Back to racing in 2012, starting at Road America

For 2012, our season start April 21st in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, at the historic race track, Road America.  Its over 4 miles of pure awesomeness.  After placing 2nd last year, and also crashing, we were hungry for more.  But this year the entry list roughly doubled, to 50 cars.  With some improvements to the car, long hours working over the winter, and finally some decent weather, we were ready to get racing!

Last year with the colder weather, we ran on 320 treadwear tires, when everyone else stuck with their 200 treadwear Dunlop Star Specs.  So we were excited to see how the car handled on the 200TW Falken Azenis RT-615K, along with less weight, and a taller rear gear set out of an SC300.  

It turns out the gears really hurt our fuel consumption.  We actually had to shift in overdrive down the 3 longest straights, but we did gain a little low end acceleration.  We also gained a little extra rear end wiggle, probably now that the rear suspension bushings weren't all seized.  But once we got the hang of it, it wasn't too bad, but it definitely was different under braking.

Unfortunately our fuel consumption was even worse then last year.  We were barely able to make it an hour and twenty-five minutes, which meant we had to run an extra driver stint.  Ideally we'd pit at an hour and forty minutes for the seven hours, and have equal driver time, and the minimum number of pit stops possible. So with an extra 5+ minute pit stop we were at a big disadvantage.  

Otherwise the car ran well, we put down some competitive lap times, but just missed the podium on both days.  We finished 5th on Saturday and 4th on Sunday.  The BMW's in the field were just too fast for us.  So its back to work on the car to shed some weight, and on to Brainerd on June 30th.  (Yes I know that's soon).  

If you look closely, our wheel is actually off the ground here.  Nice work Jeremy.

Thanks to Alex Bellus for these photos.  Check back in a few days and hopefully I'll have some video up.

Back to Road America in April

Thanks to Jeremy's friend Eric Flood for taking these pictures!  He got some great sequences and some other good shots too.  

We did do something besides suspension work

So the SC400 did need a little more work then just a suspension rebuilding.  We were looking for weight savings wherever we could.  In doing some research via the Lextreme forums, I found some guys had success with EGR block off plates.  If we were lucky we might even pick up some midrange power, but as tired as our engine is, I doubt we did.  But it did remove a few pounds from the front of the car, which we desperately needed, and still to find more of.

Much cleaner.  And now we could see how much of rat's nest there was down in the valley.  Gross.  Thanks shopvac, for taking care of that.

And in the sake of weight, Soren took to the wiring harness.  Luxobarges have so many electronics, much of which we already removed.  Unfortunately he also snipped the rear O2 sensors, and a couple wheel speed sensors too.  Luckily they weren't too hard to splice back in.  

 And it was time for brake paint.  We had decided on a new paint scheme this winter too, and we thought some nice 80's Porsche mint green painted calipers would look nice.  Wow are they brighter then we thought.

Some new rotors courtesy of our friends at Frozen Rotors round out the look up front.

And out back.

So pretty without tons of brake dust.  We also replaced some piston seals to rebuild the rear calipers.

And here we started work on removing the old stickers in preparation for the new design.

And we didn't get it done in time for Road America in April.  So we rattle canned it with a rough estimation of what it might look like when we get to it.

And thanks to our friend Dan, we got to play around and weigh the car, in an attempt to see if we had roughly the right springs in the car.  Under 3000lbs isn't bad if you consider where the car started!

Parts get all cleaned up!

Back for another edition.  With essentially all of the suspension out of the car at this point, we now had surprisingly good access to the bolts for the catalysts.  We had been wanting to take a look at it, and make sure they hadn't gotten melted.  After reading on the Lextreme.com forums that with a stock motor, you were actually better off having the catalysts, we just wanted to check their condition, and put them back in.  At the same time, we welded on a new flange for the rest of the exhaust, and went back to 2.5" tubing, rather then 3.0".

At this point my dad had brought back some refreshed, repainted parts and we began assembling the replacement bushings.

Everything looks so much nicer with a fresh coat of paint.  Should be nicer working on a less greasey car too.  Too bad the first race will likely ruin that.

More fresh paint and bushings on the traction arms.  We debated making our own adjustable version of these, but didn't want to use up the AIV dollars.  We needed that to cover our polyurethane bushings, since there was no way I was buying new arms with new ball joints, nor was I going to search long enough to find a fully good set of used ones.  Its worth the AIV for the bushings in our book.  Plus its actually cheaper for our team budget.

Below is the opened up, smelly, overheated rear differential.  Not too bad looking really.

But the "new" differential we got from the junkyard looks WAY better.  Thanks North Imports.

Mmmmm...now doesn't that look nice?  This is prior to adding the control arms, I believe we were missing something.

And BAM, the whole thing goes back up in the car, with are super rusty fuel filter...

Also while we had everything out, we took out the transmission pan and oil pans, to clean them up, and add a new transmission filter.  There wasn't enough time to take either out for inspection or rebuild.  Hopefully we'll do that after this season.

And the fronts suspension is going back in now too.  It also looks nicer, has new bearings, with high temperature grease.  So hopefully we won't have to replace those for a little while again.

The other side.

And we had some stripped out ball joints on the camber arms, so we had to order up some used ones from ebay, my 2nd favorite junkyard.  Didn't bother pulling and swapping the poly bushings on those though.

But after all that, we had the suspension ready for Road America in April.  More on that soon.