Soren went out for the race start, and got on it right away. The green flag fell as he was in the infield, but he noticed quickly that the yellow went away and the race was on.
Another shot flying by, the car was looking good!
But then things went bad. The car stalled on Soren in the infield. It took awhile, but he got it started and came in to the pits. We dug over the car quick and couldn't find anything, so we sent him back out. Before hitting pit exit, it was stalling again, so we took it into the garage. First we thought it was the fuel pump ecu, and we called all over trying to find one. Then we thought it was the throttle position sensor, and called all over trying to find one. Both times most of the places were closed by noon on Saturday, until we found a TPS in Des Moines. Erik and Soren drove over to get it, and it didn't work. Car still wouldn't start. Digging back around the fuses I noticed a couple were different heights, so I pushed down on one, and click, it seated. Hmmm...I bet that was bad. We tried to start it, and boom, we were back. With 4 hours till the mandatory safety break, then an hour after the break before dark, we had about 5 hours before dark. So we decided to get everyone in the car to see the track before having to drive in the dark. All went well, got through the safety break, hooked up the lights, and sent out our Dad for his stint. He rolled through the next set of pictures as dusk was falling.
And rolled into our next set of issues. He came into the pits, having lost brakes coming into the infield (which is bad). Found the vacuum line off the booster, so we reconnected and added a better fitting. That worked for 30 minutes before he came back in again, with the other side of the hose off.
And of course I had to throw in a shot of everybody's favorite car, Tow-Mater.
So we called it a night. There wasn't a good way to test fixes. We thought it might be the brake booster, or the PCV valve, or something else causing pressure to blow it off. Turns out it was a broken motor mount. Broken as in sheared completely off. So the engine could rock over enough to pull the hose off. We diagnosed it in my driveway this afternoon, by doing a brake stand.
And then we took it out of the car. Now we need to either get a new mount, a used mount, or just weld a solid mount.
After that we still need to track down the source of a brake leak we had in the garage at Iowa. We had blue fluid on the ground as we loaded the trailer, but none today. So there's some more checking to do on that.
