Racing update!

capt_jordi

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Well I havent been that active on here recently! Its been a pretty busy month or so! The cats are doing great, and so is Reese the dog. The cats are pretty mad at us since we were out of town last weekend and had a friend and his dog stay over... but they will get over it. Gary and I are doing great! Just lots of stuff going on and lots of preparing for summer! I'm still searching for a new job but havent had any bites yet. Until then I am stuck at my crappy job, but we are no longer open on Sundays which is a HUGE plus, but still no benefits and that is the main reason I am looking for something new right now. But I figured I'd give a few updates on our car stuff and some pictures:

24 Hours of LeMons - Endurance race for $500 or less cars

Jan & Feb were spent getting the Benz prepped for her next race and trying to find 4 new drivers for the team. Gary raced on the original team but 2 of the other original members were only really interested in doing one to say they had, 1 of the others had quit his job without a new one lined up so he didnt want to spend the money, and the last has a baby due any day now so needless to say he wasnt allowed out of town lol!  So we found 4 guys interested had the team ready then last week one had an emergency and had to drop out so then we had to scramble to find a last person! But we found someone and made it work! So we set off early Friday morning for Carolina Motorsports Park, arrive safely, pass tech and judging no problems.

Spend Friday night doing some adjusting on the car, practicing pit stuff, and hanging out with other teams.



  Loaded up on the way to get judged. You gotta have a good theme and costume to make it in LeMons. And bribe some judges... this year we used some homemade BBQ sauce and some Cabo Wabo.

Saturday we start the race and all is going well for about an hour and a half then the first driver gets a black flag and has to come in. Some of the other cars had complained that our brake lights were hard to see, no big deal, we just ripped the plastic seats off the back and sent out the next driver. He goes to leave the pits and finds out he has NO brakes. Like slamming the pedal to the floor and the car keeps rolling... NOT GOOD! So we take it back to paddock and take the wheel off to find out the brake line has broken. Ugh. So while Gary was working on that one they went ahead and checked the other lines as well to find that 3 out of 4 lines had broken at the fittings... these were new "Strong" lines that we had just put on for this race and all of them had failed horribly.



    This is where the fitting and the line should fit together, it sheered off.... 

Replaced all of them with the original 20 year old lines and they worked perfect. But we missed about 45 minutes of racing time during the repair and dropped back from probably top 15 or 20 cars to 50something. 2nd driver keeps racing does great! Comes in to switch out and refill and we put in out 3rd driver who is BOOKING it! He dropped 6 seconds of the 2nd drivers lap times until he called in and said the temp of the car had spiked and he was coming in. Thinking it just needed some water and to cool down we didnt worry too much, until he drove it to paddock and it was spewing steam out the tail pipe. We had blown a head gasket and basically blew the engine up in the car. Spent the entire afternoon trying different fixes, called all the parts stores and a few Benz dealers and none of them had a replacement head gasket, we'd have to order it which doesnt work well at a race. Even looked on the local craigslist for a wrecked donor car. We were going to buy a donor car and have someone come from home with another car trailer to haul it home, but no luck. We did find one engine, but the place had already closed and wouldnt pull it until Sunday and that wouldnt help at all either. So after dumping many different sealers in the car with no luck we called it quits and enjoyed our Saturday night drinking and partying with the other teams. Sunday we loaded up and headed out around noon and now we are trying to get a game plan for June.

The big thing about a LeMons race is the after race festivities. These teams go to these things to have fun, they are driving junkers so they know they will be doing repairs and may not even make it on the track, but they all manage to have a good time! But one team took that party to a whole new level! They bought a 53' enclosed car trailer, that is the length of a semi trailer but only 6 feet tall inside, and instead of just filling it with tools they decided to make a bowling alley down the center



  Taken during they day, at night there was also black lights, music, strobe lights, a fog machine, and a bubble machine! And they raised it so it was a flat walk up to the alley.

Was pretty awesome to say you bowled at a racetrack LOL! Another team also had to try to brake their current record of how many people they could fit on a Ford LTD and still manage to drive around the paddock... last year at Charlotte there were 46. This year at CMP there were 51. I got a video when they had somewhere around 40 on the car, but the picture I got of the full amount was pretty crappy! Video can be found here: 
Some of the other teams with cool cars:



Charlie Brown and the Red Baron in the background. Yes they raced with the tree the entire first day lol!



Slurm and Slug until he went surfing down the straight away halfway through day one!



This one was super cool! That is an actual airplane wing mounted upside down and it was held by a gas shock so that when they were going slow it would angle like in the picture to help the car, and then when they sped up it would flatten completely out! Was very cool to watch!



Bumblebee Car. The back had lights going around the stripes.



Finally, the Ford LTD, after having been loaded with around 10,000LBS of people the night before, actually managed to race the next day! They did have to repair a windshield and probably the bottom of the radiator and the exhaust!

So that was our weekend at CMP with LeMons! We had a blast, just kind of bummed the car didnt make it. But now we will make it better! And hopefully we will have a 2 car team before the next race and we can come up with a new theme! Our current ideas are Cops and Robbers or Cowboys and Indians! Or maybe make the car a Trojan Horse, or make it look like a gladiator chariot and have the boys dress up like gladiators. 

And now this weekend we are off to South Georgia for the first SCCA National tour of the year with the S2000. Gonna be nice having a car that we know runs perfectly! LOL! Hope you guys enjoyed!
 
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g-reg

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Wish I had a few more mechanically inclined friends to do something like that!  I watched a chumpcar race last year, didn't look like as much fun as what I see in pictures of Lemons racing.  Everyone was way too serious!
 
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capt_jordi

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Looks like a fun time!

It was a blast! Apparently at the LeMons race in September the town the track is in shuts down and has a big parade and bbq for the racers!


Wish I had a few more mechanically inclined friends to do something like that!  I watched a chumpcar race last year, didn't look like as much fun as what I see in pictures of Lemons racing.  Everyone was way too serious!

Honestly last year out of the 5 drivers only 2 knew anything about cars, the rest just wanted to try driving once! And yeah, it was pretty weird going from LeMons where everything is a party to a national tour for SCCA this weekend where everyone was super focused and serious. We are thinking about doing a chump car race but not sure if we can fit it in the schedule!
 
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