out whole finish line crowd. After we were done, Dave Cole comes up with the mic to do an interview and we were informed we did not get a Qualified spot ,but we did finish the hardest race on the East Coast........
Much thanks to a pit crew that was second to none. Chris Jones,Ross Fisher, Chris Maycock,Anthony Russo,Chris Demartini. I think I saw a few others around but not sure on the names.... THANKS!
It was also nice to have my own personal cheering section on CP2
