Chumpionship at Iowa Speedway and the curse continues...

Like usual, Chumpcar had some pretty sweet trophies, but these were like none before. The first place trophy is huge, and some of the others are just awesome! I wish we could have won the Hellboy one.

We finished prepping the car in the garage, making some changes during the Friday test and tune to see if we should run the rear sway bar or not.

The race had plenty of rain, which made some interesting trips through the infield, but it was fun getting in some drifting practice.

Things started to dry out around mid-afternoon. So the pace through the infield began to speed up. Below are some of our favorite teams, Eggboy in the SHO, the Chevette team and BAR (the later winners), and one of the coolest cars of the weekend, a 510 Datsun wagon.

Also running were the Holy Rollers (the other Simpson's themed team), Team Shake'n'Bake in the Wonderbread MR2 (I keep hoping they'll step up the theme and put the Fig Newton sticker on their windshield), and of course the perenial fave, Tow Mater.

With the course drying out, they finally let us up onto the oval. I missed out on this, as my stint was just before it dried out, but Soren and Jeff got to have some fast fun on the oval!

And then the end of our race. We lost the passenger front wheel bearing, and the wobble of the brake rotor ended up causing significant damage to our lower control arm and ball joint, our caliper, and even some to the wheel and rotor. Needless to say we couldn't find all the parts we needed in the middle of Iowa on a Saturday night. So after just a "short" 10 hours, our race was done. But it was still a blast, and everyone got in 1 stint at least.

And a big thanks goes out to everyone who helped out this year. Like our cheerleaders at Iowa below (my mom, my girlfriend Amanda, and Soren's wife Tanya), (not pictured but at Iowa was Erik's wife Steff), and my dad (who couldn't make it to Iowa after having his knee re-replaced the Monday before).

I'd also like to thank everyone at Falken Tire for helping supply our tires. Running the Azenis RT-615K this year made a big improvement in our car's handling. And a big thanks to Brian for helping get out the last two tires for me, that we shipped to Iowa at the last minute. And also Bruce who helped make it happen, and Mark, for all his advice around picking tires and helping with race setup.

Lastly, I'd like to thank my team, Jeremy, Jeff (my brother), Soren, and Erik, without whom this year (or last year) never would have happened. And also Pon, our guest driver for BIR who is moving to NYC now. Hopefully we can continue to make improvements and someday catch a podium. After being happy to just place in the middle of the pack last year, to move and podium twice, 2nd place at Road America, and 3rd place at BIR, was just awesome.

The Good, Bad, and Ugly of BIR videos!

Videos from Brainerd 14 hours.

Greg, stint 1 in the rain. Camera battery died early.




Next driver, Jeff, stint 1, and proof we didn't hit the Tow-Mater truck.












3rd driver was Pon, his first stint in a race car.


















4th driver was Soren.
















5th driver was Jeff, looks like we hit a juicey bug in Pon's last run.



















6th driver was Pon, much improved over his first stint. A little too much passing in the grass though...




7th driver was Soren, at dusk.






8th driver was Greg, but we forgot to change cameras.

Finally another update...and another trophy!

Sorry for the long delay, but here's the report from BIR in Brainerd, MN on July 16th. We made the trip up Friday night to get tech'ed and checked in, and luckily made it without a wheel falling off the tow vehicle. As most everyone probably knows by now, we took 3rd place in the 14 hour race!

The Trophy: Sparky McBolt

The Team: Pon, Soren, Jeff and Greg

As it turns out, after Iowa, we had more then just one engine mount broken, ALL THREE, were sheared off. Luckily I had bought a kit, and we replaced all 3. We also found a small brake line leak, and replaced this with braided lines so we wouldn't have to drop the whole rear subframe.







Thanks to Alex B for taking and sharing some great pictures! Check out his site for more:
Alex Bellus Photography
Alex's Picasa Album

They're semi-chronological over the course of the day. Morning-Midday:










The run at dusk had a pretty awesome sunset, but that made seeing kind of interesting...






Thanks to everyone who helped get the car fixed after Iowa, and thanks to Jeremy, Erik and my dad for crewing during the race. And of course thanks to all our other fans that made the race and hung out with us. Aside from coming in for fuel early on the first stint (yeah we should top it off now before races...) and the radiator fans falling off, it was a pretty smooth race. I'm very glad I was the last one in the car, from the sounds of it, the mosquitoes after sundown were horrendous! Maybe next year we'll just run the double 7 hour race. Videos are uploading, and I'll post them soon. Tomorrow its back to work prepping for the Chumpionship on Labor Day weekend!

Iowa and the aftermath...

So, as most of you already know, our race at Iowa went nowhere near like we expected. So much that I've put off writing this post for about 3 weeks. But we're moving onward. Of course I had to start off with a nice obligatory pre-race pose. We were quite excited, having thought we fixed everything from Road America. We had the alignment set, new shoes on, we were ready to rock!


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.