Pandamonium Racing

So long, and thanks for all the black flags

2011-10-17T23:11:00.000-07:00

It was bound to happen sooner or later.

Ling Ling is sold.

On Saturday, I did one last minute fix to remove the thread chaser that was stuck in the rear hub (leftover from the ridiculous rear wheel bearing job in the Reno paddock):

From Pandamonium Racing

then I put Ling Ling on the new owners' trailer:

(I kept the license plate)

And they took her away. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't sad to see her go.

But on the bright side, she's destined for more LeMons glory with a different team and theme. You can follow her new escapades at https://www.facebook.com/clowntownroadshow, I know I will :)

Work continues into the night

2011-05-14T20:21:00.001-07:00

Two separate parts runs later, new halfshafts and wheel bearings. The passenger side one proves recalcitrant.

The sun's going down. While we've been beating on the halfshafts, a second alternator replacement appears to have fixed the charge issues - once again 14v to the battery, rather than the 7-11v we were seeing earlier. If we're lucky, and if we ever get the bearing out, the lights might work.

Update:
With a hell of a lot of help - including borrowed tools, slide hammer, bearing press, and the manager of the local autozone - they got the old bearing out and a new one in. Now we're left extracting the random taps, etc stuck in the hub. (There's a thread tap stuck in one of the lug stud holes.) And wrestling the second halfshaft in. Etc. One thing after another at this point. We'll see.

Update #2 - 3:23am:
Car back on track as of 1:30am. Ryan driving. It's down to Doug and me awake on the crew as of now, though I did just wake up Andy (next driver) to get him used to hardship.

Ryan got black flagged for passing under a yellow flag (huge tow truck parade just now) and got off with us bringing coffee to the judges, but just got flagged again. Damn.

Losses to date

2011-05-14T15:46:00.001-07:00

- charging system, despite a rockstar quick alternator replacement
- possibly the clutch
- super busted rear halfshaft (now replaced)
- two batteries (courtesy of the busted charging system)

Also the CO alarm in the RV came on? Just one of those races.

It's hazy and windy out here and the action is set to go all night. We need to sort out the charging issues, though.

Midmorning

2011-05-14T11:44:00.001-07:00

Hour and a half, and half a tank of gas into the race. We only nearly lost one wheel. Car is running well.

The Porsche crew beside us have been in three times so far with a fuel leak, out of a damaged filler vent line.

24 hours of reno fernley

2011-05-14T10:50:00.001-07:00

At the end of the test night we got in some track time with the lights, and immediately discovered that something about the bright hella lights made ling ling's electrical system sad. The lights went dim and she eventually stalled.

The radiator fan motor cooked nice and toasty, and the battery had drained stone dead. We poked around and picked up parts, but didn't find a root cause.

The race is on now. We're totally fine until it gets dark....

Reno!

2011-05-13T11:41:00.001-07:00

This weekend's racing takes place in scenic reno-fernley, which is a track east of Reno in the high Nevada desert. We've brought just the one car, Ling Ling, and six drivers, plus crew, pandas, and kids.

This race is a true 24 hr, starting 10am Saturday and ending 10am Sunday. We're totally excited for the opportunity to play "truth in 24", and will take turns impersonating Steve McQueen.

(We watched McQueen's LeMans movie at the infineon race. It is perhaps the most laconic movie ever made, but provides important spiritual guidance: "Protect the machine. Drive fast. Try to win." This is almost all the dialog in the movie.)

Jinnah rented a big-ass RV, familiar to us from such previous movies as "GWS goes to Pittsburgh" gws-team RV trip. So we are travelling in extra style, ambulance+trailer+giant RV. This is nice, because the environment is a lot like burning man - desert, dust, no power, no running water. Upgrade, though - there's cellphone signal nowdays.

This race is going to be Ling Ling's last outing - she's running with a For Sale sign, since we're moving on after this to another car.

Today is a late start day - soon we go through tech inspection, then the test session starts at 2 and goes til 9, so we get a chance to play with our giant light rig.

post Infineon body work

2011-05-04T23:06:00.000-07:00

The leaderboard looks like this now:

Go watch the video of some body work we did at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T1Xfhpy9OE

Sears Pointlessness

2011-03-28T11:24:00.000-07:00

Infineon is an awesome track.

So we totally didn't win. We came in around 40th, after some massive shenanigans with overheating at the end of the day on Saturday (threw the accessory belt, suspected that the water pump had jammed or failed; discovered, eventually, that the thermostat had disintegrated and jammed shut), and a collision on track on sunday resulting in some downstream panel beating, prying, wiring stuff shut, etc.

This is not the thermostat you want in your car:

From 24Hrs of Lemons - Sears Pointless 2011

The damage happened while Jinnah was driving, and he noticed the overheating problem very quickly, so the brief period of running extremely hot didn't do any noticeable damage. Happily, we did not replicate the Kill Bill team's experience of blowing a thermostat, swiftly followed by toasting the head gasket due to overheating. Sadly, we did lose the last half hour of Saturday. (Plus, Jinnah had to give up the dream of staying ahead of the other cars he was dicing with when he started to overheat. A tragedy.)

Working to fix:

From 24Hrs of Lemons - Sears Pointless 2011

Laz glamour shot:

From 24Hrs of Lemons - Sears Pointless 2011

Adding the Mystery Machine drivers to Ling Ling's lineup resulted in some hilarious confusion on the part of the other drivers, since with Jinnah at the wheel she is rendered merely mortal, and with me at the wheel, slightly less than that. For a while there the other cars were so excited about passing Ling Ling that they'd spin with happiness before or after the attempt -- "Whoa, I'm badass, I passed Ling Ling! *spiiiiiin*" At the end of the day Sunday, though, Laz put in 2 hours followed by Rob, and tore like hell through the pack to end us somewhere around 40th place (up from a low of ~79th following a few repair pitstops).

Ling Ling on track with Jinnah at the wheel:

From 24Hrs of Lemons - Sears Pointless 2011

We made it as high as 5th place early on Saturday, while Rob was driving, which meant that we got to see our number up on the Infineon leaderboard. Since Infineon is a real track which hosts real races, they have a lot of exciting signage, and seeing our number up there, however briefly, was incredibly satisfying.

Really hard-to-read proof:

From 24Hrs of Lemons - Sears Pointless 2011

Sunday morning with me (Astrid) driving, I took a huge hit in the rear. I was tearing around turn 7 in a pack 3 wide, when the inside car ahead of me got crossed up. The car directly on my inside (the Mazdarachis rx-7) checked up trying to avoid him, and while I was trying to get wide and get around, the ripple effect caught up the cars behind me, and the next car back clocked my inside rear quarter panel hard enough to spin me all the way around (I never saw who it was, but I heard it was car 500). I ended up stalled facing backward on the track for the couple of seconds it took to get my shit together, and then limped her back to the pit with the fender dug into the rear tire.

My experience goes something like this:
Hey, Mazdarachi is all checked up, go wide! (Screeeeeeech) I hope whatever's behind me doesn't--WHAM! (I get a nice 180 view of the track, watch the other cars scatter like cockroaches to avoid hitting me - Thanks, other drivers! That was awesome!) Hmm, I'm just sitting here. Damn, I should probably... get out of the way. Right.

I fire the car back up and drive her over to the side, which is hard because the seat got knocked loose on the slider in the impact, and has slid back into 6'5" Laz position (I am 5'5").
I sit on the shoulder for a second and think about life. Then I remember, hey, I can still drive! I should probably drive back to the pit! So I do that, with the fender digging so hard into the tire that it's blowing black smoke the whole way. The track worker at pit exit flagged me down to be like, "Hey, do you know you're blowing smoke?" Me: "I'm telling myself it's from the tire." (It was.)

Then the guys pounded the shit out of the fender, made sure the battery and fuel tank were still ok, and I went back out. I got black-flagged for the incident, which seemed entirely reasonable, but the judges were kind enough to let me go back out, so I got a couple more hours of driving in. This was my first time at Infineon, and I had a total blast.

Some gratuitous pandas (taken during tech inspection):

From 24Hrs of Lemons - Sears Pointless 2011

We discovered a bit later that the impact had kinked the fuel filler hose, leading to a leak when the tank was full, and after fixing that, forgot to put the rear spring back in place, which ate the rear cv boot before we got it fixed. (The rear springs are from a different car, and they're too short for the e30 - when the spring is unloaded, it falls out.)

But we went back out and Rob and Laz had a good time pwning the rest of the track (like they do) and we survived to come through the checkered flag, and it's all good. In fact, it's really kind of awesome.

And Ling Ling's rear end is a little... sideways. Yeah, I did that.

From 24Hrs of Lemons - Sears Pointless 2011

Infineon friday!

2011-03-25T09:39:00.001-07:00

It is bright and wet and early at Infineon raceway. Pandamonium is here with a minimal Panda/Mysteries Inc combined team - Laz, Rob, Jinnah, and me (Astrid).

note: Laz and Rob want you to know that if Ling Ling is being passed, it's me or Jinnah driving. Not them.

Today is also a Ferrari challenge test day, so the paddock this morning is half full of ratty lemons cars, and half full of Ferrari 18-wheeler car carriers. The Ferrari challenge experience comes with hordes of attendants in matching black jackets to push and wax and prep, and a support 18-wheeler full of tires. The Lemons experience comes with a spare radiator and a slide hammer to pull out last race's body damage, and cold pizza.

Though I was looking forward to barreling into a challenge Ferrari on my first ever lap at Infineon, it turns out we're in different run groups. Sad!

arse freezing, again

2010-11-27T15:09:00.000-08:00

Our black flag collection is not yet complete, so we're heading to Buttonwillow Raceway to pick up some more.

The above is a pic of the car getting hood pins. Since hitting another car at the last race, the hood didn't exactly close.

We took the car for a shake down day in the rain at Infineon. There are electrical problems. It also doesn't rev past 5k RPMs. It feels a lot like fuel starvation. We swapped in a new pump, and it didn't fix it. In fact, it didn't work at all. Brand new fuel pump DOA? WTF. At least we didn't find this out track side.

So in the next week, we'll:

fix the fuel pump
replace the windshield
replace broken kill switch
re-tape the stupid side mirrors
figure out what's clunking in the front suspension (loose sway bar endlink?)

Oh, and then there's the other car.

going for broken 2010: results

2010-05-30T23:00:00.000-07:00

We decided we'd be Very Serious this time out. The practice day would include pit stop practice. Fast pits. Teamwork. Clean driving.

We were gonna win, again.

Results

This got really long, so I won't make you skip all the way to the bottom just to find out that we finished somewhere around 27th.

Why? It all started on Thursday night when we got to the race track...

Arrival and Test Day

We rolled up to the ThunderHill paddock gates around 11pm in 2 RVs and 2 ambulances. The Mystery Machine team and Ling Ling have a siamese twin driver roster, so we caravan to the track and pit together.

Instead of going to sleep immediately so we could get up early and have a great practice day, we decided it would be much more fun to drink some beer in the paddock. One thing led to another. Shortly before we should have gone to sleep, it was discovered that some of our less wise teammates brought the equivalent of an atomic bomb with them. Four Loko. It was only a matter of time until someone consumed it and did something insane. At that point, Weaver made a strategic call that consuming the beverages immediately was the best call. What the hell, Friday was only a test day, right? We agreed.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

At 3am, some of our party retired due to inability to speak coherently. This is the point where the alcohol in your system overwhelms the high levels of caffeine, taurine, and guarana. It makes for a very sound sleep that is not restful in the slightest.

Doug and I stayed upright and stumbled through tall grass and into the paddock with cones and orange string. We partitioned off a very nice paddock space between pit exit and entry. It had shore power for the RVs, was next to trees for shade, and was easily the best paddock space my drunk eyes have ever seen.

We woke up 3 hours later and groggily laid claim to our chosen paddock space. In one vehicle, the intensity of the move was so high that the Four Loko from mere hours earlier made an encore appearance.

I'm getting a mild headache just remembering this part of the story.

The test day was generally uneventful.

We got a slow start, and things didn't really pick up. Everyone was hung over, some more than others. Ling Ling proved to be mechanically ok. Moving from a 195 width tire to a 205 width tire provided a small but noticeable increase in grip. Oh, and one driver, still feeling the effects of the night before, vomited in his helmet before coming in.

We went through the dreaded BS inspection, and were assigned 3 penalty laps. Fair. The logic is that we would get penalized by how many laps we won the previous race by.

Driver order was determined in a hungover team meeting. Weaver, Doug, and me on Saturday. Rob, Andy, and a 2nd bonus stint for someone on Sunday. 3 drivers per day. Full tanks of gas. Fast pits. We're gonna win. No sleep 'til Brooklyn.

Race Day 1: Saturday

Weaver started the race. This was a strategic move. He's not the fastest or most experienced driver on the team, but he's courteous and he'd stay out of trouble. The perfect lead off driver.

Weaver was black flagged an hour and 45 minutes into his stint for contact. After reviewing the footage, a distraction of a car cutting to the inside of T7 dropping 2 wheels off caused a distraction that led to a mental error. A car turned into the apex of T7 and Ling Ling's right front bumper hit their left rear quarter panel.

Black flag #1 = driver change only.

We fueled Ling Ling up and threw Doug in the driver's seat. No big deal, we won the last race and had 1 black flag *cough*Andy*cough*. Just need to send Doug out and get back on track.

Ok Doug, you're good to go.

Just start the car and go.

Doug, go!

What? The car won't start. Fuck.

We spent 10 or 15 minutes playing with stuff. Relays? Yep, still zip tied. Kill switch? We had to have toggled that 15 times to see if it would fix it. We finally went to "jump" the car in the trunk. Someone spotted that the battery ground cable moved freely. Hmm, that's not right. We tightened it down and the car started right up. And away Doug went.

Doug immediately complained about the instrument cluster. Everything but the speedometer was now dead. Fuel gauge, tach, lights, everything. Drive through it Doug! We can tell how much fuel is in the car because it fuel starves when it is empty.

An hour later, we met Doug in the penalty box. Black flag #2: 4 wheels off. Doug took the fast line over T5 and went through the dirt at the exit. It was really only 2 wheels off, confirmed on video and everything.

The new, less arbitrary LeMons flagging scheme calls for a mandatory penalty at the second flag. We got the Bob Ross penalty. They gave us a wig, paint, and a book of Bob Ross paintings. Doug and Weaver masterfully recreated one of Bob Ross' best masterpieces on Ling Ling's hood. It maybe half an hour. I wish I had taken a photo of the hood, but can't find one that's just the painting. Envision a blue sky, sno capped mountains in the background, and a snow covered lake in the foreground. Liberally apply snow capped trees to this vision, and your mind's eye is going to be close to what we had.

After the painting fun was over, I strapped in and went out for some fun. I came back in after a tank of gas. We sent out Rob out. Uneventful.

Doug went out for the final stint of the day, since his was cut short earlier. He ended up in a tussle with a car at the entry to turn 5. Ok, not really a tussle. There was a traffic jam going up the hill. Doug didn't see it early enough, and he ended up running into the back of a stopped orange Fiat.

The damage to Ling Ling was all on the driver front corner. The hood was tweaked, the fender had seen better days, and the top radiator hose was pinched. The hood came off, and we spent some time beating the frame out so the radiator hose was no longer pinched. Since the motor was no longer going to overheat, we drove it down for our final penalty of the day.

Black flag #3: the cone of shame. Our penalty was to find a cone in the paddock, affix it to the roof of the vehicle, and paint it white (so it would match our theme?). We bought a cone for $1 from some guys lurking around the penalty area, and stuck it to the roof with bailing wire. Doug got the honor of spraying it white.

Oh, and we had to sit out for an hour. Since there was only 45 minutes left in the race, we were done for the day.

Saturday night, we ate some tasty steak in the paddock courtesy of paddock gourmet Jinnah.

Doug and Andy went all "paddock body shop" on the car, banged out the fender and hood damage, and painted them so nobody would know of our propensity for body contact ... unless they saw the cone of shame.

Race Day 2: Sunday

We sent Andy out Sunday morning. He drove fine for an hour or so, but returned early ... for contact? Honestly, I can't remember the specifics...

Black flag #4: write "I have learned absolutely nothing from the cone of shame" 100 times on the vehicle.

minor modification of the punishment phrase was not questioned

So everyone on the roster had a chance to drive Ling Ling. Weaver and Doug both weren't up to driving, so it was between Rob and I to hop in the car. I let Rob go, hoping that it would rain later in the day so I could hop in the car for a rain stint. It never rained.

Rob drove without incident, but did complain about a lack of power at the top end of each gear. With just about no instruments, it was a "well, short shift and keep driving" kind of situation.

When Rob came in, we convinced Weaver to get back out there. He put in a stint of an hour and a half, and we put Doug in the car to finish the race.

Doug came back in with 20 minutes left in the race, for Black Flag #5: 4 wheels off over turn 5 (again!). Somehow Doug sweet talked the judges, because they just sent him back out to finish the race. He stayed on the pavement for the remainder of the race, and Ling Ling took the checkered flag.

Post-Race, Leaderboard

So that's how the race went. In hindsight, I think we all had a great time, but it was different than our expectations going in :)

Since her first black flag, Ling Ling has sported a "fighers killed" style scoreboard on the driver door. Here's the current leaderboard:

Goin' For Broken

2010-04-30T08:57:00.001-07:00

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:

panda video

2009-11-26T12:07:00.000-08:00

She even worked in a plug for the racing team.

... oh, did you want to see video from the race?

Arse Freeze Apalooza 2009: part 1

2009-11-23T22:43:00.001-08:00

Here's half of the full story, as I remember it. The other half will follow.

Travel to the Race (Thursday)

The 3 of you who are regular readers of this blog will remember a post saying the panda only needed a few things. Well, none of those things were done on Thursday. The minivan was still living in the carport on the side of my house, recovering from the replacement of a busted ass motor. Ling Ling was sitting on the trailer, waiting to get some more attention.

It looked kind of like this, but Ling Ling sat in place of the red and yellow spec e30.

Thankfully, by 6pm on Thursday, the van was gone and I could get Ling Ling ready to go. I was sitting on the ground, next to Ling Ling with all 4 corners on jack stands. The driver front wheel was on. I used the impact to tighten the lug bolts down, and gave it a quick spin. I am somehow preprogrammed to do this every time I put a wheel on. Well, now I know why:

It didn't spin.

I took a closer look. The wheel's spokes were firmly pressed into the brake caliper. I briefly thought about how wise it was to use the impact gun to tighten this together.

This was a ridiculous last minute surprise.

I picked up this set of wheels as spares for my spec e30 car. Since it was supposed to rain at ThunderHill, I made the call to bump to 15" wheels and tires so we could run a better dual purpose rain/dry tire. It turns out that on these new wheels, the wheel offset and centerbore were not E30 at all (note to self: examine wheels very closely when buying BMW wheels from a Honda Challenge racer).

So, I grabbed a jack and concocted a plan. I pulled wheel studs from my street car (5 lug, so we had 2 spares), and my spec car. The longer studs, coupled with some spacers pulled from the race car, built me a kit that should work. I test fit 1 wheel and it worked, modulo the hub centric bit not being right, but at least they fit. At 7:30 the panda car was finally on the trailer with 1 new wheel. The rest got punted 'til the next day.

We waited for the Mystery Machine crew to get it together. After a series of additional delays, we were on the road around 11pm (in hindsight, I should've known this would happen).

Test Day (Friday)

We woke up early. 6:30 maybe? I was cranky. Getting 4 hours of sleep, then driving on the race track at 100mph+ is not something that I like to do. In addition, I had to put the damn wheels on the car, change the oil, and check the trans fluid at a minimum.

Luckily, some of my team mates were around to help out. We put the car on jack stands, and I proceeded to put in the wheel studs and get the wheels on. That went well, and things were starting to look up.

Then it started to rain.

I slid under the car, put a wrench on the oil drain plug, and jokingly said to Doug "righty tighty, lefty loosey, right?". I proceeded to break the plug free. Boy that drain plug was really tightened down, but with some extra force I broke it free. I kept turning the nut, first with the wrench and then with my fingers, but it wasn't backing out. "Doug, this plug nut isn't backing out. Weird eh?" Doug took a look as I was spinning it, then said:

"Ummm. I think you're turning it the wrong way."

No fucking way. It can't be. I've been changing oil for a long time. This mistake is not possible.

I cocked my head to the side, and goddamn it, he was right.

Fuuuuuuuck.

I called some team mates who were on their way to the track, and told them to go to a parts place, any parts place, and get me a bigger drain plug. Astrid spent some time on the phone and assured me that nobody in a 60 mile radius of Willows stocks an M12x1.5 oversized drain plug.

I got on the horn with NAPA in Willows, and for the first time in a very very long time, I talked to a knowledgeable parts guy. I wish I could remember his name, because he was my new best friend. He hooked me up with an M12x1.75 plug that might work, and a 1/2"-20 magnetic plug that would be even bigger (in case I really screwed up and removed all the thread material). The metric plug was a no go, there wasn't enough material for it to grab onto. So laying on the wet ground, I tapped out the pan for 1/2"-20 Standard threads. A german engineer in my head was screaming obscenities at me, but I ignored him. I gooped up the new plug with some gasket sealer, and tightened it down just enough that it wouldn't back out, but not tight enough to strip out the new, likely thinner than usual, threads.

I let the goop set up and moped around in the paddock for a while.

It stopped raining.

I filled up the motor with oil and the new plug didn't leak, even after warming the car up. Success.

Then my brother arrived. He drove up from LA that morning.

Despite my better judgement, he intended to put a gigantic homemade carbon fiber splitter on the front of the car. In hindsight I should've just told him "no", but instead I told him that I was going to knock it off out on track when I took the car out for a few test laps.

So we put the splitter on the car.

I decided my role was to make sure the mounting wouldn't tear the entire front of the car apart when the splitter inevitably hit something. Also, when it broke away, it couldn't have anything pointy that would puncture a tire. When we were done, I was pretty sure we had accomplished these goals.

the splitter, as raced

The splitter took a while, and daylight was running out. We still needed to ~~sneak through BS inspection~~ visit the very nice judges and show them our extensive documentation. Also, we had to get a tech once over to make sure our car was safe. We hopped in line, and made it through tech with a coupla minor issues ("no cotter pins in the harness", I'm dumb. "tape up the battery positive terminal, even though it has a plastic cover", whatever).

Next was the BS inspection with the very nice judges who I ~~fear~~ respect greatly. Every time the judges see an E30 come through, they greet us with open arms, chat about the car, and try to get one of us to slip up on some minor detail in the story. When they hear the slip up, they pounce, and assign ridiculous amounts of penalty laps. We had done this dance twice before, and made it through without any penalty laps both times. At Reno, we even passed an extra special inspection by ultra cheater Rob Krider.

I was still nervous.

To my surprise, the judges were pretty happy to see us. They knew who we were, and talked about how we gave up our old number (43) to the Uber Bird car for their theme. We had a nice discussion about our residual value assignment ($450), and what we spent it on (suspension bushings, not installed!). I handed them a bottle of rye that they were sure to appreciate, and away we went with a big zero in our form's penalty laps box.

At that point, it was about 3 o'clock. The track shut down at 4. It was barely worth our time to go out and test. I decided we'd pack it in since I was too tired to think, let alone shake down a car at 100mph.

We spent some time working on the splitter mounting a bit more, and in the back of my mind thoughts of surprises from the "new" stuff danced in my head. Would the splitter cause high speed lift, or maybe high speed oversteer? Are the tires going to rub in T14? I dulled all of these concerns with beer, gawked at the competition in the paddock, chatted it up with familiar faces, and eventually went to bed.

This is a pretty good stopping point. Tune in for the next installment, where, if you're lucky, I'll actually write about the race.

Arse Freeze Apalooza results

2009-11-23T00:36:00.000-08:00

A more complete write up will come at some point, but I figured I should post tonight with results.

We finished day 1 in 1st place, and held onto 1st place from green to checkered on day 2, winning the race and a fat $1500 in nickels.

(click on the pic for more Ling Ling glamour shots)

Mad thanks to Mysteries Inc Racing for helping us out in the pits, running for fuel, cooking burgers, and generally being a great rolling obstacle.

arse freeze apalooza?

2009-11-16T22:47:00.000-08:00

aaaaaand we're back.

We were accepted for the Arse Freeze Apalooza event that takes place this weekend ... but we didn't really get much done til last weekend. This was partially due to panda procrastination, and partially due to this stuff.

After the Reno race, Ling Ling went into outdoor storage and sat

and sat

'til Saturday. Pop the key in the ignition, and she fired right up.

On Sunday, we got her up on jack stands and she passed her check up with flying colors. We originally had planned to replace the bushings in the rear of the car due to a suspension clunk at Reno. The bushings looked ok, and there was no noticeable play, so we looked elsewhere.

Hey, why's that front swaybar endlink broken? Think that could make some noise? 1 pick n pull end link later, and we're mostly ready for ThunderHill.

Next up: some new fluids, a bath, 2 3 4 coats of wax, and maybe a front aero element to balance out that big ass wing.

reno results

2009-05-25T08:35:00.000-07:00

Pandamonium finished the first day at 10th overall (of ~100 cars) and somewhere like 5th within class. As Astrid mentioned, we held down fast lap for a good portion of Saturday with a 2:37.something, but a black Saab with way more boost than sense smacked us around and put down a 2:33.

Saturday night, after looking at the results, things secretly got more serious. On Sunday our pit stops were quicker and our driver stints were longer. A judgement error on rear tires Sunday morning made for good stock footage for our upcoming documentary film: Reno Fernley Tokyo Drift.

Despite no grip, we took the checkered at 7th overall and 3rd within our class.

All unofficial of course.

pics

2009-05-24T13:02:00.000-07:00

a few photos, real quick. x-posted to both blogs.

race day

2009-05-24T12:54:00.000-07:00

(x-posting to panda and mystery machine blogs)

Hello from Reno-Fernley. We're on the second day of racing at Goin for Broken, and shockingly, both the Mystery Machine and the Panda car have been running well so far. We had some excitement getting the minivan through tech inspection on Friday - suprisingly enough, the tech inspectors were less than thrilled with the broken wheel stud on the driver's side front wheel. The lug bolt is insanely difficult to replace, so Laz and Jinnah did a hero run to pick n pull in Sparks to get a whole new steering knuckle, which we fitted in gathering dark and howling dust.

Meanwhile, Laz successfully bribed his way through a very special bullshit inspection - he unwisely laid down some very fast laps in the practice session before going through inspection, so they pulled Ling Ling aside for special inspection as a "real race car". (The special judge they called in is a cheating expert; he took a quick look underneath and proclaimed her an *actual* piece of shit.) Laz smoothed things over with a super smooth bribe:

Judges: What, you aren't even going to try to bribe us?

Laz: We hadn't gotten to the hard sell yet. (Whips out the whiskey from the trunk)

Judges: Oh, well then. This is good stuff. You guys are good to go, no penalties.

The Mystery Machine is a HUGE hit, which is a relief, because we're also the slowest thing on the track (surprisingly, there are actually a couple of cars slower, but we still hold the record for the slowest fastest lap of any team). For a while, Ling Ling and the Mystery Machine held the single fastest best lap and slowest best lap in the race.

They started timing the race when the Mystery Machine crossed the starting line, so for a full two seconds, Jinnah was leading the race. (Subsequent, we fell into our role as mobile chicane and had the whole race lap us repeatedly. Driving the minivan is like driving through a swarm of bees, with other cars whipping past constantly. We've taken the tack of being very polite about it, holding a steady outside line, which has garnered us a lot of good will. (Another team came up to thank us for being predictable while being passed, and gave us a hat as a token of gratitude. :-) )

Pandamonium has not yet seen a revisit of the electrical issues from last time, and is currently running around tenth overall.

The Mystery Machine has done pretty well through simple consistency, and is currently around 46th place, much to our surprise. After the last-minute scramble to get her race prepped, just seeing her running around the track feels a lot like winning.

Rod Knock & New Rod Bearings

2009-05-17T14:02:00.000-07:00

In our previous post, we determined that the troll hitting the inside of the motor with a hammer lived in cylinder #6. So we pulled the oil pan, got to the bearings, and boy did that troll do a number on the bearings:

For those of you who are not wise to the ways of rod bearings, the grey bearing on the left is an OK take off bearing. The 2 bearings to the right (cylinder #6) have worn through the grey metal to the tasty copper center. This is bad. Real bad. All the bits of metal that were worn away were found scattered in the oil pan or smeared across the other bearings.

New bearings are in. We threw some zinc rich oil into the motor, fired it up, and the troll from cylinder #6 is no longer angry. The BMW recommendations for rod bearing break in are something to the tune of "for 1000 miles do not go over 5500 rpm, do not exceed 100mph". Either we're going to put down lap times comparable to a Corvair, or we'll give the rod bearings a proper "racing break in".

Motor Clunk

2009-05-15T21:19:00.000-07:00

If you look closely at the last post, where we listed what was left to do on the car, you'll see at the top of the list it says "motor clunk".

Well, that piece of tape is there to address the minor issue that Astrid broke the car at the last track day. Her aggressive driving and constant accelerator abuse was just too much for poor Ling Ling. She's taken all the abuse a panda can, and is now making decidedly not good sounds from the engine compartment.

(ok ok. it's probably not Astrid's fault, but don't tell her that)

What's it sound like? I'm glad you asked. Here's a video:

E30 Rod Knock? from Adam Lazur on Vimeo.

With the race rapidly approaching, we checked the valves. They looked fine. Hell, after an adjustment, they're the quietest E30 valves on the planet. Unfortunately, quieter valves just made the bad noise sound louder.

So we recorded the noise and appealed to the internets. On the internet everyone has an opinion. 3 main causes were proposed:

broken rocker arm / valve train problems
rod knock
piston slap

To address the first, off the valve cover came (again). Maybe there was a tiny tiny crack that was missed before? Many minutes of scrutiny on the valve train yielded nothing.

The cylinder compression was tested, and it was fine. Further lending credibility to the theory that it was not a valve issue.

To differentiate piston slap vs rod knock, we were informed of the "pull a plug" method. The procedure is to pull the wire from a spark plug, and if the tone of the sound changes, that's your bad rod bearing. The theory goes that by removing combustion from the cylinder, the piston will still slap since it's moving, but the rod will knock less since it's under much less pressure.

Before trying the plug trick, the car was taken by the shop of an experienced mechanic. After 30 seconds of revving and listening in the lot, said mechanic diagnosed the noise as rod knock and promptly prescribed a new motor. Sad panda.

After the car was back home with a diagnosis, we tried the plug pulling for a 2nd opinion. While the motor was running we pulled the wires from the cylinders, one by one. Cylinder 1 is fine. So is 2. Boy this is boring. 3, 4, 5: all fine. Maybe it's actually piston slap after all? Oh oh ... cylinder 6 it is!

Woohoo, just like we thought, bad rod bearing in cylinder 6!

Oh crap.

bad.
rod.
bearing.

This is the last weekend of work. We were planning to do some minor tweaks on the car, throw it on the trailer, and knock back a coupla cases of celebratory beer. Instead we're going to pull the oil pan off the motor and hope that it isn't too screwed up.

If all goes well, celebratory beer will be shared with grease under our finger nails and the ever so faint tapping of an E30 valve train in the background. If not, we'll hit something with a hammer and start scheming for a whole new motor.

keeping organized

2009-05-13T09:09:00.000-07:00

Just 10 days to go. Wow.

Procrastination set in right after the race at ThunderHill in December, and we're just now digging out. There's lots to do, twice as many cars, and not much time.

To keep organized, I picked up a tip from TC Design to put blue tape on the windshield when something needs to be done. We got the car back from caging with "fix fuel leak" on the windshield. There was no way to forget about it.

We've adapted that technique, and the todo list is stored on the windshield of our car in blue tape. When you think of something to do, you add some tape. When you get something done, you pull it off. When all the tape is gone, the car is ready to go out on track. If it's not all gone, you're sure going to feel like a jackass, suited up, ready to go, pulling into the hot pits, with tape on your windshield that says "torque lugs" or "fix fuel leak".

This system is so stupid simple that it actually works pretty well.

Here's a pic of where we were last night:

The sky is, clearly, the limit

2009-03-17T23:54:00.000-07:00

Now that we're gearing up for Reno, it seems like a good time to recap T-Hill. Vital stats:

Finished: 78th place (of 114 teams)
Total laps: 168 (winner total: 335)
Best lap: 1:37.456 (best in race: 1:31.474, by Blues Bros Racing after their backhoe-provided on-site weight reduction.)
Total tows: 7
Miscellaneous casualties: Laz's ankle, which has not been quite the same since.

So, we were fast, and finished more than half the race! (Win!) However, it was only .5 laps more than half. (Lose!)

We figure this leaves plenty of room for improvement at Reno. A wide-open field, as it were.

We regret to inform that our arch-nemesises, Team Unsafe At Any Speed, finished 54th with 249 laps. Clearly, this is because they cheated.

They did, however, swing by to collect their specified stakes, an 18-yr Macallen. And we are happy to report that it was only moderately delicious.

When we kick your asses at Reno, we'd like to request a Glenfarclas 15 or better.

Reno here we come

2009-03-17T08:29:00.001-07:00

We've been officially accepted to the Reno event. I'm happy to report that the application process is less stressful the 2nd time around.

In between now and then, Ling Ling should get some electrical TLC. She will make a shake down appearance at the April 3rd TEAM Racing track day at ThunderHill. In addition to the usual "beat on the car to break everything we can before the actual race" strategy, the plan is to find some poor intermediate group driver, stick to their bumper, and do some "simulated yellow" laps to see if we've cured our electrical ailments.

In the team gossip category, some of the Pandamonium Racing crew have spun up their own turbo minivan team to go for the glory. See Mysteries Inc Racing for some details.

GOIN' FOR BROKEN 2009

2009-03-13T14:36:00.000-07:00

In what can only be described as a lapse of judgement, we have applied to race in another 24Hrs of LeMons event: GOIN' FOR BROKEN 2009

We've done nothing to the car since the last race, except strip borrowed safety equipment out of it. The car looks much like it did at ThunderHill:

Rob vows to continue frowning until all electrical gremlins are found.

Also, to our friends at Team Unsafe: are you prepared for round 2?

the media of arse freeze apalooza

2009-01-01T20:05:00.001-08:00

There's quite a bit of internet coverage on the race, some of which actually mentions Pandamonium Racing. For example, we're one of the "top 20 coolest cars" on Autofiends.

I've also put together a highlight reel from our in car footage:

Arse Freeze Apalooza Jackass Highlight Reel from Adam Lazur on Vimeo.

A friend of our friends Team Unsafe posted a video of us being towed:

Which prompted me to upload a video to YouTube, only to mark it as a "video response". I hope this transgression does not harm our Vimeo sponsorship deal. The video got some people upset, and I can't help myself when they bait me in the comments.

In another movie, you can see Ling Ling zip by at the end of this video:

I was driving since this was 10 or so laps after the start of the race. I had both E30's in my sights when Porcubimmer snuck by the bronzit bmw e30 and promptly spun 1 turn later. I think the spin freaked out the bronzit car driver, because he pointed me by a turn later.

Finally, here are a coupla photo galleries with Pandamonium pics from the race:

race weekend

2008-12-31T14:54:00.000-08:00

Race weekend dawns bright and early, and we... well, I wouldn't know. I was stuck on a plane in Canada. Laz, Andy and Weaver rolled in to Thunderhill on Friday morning, follwed by the rest of us slackers around sunset.

The good

Ling Ling passed tech & bullshit inspection on Friday without major problems. Despite high levels of e30 fatigue on the part of the judges, our stack of receipts backing up the budget was so high that it had to be weighted down with a bottle of Macallan 12yr single-malt.

Also, the whole crew made it: Laz, Andy, Rob, Weaver, JDH, and me - plus families, spouses, friends, and kids. Grassroots motorsport is good for the whole family! It's a good thing the kids were too young to figure out what the Slow Santas CRX inflatable santa hand gesture was all about.

Here's the panda car, all ready to race:

From lemons thill dec08

Saturday morning, we applied some last-minute pandas:

From lemons thill dec08

(In that shot, the panda epoxy is being dried by Mr Heater.)

The bad

Laz's sprained ankle got worse after walking on it for all of Saturday. We begged ice from Frankenmiata's beer keg on Sunday. We're pretty sure he'll walk again.

The ugly

Despite a solid shakedown on Friday, Ling Ling developed electrical problems on race day that we were never able to shake. Shortly after the start of the race, Laz radioed in to report that the car was stalling randomly. She'd die in the middle of a turn. For a while, no problem - he'd restart her and be on his way. But eventually she couldn't be started, and Laz returned under tow.

This became a theme.

In fact, if they gave a prize for "most frequently towed from the track," we probably would have won it.

We tried:
- replacing the coil with one borrowed from the always-classy Porcubimmer team.
- swapping the fuel pressure regulator
- checking for proper fuel pressure
- plugging and unplugging random things
- playing with and taping random wires under the dash

Each time, we'd have her in the pits for a little while, do a driver change, and send her back out. Meanwhile, the rest of the field was pulling their own jerk maneuvers, spinning, flipping, shoving and stalling their way through many hours of yellow-flag parade racing. At one point we watched our friends in Team Unsafe At Any Speed stall on the hill going into 5 and actually roll backwards into several cars behind them.

We got a pretty solid Day 1 of racing - a couple of hours of full Laz speed coming into our first date with the tow truck, then a couple of hours of Rob, mostly under yellow flag. During one of the brief yellow-green-yellow changes, he passed a couple of cars and got flagged for passing under a yellow. (The circumstances were doubtful enough that we were released without penalty, requiring only a driver change.) Andy finished out most of the day, but Ling Ling was getting increasingly temperamental - he came back to the pits once under his own power, and twice under tow.

By evening we'd unplugged the idle controller entirely, swapped out the fuel pressure regulator, and comfortably decided that the gremlins were beaten back. She didn't run too well in the paddock, but well, we'd pulled the idle control, so that was to be expected.

Next morning, Matt went out. Running cold, Ling Ling is a pliable and temperate lady, and for Matt she ran a little roughly, but was not unmanageable. By now the track had heated up, and Matt got a front-seat view of a series of full-contact incidents. Eventually, though, he too got hit with the electrical gremlin, and brought Ling Ling back in to the pits. The problems seemed heat-related, so we removed the hood.

From lemons thill dec08

But that wasn't enough, either. After the next tow we ran a full set of fuel system electronic diagnostics. Everything checked out. We hopefully disconnected the kill switch, in case that was the problem. (Shh...) We checked the fuses and swapped out some of the relays. While fiddling in an auxiliary relay panel, we discovered that replacing several relays didn't help, but the act of plugging and unplugging them did. Suspicious.

(Meanwhile, a few of us went to watch the People's Curse "winner", Blues Brothers Racing, get crushed. Jay liked them, so they got off with only a cosmetic dismemberment - but any crushing is a spectacular crushing. 4-yr-old mini-JDH was a big fan, happily yelling "More crush!" until the backhoe operator further munched a door to oblige her.)

From lemons thill dec08

The next trip back in to the pits was Rob, under his own power, but clearly mad as hell. The corvair team had lost it on turn 2 and spun in front of him, snapping back around from an oversteer correction to slam into the front of our panda car at about eighty miles an hour.

Happily, both cars straightened up and drove away. But the panda car was now overheating, and Rob was black-flagged. (He was subsequently released without penalty, since he'd done nothing to cause the incident.) Back in the pits, we surveyed the damage... more dents in the front corner which had already been dented, and a pinched radiator hose. Really? That's it?

Team Unsafe at Any Speed earns their name from Adam Lazur on Vimeo.

Angry Rob took a sledgehammer to the damage, straightening the front corner with so much force that it... ended up straighter than it was before. Huh.

No real radiator or wheel damage, either. Lucky us.

Next up was Andy. Andy once again ended a pretty smoking run with a ride behind a friendly tow truck as our electrical gremlins once more took hold.

This time we narrowed it down to a spark problem - as in, there frequently wasn't any. We checked cap, rotor and plugs. Cap and rotor were tarnished, but not *that* badly. ("It's supposed to be shiny," Laz instructs, from his luxury handicapped accomodations inside one of the RVs. "Define 'shiny'," JDH responds.) Cleaning them up doesn't help. Electronic diagnostics don't help. We go back to that mystery relay, trying to figure out what it does. It's not in the Bentley book pictures. Eventually, we find a description, right around the time one of the Porcubimmer guys wanders by. "Oh, the white one is the main relay," he offers, helpfully.

Hmm.

(Meanwhile, we send Rob out one more time: he kicks ass! Hooray! But then he stalls. And is towed. We should have tipped the tow truck operators.)

Hardwiring the relay doesn't help. Plugging and unplugging it does. JDH suspects heat saturation in the wiring harness, which travels across the exhaust manifold. Competing theories are possible grounding or shorting issues, or maybe cpu problems. But by now, we're running out of time - there's only about an hour of racing left. Ling Ling fires up, so we bind up Laz's sprained ankle with duct tape, and send him out on the track.

All of us filed out to the track to watch the last few triumphant laps. Laz put down one hell of a hot lap, with all of us cheering as he came down the front straight. Around 1 and over the back of the hill into 2, and we waited to see him come out into 3... and waited, and waited. He eventually showed up behind a tow truck. And for us, at least, that was the race.

Goddamn.

From lemons thill dec08

So, what are we doing tomorrow night? Same thing we do every night, Pinky: TRY TO WIN LEMONS.

Merry Xmas

2008-12-25T22:35:00.000-08:00

Ho ho ho. The race weekend begins tomorrow morning.

Packed the car up today. I plan for an early morning departure tomorrow to get tech out of the way, and put a few more shakedown laps on the car with the rest of the team.

Some quick pics:

Jumping the spec e30's dead battery with the LeMons car's not dead battery

on the trailer, ready to go

and for a little contrast, a pic of the car when I first towed it home

Ling Ling accessorises

2008-12-24T15:19:00.001-08:00

The rules:

3.17: Car Numbers: Car numbers must be at least 12 inches tall and clearly readable. Numbers must be white on black background or black on white background. Any other combination must be approved in advance by the organizers.

Luckily, we have nothing but black and white to work with. Due to unforeseen procrastination (that's always the way it works), we were down to the wire on getting numbers and other vinyl done. We got a ridiculous quote from a vinyl sign place in San Jose. I won't lie, part of the ridiculousness was our order, but still, who can spend $1k on vinyl for a $500 car?

So, I emailed John from Wolf Vinyl. I had seen his work on some of the prettier spec E30's, so if his vinyl is good enough for the guys who detail their car in the paddock before a race, then it's good enough for Ling Ling. John got back to me quickly, offered a little advice on sizing, and a this morning I met John halfway between my location and his. He gets bonus points for delivering on time and within budget (okay, okay, I paired down the vinyl order to the bare essentials, which helped).

So without further ado, here's some vinyl panda porn:

More (of the same) pics can be found in this gallery.

Ling Ling gets a new pair of shoes

2008-12-23T22:04:00.000-08:00

I've been waiting til I got some pics to post to plug BigWheels.net.

The owner of BigWheels.net is a racer. Knowing this, it wasn't too hard to guilt him into sponsoring us for the race.

In true big wheels style, we ordered a set of 24" chrome wheels for Ling Ling. No, not spinners. Those are cheezy. Our bling must be done tastefully. Back to the 24's. Sure, they weigh 50lbs each. Yes, mounting will require substantial amounts of fabrication. Yeah, each tire will cost more than our entire car. But it'll all be worth it when you see these rims.

Then we heard about the Alamo City Rollers from LeMons Texas. They had big wheels too:

It's been done.

Order cancelled. Back to the drawing board.

Boring as it is, for the race we opted to just get tires and run the cheap wheels we have. 1 set of bottlecaps and some less boring (and almost as cheap, thanks Ramon!) basketweaves as our 2nd set. We picked Falken Azenis RT-615s in 195/60/14 due to their relatively high grip and relative low cost.

So we ordered our tires from BigWheels and used that set for the shakedown days. Prior to the first shakedown, I showed up at BigWheels with an assortment of 7 bottlecap wheels with tires. Of the 7 wheels, 4 were straight (2 of which came with Ling Ling). Of the 7 tires, 3 were keepers. Of course, they were all mixed up. I rattled off some complicated instructions about what to keep, and was pleased when I returned and everything was done right.

And today I picked up the 2nd set of tires for the race. They go on the bottlecaps:

The wheels weren't black originally, but that was easily fixed with some of our favorite appliance enamel in a can. I'm thinking about buying stock in Rust Oleum. In today's tough economic times, appliance enamel can make a difference.

Ah, and while I'm posting, here's another shot of the car with the nose and grills in, plus a nice garden edging front spoiler:

I wish I could roll the clock forward 3 days, the race can't come soon enough.

we call her Ling Ling

2008-12-21T22:45:00.000-08:00

We're at six days to the race and counting. All the major mechanical work is done, we've shaken her down a couple of times (and we emphasize the "shake" - all the relevant parts have been duly zip-tied back on), leaving us with one final mission: pandafication paint job.

There was plenty to be done, so we planned to start bright and early at 9am Saturday morning. Around 10:30 we arrived to find the soon-to-be-panda car swathed in temporary plastic spraybooth, with taping fully in progress. (Taping? Why yes, we're very nearly professionals! We masked stuff and everything!) Laz and Matt covered the back, leaving me with the awesome responsbility of outlining the hood graphics. (I made matt do the cutting. Who wants to face that kind of pressure alone?)

From pandamonium

We used only the best spray can paint from Sears (black appliance enamel), and chose Laz as the designated inhaler, because his head is the easiest to wipe clean. (He even wore eye protection this time, which is a measure of how seriously we take this.)

Laz did a pretty slick freehand spray can job, despite being encased in a solid bubble full of paint vapor. About forty minutes later, here we go:

From pandamonium

Matt and Laz admire their handiwork:

From pandamonium

Tiny panda mascot:

From pandamonium

After an action-packed morning of car painting, we moved on to foam-pouring. We have a diversity of driver sizes, from 6-something Laz, to 5-something Rob and Matt. With careful seat positioning and a large stack of Style magazines tucked into the base of the seat (stolen from Laz's wife) we reached a fairly workable compromise, in which Laz drives with his knees tucked into his armpits, and Rob can almost depress the clutch. To smooth out the differences, we planned to pack Rob in a custom-fitted cradle of spray foam.

Rather than spray cans, we used a 2-part chemical mix. (You can order anything on the internet.)

From the supplier website:
Everything must be disposable except for the car, the driver, and helpers.

So we covered Rob in a stylish garbage bag wrap, and got pouring.

The foam sets up much quicker than you expect, and once it bulks up, it pours like cottage cheese. The first batch came out too small, and lumpy as hell. The second time around, we decided we needed more. How much more?

"I think all of it," Rob suggested. So we figured, go big or go home, and went all in.

Just a note, if you should ever find yourself tempted to try this: it expands more than you think. We found ourselves battling a rising tide of violently sticky spray foam, filling the garbage bag casing, bulging out the sides, and threatening to rise up and swallow Rob.

After about thirty seconds of quality panic, in which we struggled to prevent the surging foam from pouring down the back of Rob's neck, the foam started to set (it's an exothermic reaction, getting very warm as it hardens). Unfortunately, in all the excitement, it set in exactly the form we molded into it - a pretty solid "driver hunched forward to escape giant invasive sticky blob".

Anyway, it was a good theory. We'll see if it makes it into practice on race day. We might just pack Rob in with some more Style magazines.

After the excitement of the spray foam incident, we called it a day (and a pretty solid three months), and retired to celebrate by deep-frying some turkeys. Nothing says "job well done" like a vat of boiling oil. (In actuality, it was the traditional christmas turkey deep-frying at Casa Laz, which just happened to have been scheduled for car-painting day. But as we gathered around the fryer, drinking beer and experimenting with deep-frying various food items, the warm glow was only partly from the boiling oil, and mostly from a vast sense of satisfaction in a job fairly well done.)

If the car should happen to get crushed in any sort of race-day incident, we are all going to cry like little girls. Just so you know.

Sunday night, we finished up the last few things: fire extinguisher, important sticker positioning design choices, welded a few loose nuts on nice and tight, and wired in the kill switch. (It worked well right away: stopped the car dead cold, and required a fair amount of poking before she could be restarted.) Laz points out that as the kill switch causes current to backfeed into the alternator, that it is strictly NOT to be used as a toy. (Disappointing, I know.)

And there you have her.

From pandamonium

Yes, the back is a little lop-sided.

developing the aero package

2008-12-13T15:50:00.000-08:00

We raised enough scratch to buy the ugliest, cheapest, universal wing on ebay (Did you mean: bomb wing?). Here's a shot of the wing after install:

Yes, that's 2 layers of awesome wing that you see. $50 of china's finest heaviest aluminum. It must be the latest high tech aluminum and lead alloy, because the wing really does weigh at least 10lbs.

So with the new wing installed I towed the LeMon up to ThunderHill for a Friday with TEAM Racing. I was instructing, so I got a white wristband: my ticket to drive like an ~~ass~~ exemplary instructor in any session. The plan was to drive as much as possible and break anything on the car that was going to break.

And break it did.

First session of the day, lap #2 as we're entering the front straight (just after pit exit), I felt some moisture on my cheek. Then I looked at the temp gauge and saw it in the middle of a seizure. I pulled the car into the paddock, popped the hood using the BMW special hood opening tool, and spotted the belt that drives the alternator and water pump dangling from the engine compartment. It was a bit mangled, and clearly was not where it was supposed to be. Luckily I had the belt we took off the car when we replaced it with a brand new one. Yeah, that belt should be ~~just right here~~ back at home in a box. Luckily, another Spec E30 racer was there, and he supplied me with his spare alternator belt. I put a new belt on the car, and fired up the motor. Mike S, another Spec E30 racer, noticed the crank pulley wobbling like mad. I took it all apart again, couldn't figure it out, so I put it back together and drove it, wobbles and all.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Next up I noticed horrible understeer into turn 1 and turn 8 at Thunderhill. Both turns are taken at 80mph+ To my surprise, the wing was actually being effective and creating downforce on the rear of the car!

That's great, but without any aero on the front of the car all it did was produce understeer. Ridiculous "slide the car into high speed turns" understeer. I managed to trail brake to get the car to turn in a little better, but it got hairier and hairier as I pushed harder. After one session, a driver who followed me through turn 8 found me in the paddock and remarked "wow, your car was all balled up and twisted with a front wheel up in the air"

That convinced me that it was time to stop driving around the problem and to try to remedy it. So I pulled off the top wing. Less surface area has to have less downforce, right?

It worked, and the car went back to a more normal level of understeer. Hopefully in the actual 24Hrs of LeMons race, due to the track configuration, we'll be going a little slower and the wing won't need further tuning. If not, at that point, we'll be tuning using another special tool.

The rest of the day was fairly uneventful.

There are some pics from the day up at gotbluemilk.com. Check out that suspension compression! Used KYB shocks and Vogtland springs are about the lamest E30 suspension kit on the market, but it's the cheapest ... so here we are.

The first ever lemons junkyard scavenger hunt

2008-12-09T18:22:00.000-08:00

Over the weekend, we participated in the First ever lemons junkyard scavenger hunt (jalopnik link) -- in which we competed against other crews of losers to raid the Hayward Pick Your Part junkyard for a number of specified items, which were worth points. Winners were up for a "get out of jail free" card, which gets a team immediately released from a driver penalty on Lemons race day.

Needless to say, we took this challenge very seriously. No matter how much Laz claims that he plans to drive like a gentleman, we all also know that he's not above giving his fellow racers the occasional love tap when they fail to get out of his way, and while we're busily engaged in a ~~psychological warfare~~ re-education campaign to create a nicer, gentler Laz in time for the race (a panda is nothing if not a good citizen, after all!), we figured the extra insurance couldn't hurt.

Amongst the targets of the scavenger hunt:
- cutlery (5pts)
- hose clamps (2pts)
- badges from makes of cars no longer sold in the US (40pts) or anywhere (80pts)
- porn (30pts)
- heavy metal mix tapes
- disco 8-tracks
- valid insurance cards
- working analog dash clocks (30pts)
- 12-cylinder intake manifold (100pts)
- 5-cylinder carburetor
- 100 points to the team with the most christmas tree air fresheners
...and so on.

Some observations from this experience:
- porn is more common than heavy metal mix tapes (we found 2 dvds - one demonstrably porn, the other a home-burned affair marked "hooker bitches", which we decided was either porn, or possibly a heavy metal mix cd - 30-40 points either way!)
- working analog dash clocks are quite *un*common, much to our sadness.
- hose clamps are orders of magnitude more common, not to mention easier to collect, than v12 intake manifolds. (One team got most of the way through pulling said manifold from a 5-series BMW, but the last few bolts escaped them.)

Our haul:

From pandamonium

There was special consideration for unusual finds. We had a pretty good one - a certified birth certificate, for a dude born on December 7, 1957 - making him exactly 51 years old on the day we found it. (Since I found it along with a bunch of other papers in a totalled convertible, I really hope he lived...)

From pandamonium

Unfortunately for us, this was clearly the second-best thing found during the course of the hunt - the clear winner being a citation for a DUI, including resisting arrest, on Christmas eve of last year. Ouch. This went to Team Huey Newis and the Lose, who were the day's winners, due also to having collected about a million hose clamps (we were a close second in the hose clamp total, with 95 to their 155). For their troubles they got both their Gerald Ford Presidential Pardon (get out of penalty free) certificate, and also the I Love Pole award, which grants them the dubious benefit of starting from pole position on the day of the race. Lucky bastards.

(We came in 4th overall, with 302 points, plus a nebulous special credit award for our awesome birth certificate. Jay liked it, so we're under instructions to bring it along on the day of the race, on the off-chance it turns out to have special get-out-of-jail-free-type powers.)

This was a great opportunity to meet ~~the enemy~~ our fellow competitors, and we got t-shirts and stuff for our trouble. Other winning teams were Can't Am racing and our fellow BMW entrants, the awesome Porcubimmer.

For best results, spray directly towards eyes

2008-12-09T17:39:00.000-08:00

1. The most important thing of all: we have t-shirts! And other junk.

Pandamonium cafepress store.

2. Our car has a shiny new rollcage, courtesy of the awesome guys at TC Design.

TC's cages are this good:

The driver was unhurt. The cage was certified intact following the crash, and this car went on to qualify, compete in, and finish a 25Hr endurance race.

Sunday afternoon we painted the cage (and Laz) appliance-enamel white. A few painting tips:

for best results, always paint in the dark.
for good coverage on the backs of the bars, spray paint directly towards face.
acetone removes appliance enamel buildup from the eyelids, at least enough to allow you to reopen your eyes
eye protection is for losers.

Sponsorship: BimmerWorld steps up

2008-12-07T14:44:00.000-08:00

Apparently it's a numbers game, but if I spam enough people someone is eventually going to give in.

According to the 24Hrs of LeMons rules, sponsorship in the form of parts still counts towards the $500 total. But there's a loophole, the budget for safety equipment is unlimited. So I went on a quest looking for sponsorship in the "safety equipment" area.

Enter James Clay, owner of BimmerWorld and really nice guy. About 2 months ago I received an email from James offering some BimmerWorld/BMWCCA Club Racing gear as a perk from going to the BMWCCA Club Racing School. I must admit that I was initially a little starstruck: James drives a car in the Speed World Challenge Touring Car series. I intentionally don't look at the results of those races until I've recorded them on my Tivo. Then I watch James and crew on TV and hope that he does well. And he just emailed me, a mild mannered middle pack racer.

Once my excitement wore off, I got my schwag, and more importantly: now I had James' email address.

2 months later, when brainstorming about who could sponsor us in exchange for our plush sponsor package, James came to mind so I fired off an email. To my surprise, James emailed back that they'd be happy to help out with brake pads.

Performance Friction PF06's seemed to be the hot ticket, from the Bimmerworld site:

06 Compound - NEW!
This new compound represents the cutting edge of brake pad technology. Extremely long life, but with torque similar to 01, this pad will be the leading choice for endurance racing and a trackday pad. In our 2008 win at the 13 Hour at VIR, we used approximately 40% of the front pad and 25% of the rear - that
is incredible wear for a capable, full-race pad.

So we ordered 2 sets, subsidized by our new sponsor. Here's what arrived in the mail a few days later:

That's right, stickers! Well, and some brake pads. We put the pads on the car for the ThunderHill shakedown weekend and were very pleased with the performance. They feel like the PF01's, and hopefully the wear characteristics will be better.

So for the race the car will feature Bimmerworld stickers, Performance Friction PF06 pads, and we'll be diving deeper into the braking zones than all of our competition. Thanks James and Bimmerworld!

fire retardant faux fur

2008-12-05T14:27:00.000-08:00

The Google can't find me an online store where I can click my way to a few yards of black flame retardant faux fur. It did tell me that it might exist. Modacrylic is flame retardant, and they make faux fur out of it. But finding "modacrylic faux fur" amidst a sea of coats, vests, rugs, and PETA web pages is surprisingly hard. To further muddy the waters, there are acrylic/modacrylic blends too, and acrylic is the opposite of flame retardant.

So at 1am last night I clicked through a few web contact forms, and sent a coupla ebay sellers some messages.

Wait a minute, why am I here? What the hell am I talking about? Isn't this blog about a race car? faux fur?! Really?!

Here at Pandamonium Racing, we're foolish enough to think that we've made it through most of the mechanical challenges. Now we've got to deliver on making the car's theme tangible. The goal is that the car should say "panda" when someone sees it. Sure, we could spray paint "P A N D A" on the side, zip tie a stuffed panda to the grill, and that would probably achieve the objective. But we've got 3 weeks. If we count that in panda years, that's still only 3 weeks but it sounds way cooler. 3 weeks means there's no call for half assed solutions. No hurry. All the time in the world. May as well spend all day drinking beer and drawing our car with crayons.

So back to fur. Pandas have fur. Maybe our car should too? Good idea! But this is a race car, humble beginnings aside. As a rule, when a race car is on fire anything added to the car should not make the situation appreciably worse. Acrylic fur flying off the car in liquid fireballs of death does not meet this qualification. Modacrylic fur that just smolders a little almost certainly does.

So that's how I got here: sending inquiries on the internet about faux fur to anyone who would listen.

Back to the story.

This morning I woke up to a few responses, ranging from "no, go away" to "I didn't know if my fur was fire retardant, so I took a swatch and lit it in on fire. It doesn't get gooey, and it mats down kind of like burning real hair. Is that flame retardant?" The latter was from an ebay seller. She offered to send me a swatch to do my own independent testing, and she even signed the email "Warmest". I don't know if the pun was intentional, but that's the kind of thing that is hilarious to me when I'm half asleep.

So, now I know more about faux fur than I ever wanted to. Did you know you can buy a wall mount faux fur faux panda head? and even a wall mount faux panda ass? If you don't already know Andrew Davidson, you wouldn't be surprised to find out that he likes faux fur so much that he has put up a web page devoted to it, which is conveniently the only useful collection of faux fur links on the entire internet. Did you know that barbie rocks faux fur while she watches seals get clubbed?

I'm straying off topic.

I came up with 2 options:

ebay lady who burnt the fur and it's not that bad sounding. She offered to send me a swatch to do my own testing. $10/yard, black fur.
Big 4 Fabrics has "a few" black faux furs that are flame retardant, the guy asked if I wanted short of long hair, I responded "cheap". The cheapest comes in at $7/yard, I know nothing else about it.

This vital information has been forwarded to the Pandamonium Racing Council of Elders. No decision yet, but we'll almost certainly make one soon.

That's all for now.

What faux fur will we pick? Will the genetic experiment to infuse Matt with panda DNA succeed? Will the car make it to ThunderHill in 3 weeks, or will the ambulance refuse to start? Are we going to sell enough ~~crap~~ spare parts to put a gigantic wing on the car? So many unknowns! Tune in to this blog for more exciting panda episodes.

T-Hill shakedown

2008-11-26T13:25:00.000-08:00

Saturday morning dawned bright and early (REALLY early) at Thunderhill, and, bleary-eyed and full of optimism, we unloaded the e30 from its trailer, ready for its track debut. It sat in the paddock, idling uncertainly, slowly chewing its way through twelve gallons of what we were convinced was bad gas while we said hi to our neighbors and taped numbers on our cars.

Once on the track, with Laz in the driver's seat and me riding shotgun, it went roughly like this:
Car: VRRRROOOOOOcoughOOOOMM
Laz: Oh yeah! Go baby go!
Car: coughVROOOOOcoughcoughcoughOOOOM!
Laz: Come on, baby, you can do it. 5000rpm, you know you want to.
Car: coughcoughcoughvroom? cough.

Laz made a few more attempts at running it around the track in the hope of burning off the theoretically bad gas, but it was running so badly that he was basically a mobile chicane, so he retired it back to the paddock to troubleshoot.

The panda car in its natural habitat:

From pandamonium

By the end of the day, we were no closer, and Laz and Rob were quietly muttering about taking it somewhere to drain the tank. But when they did -- surprise, Laz discovered that the fuel pump wasn't running right, and the fuel pressure regulator was not flowing fuel back to the tank on idle like it's supposed to.

(Meanwhile, en route to Chico in an extended search for brake parts for my own car, I got a call requesting that while I was at it, if I could please also return with a fuel pump for a 1990 e30, that would be much appreciated. In the background I could hear 80s music and the sound of beer pouring copiously in Willows' one Mexican restaurant. "You better hurry," Rob informed me. "Laz is drowning his sorrows, and he's already on his third giant beer.")

But the closest fuel pump I could find was in Anderson, CA, another hour away, and I was really hungry, so I called it a night and drove back to collect my share of the beer. We discussed replacing the fuel pump with an aquarium pump ("The fuel would melt the plastic," Rob pointed out, so I pointed out that it would clearly need to be a METAL aquarium pump.) Meanwhile, drunken Laz did the sensible thing and turned to the internets.

We tracked down an e30 fuel pump (right model and everything), for sale by a salvage parts dealer in Sacramento named SuperEuroBeat. The phone conversation went something like this:

Laz: Uh... no, I didn't really consider picking it up this evening. Let me confer with my associates... fifty dollars, you say? Yeah, uh, as a matter of fact, we DO need a fuel pressure regulator... and a set of injectors? Um. Wouldn't say no?

So we made plans to meet up with SuperEuroBeat guy at Euro Sunday (it's apparently a big deal?) in Sacramento at 8am Sunday morning. By Sunday lunchtime, Rob and Laz were back with the goods. (The goods, in this case, being effectively an entire fuel system replacement.)

"Sixty bucks," Laz explained happily.

Euro Sunday:

From pandamonium

And yeah, that was pretty much it. After a quick trackside fuel pump swap, the panda car was back in the game:

From pandamonium

So it's still not as fast as Laz would like (he's contemplating further tuning plans) but it pulls well and handles better than expected. We drove it through the entire afternoon, and nothing fell off. An avalanche of bolts and other debris pours over your feet every time you go around a corner, and there's nothing for the passenger to hang on to except for razor-sharp bare metal, but if it wasn't kind of ghetto, it would hardly be Lemons.

It's going to be really cute with a panda face painted on.

peddling to the masses

2008-11-24T12:58:00.000-08:00

In an effort to get the most bang for our 500 bucks, we're exploiting this rule to its fullest:

4.7: Scavenger Sales: If you sell pieces off of your car, the money that comes back in can be used to offset the initial purchase price. Just be prepared to convince some exceedingly skeptical judges of the validity of all those transactions.

I've been scavenging the good stuff off the car as we strip it out, then posting it for sale on the internets. No, I'm not trying to sell every nut and bolt like some other teams. And NO, we cannot sell the sheepskin seat covers. The liability of selling the toxic fungus growing in them is too high. Everything else that we've removed and haven't thrown away is for sale.

In true LeMons blog style, we've ~~dressed up homeless people and staged this whole thing~~ snapped photos of these transactions to lend an air of legitimacy to our budget sheet. Thus far we've:

Traded our undented passenger door for a dented one, plus $75

(See the dented door on our car on the left, the transaction and post swap undented door on the buyer's car on the right)

Sold the pristine uncracked padded dash plus hood liner for $80

Sold the washer pump for $10

The money from these sales will allow us to buy the electric supercharger we've always wanted, or maybe even finally afford this ~~riced~~krauted out spoiler.

Want to help out? Do you need door panels, a rear seat, the entire air conditioning system (it was still good!), or a scrap catalytic converter? Make me an offer, I doubt I'll refuse!

I'm going to name my next cat Guibo

2008-11-17T20:26:00.000-08:00

This coming weekend, we're headed to Thunderhill for a shakedown trackday (with the nice people at TEAM racing) . The question on everyone's mind coming into last weekend was:

Uh, it's really just running that badly because it's full of 4-year-old gas, right?

Coming in to last weekend, we had:
- no hood, fender, seats, steering wheel, or headlights, and a nest of loose wires where the dash used to be.
- far too much sunroof
- ancient tires full of what might kindly be termed "character" (or alternatively, "cracks")
- a tank full of nothing but 4-year-old-gas and ancient despair
- suspension so bad that when you pushed down on one corner, the whole car rocked gently like a boat on a calm ocean.
- several intact sway bar bolts
- fancy plans, and pants to match.

As of 8pm sunday evening, we had:
- one bad-ass race car, with no hood, fender, sunroof, headlights or roll cage, with the remains of the dash lovingly tie-wrapped into place
- one stock driver's seat and a steering wheel mounted suspiciously sideways
- even less sunroof than before
- suspension so GOOD that when you push down on one corner, the car performs a polite dip and returns to original position (as if to say "Hey there! I will probably not kill you if you drive me!")
- nearly-new tires, brake pads and rotors
- one less transmission leak
- two snapped front-right sway bar bolts
- a replacement salvage guibo (a term which I am convinced that Laz invented to trick people into being like, "Oh yeah, the guibo, I totally have one of those!" while other racers laugh behind their backs. He, however, claims that this is the name of the rubber donut piece that connects the back of the transmission to the drive shaft.)
- lots of exciting new sharp edges!

One of the major plans for the weekend was the ongoing project to replace the seals in those locations scientifically determined to be the hardest possible spots to access. In this case it was the transmission shaft seal, where the shifter goes into the transmission. You have to pry out the old seal with a screwdriver (without scoring the aluminium inside the shaft), but during extraction the rubber of the seal dissolved, and the metal ring was corroded into place. After two hours, several screwdrivers machined into ad-hoc seal removal tools, one dry run on an old transmission Laz keeps out back, and several chunks of Laz's fingers - victory!

(Which is good, because the spare transmission is missing third gear, and also now missing the same seal.)

We also swapped out the motor mounts, which are a known point of failure for E30s. Yeah, no kidding:

From pandamonium

The other major plan was suspension replacement. On Saturday I drove up to Richmond to meet with a guy who had kyb springs and vogtland shocks as takeoffs from a wrecked spec-e30 ($225 for both). Contrary to all expectation, I was NOT mugged, raped or murdered in the dangerous outlands of Richmond while meeting random dudes from internet forums (I think the only person in any danger was the seller, who had driven down from sacramento with an unhappy-looking carful of wife and children), and returned victorious with springs, struts, and In-n-Out.

It was all in the original boxes, and even came with instructions. For example, never do this:

From pandamonium

If one thing has been a constant with the Panda car, it would be incontinence in the matter of fluids. Sure enough, when we pulled the old shocks out, oil poured out of the housings. Lovely.

After the replacements were in? Oh yeah... rock it. Uh, stop rocking. Laz hates the shocks; he thinks they're too squishy, and plans to address this in typically German fashion by swapping in ridiculously stiff springs. It'll all come to justice this weekend, when we see how it handles.

Also, jdh rocked the grinder to strip the remains of the sunroof, generating picturesque sparks:

From pandamonium

Sunday evening, in an attempt to actually get the thing pieced back together, we forwent swapping the open diff for a salvage welded diff, reassembled the drive train, zip-tied the interior back together, and bolted in a driver's seat.

From pandamonium

In celebration of this tremendous leap in race car preparedness, Laz and Rob took it for a celebratory shakedown cruise to Rotten Robbie, where they added 8 more gallons of 91 octane, a lot of injector cleaner, and a whole tankful of hope.

This produced an immediate improvement in the panda car's performance, bringing it to the point where it could:
a) Idle on its own
b) Rev above 2000 rpm

Progress!

(We are neither prepared to confirm nor deny rumors that the panda car, while parked at the gas station missing various body pieces, with a hosepipe "tail" inserted to stop the trunk from rattling, no headlights or passenger seat to speak of, and Rob leaning out the sunroof, successfully evaded the attentions of a passing local law enforcement vehicle.)

And one last thing: clipping the blade-like edges of bare metal bracket in the vicinity of the former dash which were, as belatedly noted during the shakedown cruise, pointed directly at the passenger's throat. And then we covered the remaining sharp edges with red racer's tape.

Safety first.

Next week on Pandamonium: the shakedown track day, in which we discover (probably quite quickly) whether the car runs like a champ or dies like a dog.

It's on

2008-11-12T17:40:00.000-08:00

I've always been blabbing to anyone who will listen about the 24Hrs of LeMons.

A few months ago a coworker told me about meeting a YouTube guy who was also doing LeMons. He said he mentioned that I was thinking about running the race to the YouTuber, who then began the smack talk about how his team would beat my unborn team.

A panda never forgets.

Fastforward a few months:

From: laz
To: Mike
Subject: LeMons wager?

Hey Mike,

I've never met you, and don't know what heap of junk you're going to
be driving, but my team will handily finish above yours at the 24Hrs
of LeMons.

I will back this assertion with a wager: 1 bottle of 18yr whiskey or
equivalent spirits. The "loser" buys the "winner" 1 bottle, to be
presented at Whiskey Thursday (regular thursday festivities in MtView)
in January sometime.

Deal?

.laz

Mike responded:

very well, sir, i accept. to the victor go the spoils!

I sussed out some other details. They're driving a '65 Corvair. Their blog is at http://teamunsafe.blogspot.com Go check it out, I bet you'll fall over laughing.

I look forward to drinking some victory booze.

cast list

2008-11-08T00:10:00.000-08:00

Since we're taking a break this weekend, it seems like a good time to go human interest and introduce the team.

Driving, we have:
Laz, the team's evil mastermind. Some say that he was raised by pandas in the industrial bamboo forests of southern China, and that he sold his soul in exchange for the special tool that you use to adjust the valves on late-eighties BMWs. All we know is, he's spending this weekend at a spec E-30 track day in his OTHER race car, so I get to make stuff up about him while he's gone. Laz brings racing expertise, a love of close contact with his fellow man and vehicle, an intimate knowledge of e-30 engines, and his tow vehicle, a 1991 converted e350 ford ambulance fondly known to the rest of us as the Ambulaz (or the Lazbulance, which everyone agrees is funnier.)

Andy, secret technologist. He's Laz's brother, which technically makes him another Laz, providing us with a hot spare in case of primary Laz failure. Andy will be joining us from Huntington Beach, where he spends his days working for the man and his nights upgrading kitchens and dreaming of vertical wings or positive downforce machines.

Rob, on lead guitar. Legend has it he was born with a steering wheel clenched in his tiny fists, and that he had already slammed the gas pedal so firmly to the floor that the doctors had to extract it from his mother with the jaws of life. Last weekend he decided to take up welding, saying that assembling a roll cage with a mig welder "looks like it might be fun". He brings a vast expertise with tie-wraps and baling wire, and a fierce love of trailing throttle oversteer.

Weaver, master thought criminal. Hails from the exotic climes of Detroit (just outside), where he cut his teeth on the rusting parts of abandoned american industry, last seen driving a blacked-out Lotus Elise into a spray booth on the dark streets of San Francisco, pursued by four badges' worth of angry police. He'll be bringing one of our support vehicles, the world famous 24-ft rv known as the USS Janky Weave. (Interestingly, he wears the same size racing suit that I do. It's very hard to positively identify a driver with his helmet visor down.)

Pit crew and miscellaneous moral support, we have:
Jdh, interdimensional machinist. Fondly known as John Bigboote, Jdh used to be a an evil alien overlord, part of an extraterrestrial invasion force hailing out of New York City. But seduced by the quiet allure of International Scouts, he traded his ray gun for an air compressor and a set of standard wrenches to (hopefully) join us in the pits at LeMons.

Astrid, deus ex machina. Raised by dingoes in the wilds of australia, on coming to san francisco she was amazed and relieved to discover internal combustion engines and indoor plumbing. Her specialties are holding lights and fetching tools, blogging, photography, blogging, art direction, blogging, and skinning stuffed panda toys.

Installation is reverse of removal

2008-11-03T22:50:00.000-08:00

(We really need icons or something to distinguish different posters. This is astrid again.)

This weekend was reassembly of engine and disassembly of interior.

Our car came packed full of useless heavy items, such as:
- seats, front and back
- trim panels
- that piece of fabric that lines the roofs of cars
- dashboard and center console pieces
- carpet
- 60lb of sticky tar (underneath the carpet, in the body and in the trunk)
- spare tire
- airbag

We didn't need any of those things.

I spent most of Saturday stripping the interior, while Rob and Laz did stuff to the motor. By evening we had the seats, center console and carpets out, leaving only the thick layer of tar which apparently lurks under the carpets of BMWs. We were also minus one longstanding oil leak, in an oil pressure valve near the oil filter (also replaced).

Useful tech notes:
Six-cylinder e30s prior to late 1990 have a known oil leak in the oil pressure valve (the internets call it the "oil control valve"; the shop manual is silent on correct name of this component, and in general on its existence). The seal in earlier models is made of substandard... seal stuff. And in newer models is made of something higher-tech which starts with V. Rob and Laz replaced it in a marathon effort which requires, in case you are curious, a 4-inch C-clamp, a lot of leverage, and about two hours of muffled cursing.

(Mostly) before we started:

From pandamonium

Our car was suprisingly full of guitar picks, bits of broken window glass, and old pay stubs. $9 an hour. Ouch.

I spent a peaceful sunday morning stripping tar with a heat gun:

From pandamonium

And now it looks like a race car:

From pandamonium

Jdh spent most of sunday afternoon attempting to remove the sunroof with an angle grinder - unfortunately, it's really hard to remove. Also unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of all the sparks, which were very cinematic. We got out the headliner and one or two bits of the roof, but the sunroof assembly remained stubbornly attached. It's glued in place, and there are spot-welds in the front - this was a factory option which is remarkably hard to get rid of.

Meanwhile I went back to art direction, drawing pictures of pandas, with the help of four-year-old mini-Jdh, prepping for future decorative efforts. We are currently taking inspiration from laz's favorite panda graffiti:

By Sunday evening, all that was preventing us from firing it up was a missing spark plug (Laz ordered six, but one of the boxes went missing in the debris) and the electric radiator fan, for which the motor was busted. Rob and Laz did a literal last-minute run through pick-n-pull in the last five minutes before it closed, and came back with a new fan, which then required some creative re-mounting. They fabricated one bracket, and then, after extensive consideration and a fair amount of aluminium hammering, tie-wrapped the remaining two mount points.

From pandamonium

It's really solid. We promise.

After reinstalling the cooling system, all that was left was starting the engine. I cleaned up most of the tools and the rest of them vibrated down into the engine compartment, along with the cardboard scraps and empty coolant jugs.

Let's just say that four-year-old gas makes cars run badly. Also, the engine blew a lot less smoke once Laz tightened the coolant drainage plug, which had been steadily dripping on the exhaust manifold.

Still, it started, and it ran - eventually it even idled without external intervention - and it no longer overheats. In fact, it runs about half as hot as it ought to, at 1/4 on the gauge instead of 1/2, and it mostly stopped smoking and steaming.

Let's call that victory!

Dash + Sunroof removal DIY links

2008-11-03T10:01:00.000-08:00

Squirreling some links away here so I don't lose 'em:

Dash removal instructions
Sunroof removal: link 1, link 2, link 3, pic of install tabs

The sunroof is yet to be removed (I think that'll be mentioned in another post somewhere around here). The dash is out and I'm actively peddling it to the highest bidder. Dash on the left, crazy messy cockpit on the right. Excuse the crappy camera phone pics:

Operation It Probably Needs a New Head Gasket Anyway

2008-10-29T17:55:00.000-07:00

Hello, Astrid here.

Over the weekend we started taking the car apart. By "we" I mean "people who are not me", because my role in this endeavor is mostly covered under the heading of "can perform simple tasks under close supervision". Like taking pictures. However, since I started reading the service manual on Sunday night, I expect that I will shortly know everything there is to know about cars.

Due to the fact that it steadily begins to overheat from the moment the engine starts, and that it clearly does not respect a civilized separation of fluids, the first overhaul phase for the Panda car was invasive. Among the important and oil-soaked parts removed were: air conditioning (gone forever), power steering (gone forever), mechanical fan (gone forever), electric fan & motor, radiator, water pump, belt spaghetti, distributor, temperature sensor, intake manifold, valve cover, head, head gasket.

The first thing you notice about this engine is the sheer quantity of oily black crud all over the place. This was not, unfortunately, limited to the outside of the block - once we got in there, the inside turned out to be just as bad. Even I know that there's not supposed to be that much carbonized black stuff inside the cylinders.

Evidence:

From pandamonium

I spent some quality time polishing the head with mumble scotchbrite mumble, because polishing stuff is my idea of a great saturday night. Before I started it looked like this:

From pandamonium

Oh look, head gaskets. Note that the old one (bottom) is troublingly intact compared to laz's spec e30 take off (top):

From pandamonium

The head and block were also quite undamaged under the grime. In fact, we found nothing that might have caused the horrible oily mess, other than the pervasive presence of Horrible Oily Mess itself. Ominously, this included the interior of the intake manifold, which should be shiny and clean, but instead was filled with oily sand.

As a result of initial investigations, we have decided that this car is probably a retired dune buggy.

the car purchase

2008-10-28T23:30:00.001-07:00

I found the car on craigslist one particularly stressful Saturday morning. The ad read like this:

For sale: 2-door 5 speed [stickshift] BMW runs strong and is operable. This car has 2004 tags and has 169,000 miles.

The fine print: It has been hit in front and has one broken right side window rear. To make it look right, it needs a new fender, hood, bumper, 1 grill half. You may want to replace the cracked windshield. Underneath the dash it’s a little tore up—someone stole the radio--otherwise interior is nice [black in color].

$500.00 great for parts or for project lover.

Please call John 408-xxx-xxxx

I called John, and after some back and forth I agreed to meet him at a self storage facility to look at the car that afternoon. I was running a little late, so I called John to say I was on my way. "No problem" he said "I'll pull the car around front for you." It didn't click at the time, but I was dumb not to stop him from starting the car til I got there. Rookie mistake.

I showed up to find John and his father with the car idling in the front lot. The car was idling smoothly, almost too good to be true. There were many things that quickly drew my attention. The frontend hit didn't look too bad. The tires were crap. 2 were almost flat, and 1 of those was dry rotting AND bald. The brakes were caked with dust, it had been sitting a long time. The bottom of the car was covered in grime. Looks like the oil leaks. Oh, and the hood doesn't open and John broke the handle trying.

When I asked about the car John immediately shared with me that he bought it for $1. That's right, just $1. The story goes that the storage facility was holding an auction for stuff they took possession of when tenants don't pay their bills. Apparently nobody wanted this fine automobile, so John bought it for $1 and was going to either dump it on craigslist or sell it for scrap. He got the car to run, so he decided craigslist was the way to go. He said the car had sat for 4 years, which is believable. He also said it was running fine on 4yr old gas. Insanity.

I went to take the car for a "test drive" and was informed that the seat back doesn't sit up. So it was like sitting on a stool leaning backwards to drive the car. Gotta hold the wheel tight or you fall backwards. I took the car for a spin in the little corridors between storage buildings. The tire rubbed the body on the side that was hit. 2 tires were borderline flat so it rode pretty poorly. The good news was the motor pulled pretty strong, and the car didn't blow up when I bounced it off the rev limiter.

On the way to park the car in the front lot, I noticed the temp guage was climbing rapidly upward. I pushed the AC on, turned the heater on, and I parked the car in the front lot as quickly as I could.

I negotiated with John, cited all the busted characteristics of the car, and got him down to $200. This was in spite of his father standing there spouting off half truths "it's overheating? just put water in it!" and telling John not to take the deal. I think the phrase "cash right now" worked, but later John told me that selling a car for scrap requires that you drain the gas and oil out of it, and that was too much of a pain in the ass for him to consider. We went to a shady warehouse full of junk dealer stuff and put together the paperwork. The paperwork consists of a couple of pages from the self storage place about selling the car to cover a debt, the $1 receipt from John, and then a handwritten bill of sale. We don't have a pink slip.

Posession is 9/10ths of the law, right?

this is just the beginning

2008-10-28T08:52:00.000-07:00

This blog is a collection of the incoherent ramblings of an endurance racing team with aspirations to compete in the 24 Hours of LeMons Arse-Freeze-Apalooza in December 2008. What this blog lacks in content will be made up for in sheer entertainment as we stumble our way through building and campaigning a race car.

Let's start with the essentials: drivers, crew, and a car.

Drivers: we've assembled a few mentally unstable individuals with varied backgrounds and levels of experience. We're united by an affinity for driving and tinkering.

Crew: we found the most qualified crew we could, then realized that those guys are way too serious. So we traded up for a guy who can tailgate like no other. As a bonus, he's good with the hammer and bailing wire. We think we've got all the bases covered.

Car: ah yes, car. Here she is, in all her glamour:
This fine example of German engineering and style has a mere 170,000 miles on the odometer. Soon it will be transformed into a panda racing machine. We'll detail the car acquisition story and race car build in future posts.

Stick around or subscribe to the RSS feed for more entertainment as the car is transformed and eventually campaigned.