:. Racing .:. High Plains Raceway "Last Chance" N/N
Results: Saturday, Sunday
Dry, With a Chance of Oil Pressure
The last race in a 3-week period with 5 race weekends, I was really looking forward to this N/N race, only my second ever national weekend. The car seemed to be in relatively solid shape,
with the BRD dry sump performing well, and the car behaving more or less OK. The big man-this-will-be-great for this weekend was the installation of my newly acquired
WF-1 front splitter, and the prototype Dauntless rear wing configuration from Mark Jaremko's 2008 Runoffs car. New parts, what fun! I finally got everything ready and installed on Friday,
loaded up the car, and headed down to the track. Gee, I hope all this stuff works!
Saturday
Saturday was relatively cool, befitting the late summer date. I found myself working my way up to speed with the new parts. Initially, I detected a few mph straightaway speed loss, but as I took
more and more advantage of the newfound grip in the car, that turned into about a 1mph gain, overall. The car was not as hugely different as I expected - no radical shift towards front bite with
the WF-1 splitter. There was just MORE everywhere. The car could go faster in each corner, and as a result, boy was it moving around a lot (well, relatively speaking) on its 1000/1300 springs.
I was happy with the new speed, doing a new best of 1:44.3, but was slightly disappointed that was all I had found, since that left me a healthy distance from Chris's 41 second lap earlier at the
July double national.
Early on, the only bugaboos were that the extra grip was causing enough roll that I was quickly wearing the front rub blocks away, so I had to raise the car. Ultimately, that still wasn't quite enough,
as I'd installed the splitter just slightly nose-down (incompetence), which we fixed after Saturday's race. The only other frightening aspect was that I found a cooked oil temp sensor wire, which made
it look like there'd been some miniature fires under the car, the cause of which we could not determine. Having never had oil temp problems, we decided to just run the car.
In attendance to play were Paul in his Radical, and Tom Gonzales, up from New Mexico in his 1g Stohr. Much as I was sporting my new widgets, Tom had a Dauntless front splitter to complement his
biplane rear wing setup, so we were poised for a good race. Sure enough, we qualified 1-2, me improving further with a 1:43.875, getting used to my new grip, and Tom learning his car, not too far behind.
The race was a pretty uneventful one for me. The green flew in about the normal spot. I pulled about a car length on Tom into T1, and Paul was very close behind him, for a DSR 1-2-3. Paul pulled a bit
of a draft behind Tom leading up to T4, but wasn't able to do anything with it. Paul had a bit of oversteer at the exit of 4, and lost a few car lengths to Tom and I while gathering it back up, and
the same in T10, which was big enough for Dwight to pass him in the FC. I had a good first lap and pulled several carlengths on Tom, and continued to gap him for the next few laps. After Dad radioed
in with a 15 second lead, I backed off and tried to save the tires.
Despite this, as with the races a few weekends before, I noticed the car going more and more towards understeer, especially in right hand corners by the end of the race. My laptimes dropped off
significantly, but fortunately, so did Tom's, so it was a relatively easy win. A late race spin by Tom handed Paul second place, which is where he finished, with Chris Waterman on
his butt the whole way through.
Sunday
Post-race inspection on Saturday showed that quite a bit of rubbing had occurred, so we swapped to 1200/1400 springs, from the 1000/1300 I'd had before. Sure enough, the car felt "tighter" than before,
and I suspected I was going to have some late-race issues again. By driver feel, the front end was now better, so the car was better through 1 and 4. More understeer in 2, 6, 8, and 11.
Overal, the front end of the car was much more controlled than before, it just didn't quite have the balance. Similarly, Tom had jumped down to 1200F, from his 1400/1500 combo the day before,
and was loving life.
Adjusting the splitter and the stiffer fronts definitely helped, as I qualified with yet another .5s improvement, down to a 1:43.2, my best
for the weekend, and now not terribly far off from my goal time of 1:42. Tom also found a chunk of time, so once again it was he and I
1-2 on grid.
The race was MUCH different than Sunday. Now accustomed to his new car and with a nice setup, Tom was going much faster than on Saturday. We
were both on shagged tires, so a good question was just how bad they were, and whose were going to give up first. The race was AWESOME.
The start was a good one for me again, and I pulled a length or so on Tom. Paul got a good run once again and thought REAL hard about
making a bid for P2 at the start, but thought better of it. Leading around T3, I thought that I might be about to set sail again, but Tom stayed
in my mirrors, just a 3-5 seconds back for the first ten laps of the race. I never quite ran away the same as on Saturday.
That might have been the way it stayed, but finally on lap 12 or so, they black-flagged the race due to the various cars spun and stuck on track. Zach
high-centered down at Danny's Revenge, and a mess of FE's that tangled up at T8. We sat in the hot pits for a few minutes while they sorted it
out.
The restart was pretty tense for me. Already, a few laps before the black-flag, I had felt my car start to go away, and feared that another
heat cycle might basically be their last. Sure enough, Tom stayed absolutely glued to my rear wing after the restart, to the point where I was
having to take shallower corner entries to discourage him from trying moves! He looked to the outside on T1, and pulled up side-by-side with me as we went to T3,
but backed off and planted himself on my rear wing.
As we crossed the line to start the second to last lap, Tom got an excellent run, so I defended strongly into T1, but got crossed up in the marbles, and put four
off into the dust, and took a bit of a ride getting straightened back out. Tom and Chris Waterman (Speads FB) snuck by, and I set about trying
to somehow catch them back up. They slowed eachother up battling eachother for the lead, to the point where all three of us could have been covered
by a blanket as we entered T8.
Last lap: I got an excellent run on Tom out of T15, but he suddenly slowed, so I had to jink to the outside and passed him unnaturally quickly,
turns out he had run out of fuel. That left only Chris Waterman to try and catch. I tucked right up under his rear wing leading into T3, and got a
nice draft off of him leading into T4, outbraked him, and went by. He tried an over-under into T6 as we came down the hill, but thought better of it
and backed off. I led him around the rest of the lap, and defended as I saw him close as we came into T13. I had just a bit of an oversteer
bobble coming out of 13, which hurt my exit, and he got a great run. We came up to the flag side by side, him slooooowly catching me, but it
just wasn't quite enough for him - I crossed the line first, Chris's front wing just six inches behind my splitter, for a finishing margin
of .025 second......WOW!
Moving On...
What a weekend! With three competitors running CSR, that was the first time I had ever won something for racing, and boy, 4 new tires will
be wonderful to run on.
All was not totally well with the car, however. Some of my late-race woes had been down to the chain once again coming loose and eating itself,
resulting in a huge amount of driveline lash. Further, while I didn't know my oil temps due to the aforementioned cooked oil sensor, the car had
gotten warm enough that pressures were only about 45psi on the straight with 10w-40 oil.
Writing this now after the fact, we know that the chain trouble was caused by failed differential bearings, and the low pressure on dry sump
systems has been solved now as well.
Comparing data from Saturday and Sunday, it was very marked what the suspension changes had done. The lap-to-lap comparison showed a series of "hills", in that I was continually
gaining time on corner entry with the stiffer springs, but I was loosing it on corner exit, since I couldn't put power down as early with the more rear-biased spring split. So, one thing
I definitely want to try is to get the spring split back where it belongs, and see if the better front-end, combined with better balance, will be the best of both worlds, and help the car
get around the track as quickly as possible.
In particular, the better front-end control was worth almost a second a lap alone in increased T1 speed, but getting through 2 and 3 better the previous day paid larger dividends all the way
down the straightaway, that I was giving up on Sunday. The pattern of faster in downforce corners and slower in slower corners held for the whole lap.
So, fix the chain, fix the temp sensor, fix the springs, and do it again in a month!
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Saturday Full Race(200MB)
Sunday Full Race (277MB, Rear-View)
Sunday Race Highlights (77MB, Rear-View)
Paul's Saturday Video (You Tube)
Paul's Sunday Video (YouTube)
Saturday Qualifying ooooopsie (5MB)
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