Sears Pointlessness

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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.