Bear Patrol's Blog is back baby!

Well, I've officially put off blogging about the car for long enough. After working on the car tonight, I realized I haven't posted anything about about 2012 build, and worse yet, nothing about our first results. Being that I've been such a slacker, I'm going to group some of the work together, since I can show beginning to end work, rather then just saying we did this on this weekend. First off, thanks to my lovely fiance for being understanding of the time required to build and maintain this car. And also, thanks to all that helped work on the car, you know who you are (yes, I'm too lazy to type them all out). Our big project for this year was refreshing the suspension of our 1992 Lexus SC400. Thankfully some online places like www.lexuspartsnow.com have online diagrams, or at least they used to, and better pricing then dealerships. We were also lucky to find an SC400 in the local u-pull yard, so we got lots of our spare parts for cheap. Lets get started, if this was the good, the bad, and the ugly, we didn't really have any good, except for air tools and WD40.

Needless to say, things weren't as they were supposed to be. We're pretty sure this is residual damage from our Road America 2011 crash. Once we got the bolt out, we quickly figured out why it was so hard to get out of the hole...

Yeah, Jeremy's a little perplexed by the whole thing.

It was also quickly apparent just how far gone our right front wheel bearing was.  Notice the top steering knuckle with the nice shiney gold colored hub nut.  Then compare to the dark, burned looking one on the bottom steering knuckle.  Not good.

Next on the way out was the rear subframe and suspension.  It didn't come out quite as easily as we thought, and it was a big heavy b*tch.  Hence my salutation to it.

As you can see here, we now have more then 2 spindles and hubs.  We got lucky with the junkyard find, so we picked up some extras.  You can also see the beginning of our lower control arm rebuild.  Gotta love integrated ball joints...

The hatred with the rear suspension continues.  When just unbolting stuff isn't good enough, get out the grinders, and make sparks.  We were planning to replace all the hardware, with new, unrusted pieced, that were actually adjustable, so we just went to town on the old ones.

And of course we won.  All the various control arms came off, the rear hubs were disassembled, and the axles were pulled.  

The bare subframe is ready to head down to Northfield.  My dad sand blasted away all the rust, which was much nice to work with.

Before sending it for the sandblasting, we had to weld up some patches for rust spots too.  Next time maybe we won't start with a northern car.

Got the rear differential apart for inspection, and apparently we forgot to change the fluid 2 years ago when we got the car.  Hawhoops.  Man did that stuff smell.  So we went and picked up a "new" one from a local junkyard as well.  It was easier then trying to replace bearings.

And the first parts to get the clean treatment were the aluminum rear upper control arms.  The ball joints tested out fine, so we just cleaned them up with a wire wheel, and preserved the fancy shine with some glossy clearcoat!

After sandblasting the "new" rear differential, we got to painting it as well, in hopes of preventing future rust.

Okay, I lied, this is all I'm writing tonight.  I'll try to get another update with more info some time in the next 6 months.  ;)

Caption contest!

This photo of bear racing NEEDS a hilarious caption!


We need to turn this into Team T-Shirts and we need some hilarious captions or quotes to pair with it. Post your caption in the comments.

Winner gets their caption on our shirt, recognition on the blog and Facebook page, and I will personally buy you a Team T-Shirt.

I'll get you started, discuss!
"Even with one horsepower, BEAR WINS!"
"If horse doesn't win, I eat him"
"You cannot catch a bear"

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!