2009 Track Day Information and Dates

[Brent]

Alright, finally have a little time to throw a little bit together. Well, on Thursday evening I finally have my new engine fully broken in, everything on the car is buttoned, and I go to test out the car under boost and make sure nothing comes undone. I pull out of my driveway, warm the car up, and hit the gas…. The car starts stumbling and falling on it’s face when it hit’s 2-3 psi. It was just dumping fuel in when the secondaries were coming online and killing it. I thought I might have an injector stuck open. I check and they are all good. I go back and double check everything, verify all my vacuum hoses… nothing. Long story short, I ended up staying up until 2am going through the fuel and ignition system and not finding anything. After talking with David Jerome, he thought it was my “new” used harness we put in the car during the reinstall. So Friday morning, after trying a few other things, I pull the main engine harness out of the car and put my old one back in. In the process I broke the coolant level sensor connector and knock sensor connector on my old harness I was having to put back in. Luckily I have a really good condition RHD harness that I use for connectors. So minor hiccup there. I’m extremely frustrated when all of this is going on. I was wanting to leave at 10am for VIR on Friday morning. At this point, it’s around 2pm. I get it all back together and am thinking to myself, “if this doesn’t work” I’m going to tear this car apart and sell everything” haha… I think we have all been to that point at one time or another working on these cars. Well, I pull out of the driveway, get the car warmed up again, turn around and hit the gas and… brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaapppppppppp!!!! I was screaming and yelling as I was at WOT with joy! As soon as that happen though, I blew the main coolant line off the side of the block(the one with the plastic quick disconnect nipple). I am right in front of my house just in case something like this happened so I immediately cut the car off. It spewed coolant everywhere but it never even got above 85C. Pull the plastic nipple off and double clamp the hose to the block and go and do it again. Everything is working great now Load the car on the trailer. Pack the rest of my stuff, shower, and hit the road around 4:30-5pm. We arrived in Virginia at the hotel around 1am. Get up at 4:15am my time, get ready, head to the track, and had one of the best weekends at the track to date. Car did absolutely amazing!! Really enjoyed the grand east course. Here are some more pictures from VIR:






I drove up to pick up a Carbon Fiber Hatch and RE-A wing from Fritz for my yellow car and some other parts after I finished at the track Saturday. I figured it was only 4 bolts to bolt it in, might as well try it out at VIR I was very surprised at how much more stable the car felt over around 80mph.
So I had an issue free weekend with great track time and continuing to progress my driving. VIR is still my favorite track… just wish it wasn’t 8 hours away.

So we headed back home, arrived home around 2am in the morning. Woke up early Monday morning and did a once over on the car and started trying to play catch up on everything else. I end up leaving for TGPR around 7-8pm that night. Arrived around midnight and got a pretty good nights sleep. It turned out there were only 5 cars running!! So I was running a session, taking 1-2 sessions off to cool the car down, driving another one, and then repeat All kinds of track time!! On my last session I came into the double apex turn that is before the sweeper turn that leads to the back straight. I turn the wheel and try to turn the wheel to start to track out at around 50-55mph. The wheel is stuck turning right. I push it a little farther to the right and whatever is lodged in it comes free and hits the ground and is dragging before it finally lets go. I pull in thinking that something messed up in my suspension/steering. What actually happened was my HKS Twin Power wires some how broke or burned through the zip ties that moved the wires out of the way of the steering column. When I turned the wheel it caught the wires and ripped the twin power(which was bolted to the metal sidewall of the engine bay) out of the hole and lodged it between the steering and wheel. The only wire it tore was the ground wire. It eventually let go at the harness connector and dropped it on the track. We go back out there and pick it up. It’s beat up pretty bad. I just want to see if it still works. So I reground it and plug it back in… sure enough it still works… ha! I took it back out as I still want to check it out some more but I thought that was pretty neat. Didn’t really get many pictures from TGPR, but here is what I have:

Here is a video from TGPR trying out my Aiptek A-HD+. I can’t seem to get it to move back far enough so I can actually get the entire front windshield.


I'll have my video's of VIR up in a little while most likely. I'll be at Nashville Super Speedway on Saturday and then I'm going on vacation. This will be my last track day for a while. It's been fun, 9 track days in a month!