Goin' For Broken

Between my wife hating LeMons and my son putting everything in the world in his mouth, I didn't write up the last race. Here's a quick summary:

We ran 3 drivers each day to minimize pit time, and just stayed out of trouble. That turned out to be a good strategy. We were 7 laps up at the end of day 1, then got a penalty for contact with the Faustest E30 (they spun in front of us, never our fault!). With the penalty we ended up still in the lead at the end of day 1, but the 2nd and 3rd place cars were on the same lap as us. On Day 2 we started up front, pushed our lead to 5 or 6 laps in the first driver stint (I was sprinting trying to build some buffer), and then had drivers 2 and 3 on a "maintain the lead and conserve fuel" strategy. There was a moderate amount of stress at the end when we were driving to conserve fuel to avoid an additional pit stop (day #2 is 1hr longer than day #1), and Eyesore's frankenmiata was in 2nd place and closing the gap. Luckily, we didn't run out of fuel, and we didn't have any incidents, so we took the checkered flag.

That's a pretty good distillation of what was going to be a masterful dissertation on our secret "fuel conservation and luck" strategy.

I'm so lazy, I didn't even post process the video from the race. But I did cut out 1 quick lap to show the new fish eye camera lens (note: this was a random lap. it is not awesome, for example, the braking for turn 1 is far from exemplary):

One Lap of LeMons THill 2009 from Adam Lazur on Vimeo.

So, the last race is behind us.

The Pandamonium crew and Mysteries Inc Racing both opted to skip the race at Infineon earlier this year, but we're back for Goin' For Broken (now at ThunderHill).

Ling Ling has spent the past few months in underground parking. The only action she's seen is when we show up and scavenge parts (our friends at Team Unsafe needed a kill switch, and she had some loaner spacers from my spec e30 that had to be returned).

We've got a week to prepare. There's nothing like procrastination.

The good news is that the car is in ok shape from the last race, so we're hopeful that we can get away with not doing too much work. I'm going to email Jay and ask what our budget is. The least he can do is let us fix our once pristine hood: