Rats

After several months of wondering and waiting for schedules to be published, and after a few more weeks of planning and nail-biting and revising plans, I finally posted a tentative schedule, thinking that all of the events had been confirmed. Silly me. Two days after posting it, races were cancelled and race series changed. Next year I'll post my plans in November and see if the "last-minute" changes happen any sooner.

Now I'm down to just 10 races over 6 weekends:

April 27: SCCA Regional, Blackhawk Farms Raceway, South Beloit, IL (TRO Champ Series)
May 24-25: SCCA Double Regional, Grattan Raceway, Belding, MI (East-West Challenge Series)
May 31-June 1: SCCA Double Regional, Road America, Elkhart Lake, WI (TRO Champ Series)
July 12-13: SCCA Double Regional, Blackhawk Farms Raceway, So. Beloit, IL (EWC and TRO)
Sept 13-14: SCCA Double Regional, Road America, Elkhart Lake, WI (EWC and TRO)
Oct 18-19: SCCA Regional, Blackhawk Farms, So. Beloit, WI (TRO Champ Series)

I wish I could run more events at Road America or Grattan, but neither track has any more SCCA Regional or Midwestern Council events scheduled. I'm also very disappointed that neither series will be stopping at GingerMan or the Milwaukee Mile. There are a half-dozen racetracks within 100 miles of Chicago, yet each sanctioning body is only running two of them! What gives??

Hibernation

Have I mentioned that I am not a fan of winter? I'm not. Especially winters where the snowfall total is more than I am tall, the windchills are below zero for days at a time, and even the plow trucks get stuck. Winter Wonderland? Sure, if by "wonder" you mean “I wonder if I’ll make it to work today… I wonder when I’ll feel my toes again… I wonder if I should buy a few more sets of long underwear... I wonder if I still have ears...”

Our one-year-old snowblower is going to need a major overhaul if summer ever comes, because it has seen some very hard use this winter. I think the racecar has seen less abuse in 30 years than the snowblower has seen in 3 months. I should be thankful that snowblowers don’t have logbooks. That would be an embarrassing read: “Crashed into ice-packed snowbank; repair auger hood damage before next snowfall… Stalled by choking on heavy snow; check engine case for cracks before next storm… Rolled, total damage to everything, tech sticker pulled…”

Last Sunday was a refreshing change. Instead of shoveling ice and snow, I spent the day shoveling ice and water. The mercury finally poked its head up over the 30 degree mark as a warm (storm) front came through town. For the first time in months, we got rain instead of snow. It was a terrific opportunity to get the two-inch layer of ice off the driveway, but underneath the ice was a lot of water. The rain and melting snow combined to make some epic puddles (which couldn’t get past the snowbanks on either side of the driveway into the soil which was frozen anyway), so I basically worked on corralling the water from the garage to the street, which was also flooded and iced over. I was thrilled with the rain, but I also wasn’t sad when it finally changed to snow in the afternoon.

Fortunately, the warm weather (well, relatively warm) gave me an opportunity to finally get the car up on stands, and just in time too. All that water in the garage has now frozen into a fascinating display of freeze expansion. Depending on your point of view, the garage floor looks either like a 3-D map of the glaciers during the ice age, or like a snapshot of the tide coming in. The ice actually sits up so high that it just touches one of the rear wheels, which is hanging 2 inches off the floor.

That’s enough talk about winter. I’m getting cold.

I mentioned before that this is the first time that I’ve had a running car in my garage during the off-season. I’m used to panicking with a three-page to-do list a couple of weeks before the first event, so this is an unusual situation for me to say the least. I do have a brief list of projects to keep me busy, like fixing some stripped threads on the gearbox and re-doing a hasty exhaust repair, but the car is essentially ready to run. So what do I do now?

My other big area of indecision is in planning the 2008 season. I have a list of events I really want to run, but they don’t really add up to a season. I’m looking at an SCCA Regional here and a Midwestern Council race there, but I’m not leaning towards a commitment to any one series right now. Each group has at least one event that I'm willing to miss the other group's race for, so I won't be running a full season with either group.

Another question mark on the horizon is my license renewal. Because of my abbreviated 2007 season, I ran enough races to renew an SCCA Regional license, but not enough to automatically renew my National license*. For an extra fee I can apply for a waiver to renew my National license, and for another extra fee I can also apply for a waiver to renew my Midwestern Council license. MC will let me run on an SCCA license, but I won’t be awarded any points (which won’t be a big deal if I’m not running the full MC schedule anyway, since I won’t be in the running for a championship).

Here are the not-quite-set-in-concrete, definite maybe events that I’m considering, possibly:

April 19-20 Driver’s School & Race, MC, Blackhawk Farms
April 27 SCCA Regional Race, Blackhawk Farms
May 24-25 SCCA Double Regional, Grattan (MI)
May 31-June 1 SCCA Double Regional, Road America
June 29 MC Race, Blackhawk Farms
July 12-13 SCCA Double Regional, Blackhawk Farms
July 19-20 Driver’s School & Race, MC, Blackhawk Farms
August 9-10 (a busy weekend) MC Race, Blackhawk
(or) SCCA National, Grattan
(or) SCCA Double Regional, Mid-Ohio
August 30-31 SCCA Double Regional, State Fair Park
Sept 13-14 SCCA Double Regional, Road America
Sept 21 MC Race, Blackhawk Farms
Oct 18-19 SCCA Regional, Blackhawk Farms
Oct 25-26 MC Race, Blackhawk Farms

Whoops, that’s 13. Not that I’m superstitious, but let’s put the June 8 MC Race at Autobahn Country Club on the list too.

My only complaint about that calendar is the same as in many other years: The events are clustered, with back-to-back events separated by long gaps. The back-to-back events at Blackhawk are not too tough because the setup doesn’t need to be changed, but going from Grattan to Road America to Autobahn can be tough. In addition to the major wallet strain, you have to schedule a gear change during the week. That isn’t a big deal for some people named Nicole Temple who can change gears in 15 minutes, but when it takes you an entire evening (hi, that’s me), the week gets pretty hectic. Unload the car Sunday night (if it’s not too late), clean the car and get the tools back together Monday night, nut & bolt Tuesday, change gears Wednesday, load the truck Thursday so you can take the car along Friday morning so you can leave from work Friday afternoon. That doesn’t leave much room for actually fixing problems.

But thinking about it again, the first back-to-back like that is the Memorial Day weekend at Grattan followed by a Road America event. RA is so close to home that I wouldn’t have to load the car until Friday night after work, or even Saturday morning (plus we have a holiday on Monday which will help). The trip back home from RA Sunday night will get us home early enough to get everything unloaded and cleaned up so we can start working on the car on Monday. And the next event (MC at Autobahn) is Sunday only, so I could drive down Saturday night or (ungodly early) Sunday morning, so that’s another half-day on my side at least. The other nasty back-to-back is the September Road America event followed by an MC Race at Blackhawk. The MC race is also a one-day (Sunday) event, which gives me Saturday to finish the car, after an early evening the Sunday before. So what am I worried about?

*To renew an SCCA Regional license, SCCA requires completing 2 Regional races. To renew an SCCA National license, SCCA requires 4 Regionals, or 2 Nationals and 1 Regional, or 3 Nationals. I ran 2 Regionals plus 2 MC events which are not officially recognized by SCCA for licensing purposes.

Catching Up

It's all a blur.

Starting where we left off, Friday (October 26) during lunch I drove to NAPA to pick up the correct bearings. Then the fun began.

If you recall, we had to warm the upright and chill the bearings to loosen the interference fit between them. I put the bearings in the freezer and checked the LP tank on the gas grill at work. Everything was ready to go, but I didn't want to char the uprights or get burger grease on them. Fortunately, we tend to save things here. We had a company lunch a while back, with food from a local restaurant brought in inside pans of heavy aluminum foil. Knowing that the pans would come in handy somehow, we washed and saved the pans and the lids. One lid was the perfect size and shape to wrap the upright to protect it from smoke and hot spots. We fired up the grill and put the upright in to cook for an hour.

Bruce Lindstrand had told me that if I warmed the upright and chilled the bearings, the bearings would slip right in (insert slurping noise here). I confess I'm not used to things going that smoothly. When I hear, "They'll slip right in (slurping noise)," that translates to "You'll only have to fight with them for 15 minutes, not an hour or two." But this was a statement I could have taken at face value. I positioned the first bearing over its hole just to get it ready for the press, but the frost on the bearing made me lose my grip on it, and it fell out of my hand... and slipped right in (slurping noise). We were so thrilled that we flipped the upright over to get the other bearing in from the other side -- and the first bearing slipped right back out. A few minutes of Three Stooges re-enactment later, and both bearings were in. By the time the upright cooled to the point that the bearings would not fall out, it was after 5pm. I wrapped the assembly in racer's tape to ensure that the bearings would still be in the upright when I got home.

Reassembly was only a little more work than disassembly, but not by much. When everything was back together, I spun each axle and listened for any noise. The right axle had a little noise that seemed to be coming from the inner CV joint, so I took that joint apart to examine it. There was a little wear inside, and a couple of the balls had a little discoloration, so I decided to replace it. First I would need to grease the new joint. Which took a little longer than I anticipated, because I had to look for my grease gun (I'm still unpacking from the move). And the grease gun was empty. No problem, I have more grease in the basement. Twenty minutes later, the grease gun was loaded with fresh grease and so was I. Ten minutes later the new CV joint was installed and the car was on the ground. It was about 9pm at this point, so I was well ahead of schedule. I got the car on the trailer and went to bed.

I think I've mentioned before that I'm not a fan of being in the first group of the day. I'm not a morning person to begin with, and I don't like having to rush to be ready. But the truck was running well and the prior weekend's head wind had died down, so I was able to get to the track by 7am. The good people in Registration and Tech got me through in plenty of time to set up a work area. We got the canopy set up with the sidewalls on (50 degrees with a stiff wind is not nearly as pleasant as 50 degrees with no wind at all), unloaded the truck, and got some hot chocolate.

The first practice session was incident-free. Despite the cold, I turned a 1:21. The engine was very strong -- cold weather typically makes more horsepower than hot weather -- but the cold air seemed to be right at the limit of the carburetor jetting. There was a definite lag getting on the throttle, and the exhaust would pop frequently, but I had no competition, so I wasn't too worried.

We huddled around the car under the canopy during lunch. The warm tires, brakes, and engine were like a campfire in our tent. One quick nut-and-bolt check (and refueling) later, and we were ready for qualifying. The afternoon was slightly warmer than the morning, so the engine was running a bit better and the tires were gripping better. I qualified at a 1:19.6, which put be 8th overall in the group, but the official grid confirmed that I had no competition. I was the only car entered in CFF for this race. Of course I have mixed emotions about that. Every trophy and every win still means a lot to me, and running alone makes for a very relaxing race. On the other hand, it also makes for a boring race, both for me and for anyone I talked into coming to watch. It also means that the average number of entrants in the class is coming down. Still, I needed to run this race in order to keep my license current, so I wasn't about to go home.

We checked over the car before buttoning it up for the night. Everything looked good, but we struggled for a while with the zippers on the sidewalls. The car is just a little bit longer than the canopy is, and the sidewalls are only just barely long enough to go all the way around the canopy -- IF the legs are perfectly vertical. Which they weren't.

It was a bit like another Three Stooges episode. We'd close the zipper a little bit, then it would refuse to budge because the opening was too wide. Then we'd pull up the stakes holding a couple of legs down, move the legs in a bit, stake them back down, and try the zipper again. Better, closer, but still a bit too snug. Pull up the stakes, move the legs in, stake them back down, try the zipper. That one got us another 3/4 of an inch. (Before you yell, "Idiots! Why do you keep pounding the stakes back in before you try the zipper?" Please understand, it was windy. As soon as a stake came up, the canopy began dancing in the wind. We had to get the stakes back in the ground as quickly as we could or we'd lose the whole thing.)

We finally got the zippers almost all the way to the ground and called it good. Driving away, my father remarked that the canopy looked remarkably like a tomb. Yeah, let's not bring up death at a racetrack, okay?

Sunday morning was clear and nowhere near as windy, but we were greeted by a layer of frost on everything. Thankfully the sun was coming out when we got to the track, so it felt even warmer than Saturday. Unfortunately, that meant the frost on the canopy was melting quickly, and it was dripping on everything. We pushed the car out and left the canopy to dry in the sun.

I warmed up the car, changed into my driver's suit, and waited for the calls to grid. Normally, they will announce three calls to the grid over the PA system. When they give "third and final call," they will often warn that the grid will close soon (typically 5 minutes). Anyone who is not on the grid when the grid closes will lose his starting position and will have to start the race from the back of the grid.

The PA was eerily silent. Several of us were standing around, wondering out loud when the grid calls would start. Finally, about 5 minutes before the race was scheduled to start, they gave first call. I walked to the car and suddenly heard an oddly frantic voice over the PA shrieking, "Grid is at 5 minutes!! Grid is at 5 minutes!!" The grid had signalled that the race would begin in 5 minutes. I drove the 50 feet to the grid and was informed that I was late and would have to start at the back. Was this someone's idea of a joke? One grid call, and then we're suddenly late? What happened to second call, third call, and the warning that the grid was closed?

Actually, I wasn't that close to the back. Only four or five cars had made it to the grid "on time." The rest of us were being lined up as we came, and at least four cars were behind me. Suddenly I was very glad that I didn't have any competition. If I had been trying to beat someone, I'd have been furious. Or at least as upset as my dad was. I actually had to try to calm him down while I waited for the pace lap to start.

For the start of the pace lap, cars pull out from the grid and stop on the front straight as they wait for the rest of the field to line up behind them. Once the entire field is lined up on the front straight, the pace car pulls out to start the pace lap. I waited for the cars behind me (maybe it's more than four, this is taking a while) and saw the pace car pull away. The cars in front of me began to move, I went to pull away -- and stalled the car. I have never done that before -- have I? Maybe once before. Or twice. But not in the last 5 years, certainly. I think. I got the car started again and rejoined the field for what was perhaps the fastest pace lap of my life. Nobody had a chance to scrub tires or warm their brakes, but I'm sure we warmed up the track a bit.

The grid mix-up had put me behind several FVs and FSTs, which I decided to use for entertainment. I would gradually pull up behind a slower car and watch the driver's technique, looking for any little tricks that I haven't seen before. I learned a few new lines through some corners (not all of them successful), but after a corner or two behind each car I would begin to look for the safest and easiest place to pass. Some were easy to pass, either under acceleration or braking. Some drivers nearly pulled over and stopped to let me pass. When I finally reached the F500 which should have been gridded behind me, I realized that I was working very hard to pass him and even harder to keep him behind me. Since we were running in different classes, I let him re-pass me, choosing an easy finish over a potential mistake.

Two cars did make the kind of mistake I was trying to avoid. An F500 and an FST tangled in corner 6 on the first lap. The FST was one of the few cars who had made it to the grid on time, but his qualifying time was the slowest of the group. It appeared that the F500 (who had not made it to the grid on time) may have been trying too hard to pass the slower car, or at least may not have realized how much slower the other car was. Both cars were unable to continue.

I settled in behind the F500 and concentrated on running a conservative race. My fastest lap time in the race was a 1:20.4, which was likely when I was trying to chase down the F500. Most of my laps during the second half of the race were in the 1:22 to 1:23 range. But I finished the race and set a new record -- for the first time, I finished the last race of the season with a car that will not need any repairs over the winter.

While we were resting after the race, a photographer approached me and told me he had been looking for me for two years. He had taken pictures of my victory lap at this same event in 2005, but he hadn't seen me since.

He only needed to look on my couch; I was there pretty much the whole time.

Losing my Bearings

I forgot the cardinal rule of auto racing: When everything looks like it's falling into place, you've missed something. Put another way, if anything can be described as "too easy", it is.

I purchased replacement bearings (four, in case we damaged any on installation). I took the upright off the car (it came off without any trouble). I packed everything in a box and arranged to take it all to LMI Thursday evening.

The first thing Bruce did was to take the stub axle out of the upright. As soon as he did, he could see that I had purchased the wrong bearings. Nothing about them was correct -- wrong size (by about 1mm on the OD), wrong type (double-row ball instead of single-row ball), and much too wide to fit the upright. He got the old bearings out without much trouble (he makes it look so easy), but there was nothing else we could do. The parts stores were closed, and none of the other cars in the LMI shop use the bearing I needed. I put all the loose parts back in the box and drove home.

The real shame is not that I wasted all that time driving to Darien. I felt worse that I asked Bruce to stay in the shop three hours after they closed so he could help me. But this morning I have an upright with no bearings, and no access to the proper way to install the new bearings once I get them.

The proper way to install bearings in a cast aluminum part is to start by warming the aluminum part to about 300-350 degrees. This makes the bearing bore slightly larger, making it easier to slip the bearing in. Ideally the bearings should also be chilled to shrink them slightly for even more clearance. Finally, a press should be at hand to squeeze the bearings into place. I have two out of those three here at work and at home. We have a press and a freezer at work, but no oven. We have an oven and a freezer at home, but no press. If the bearings arrive in time today, we may try to warm the upright on a gas grill. If not, I'll have to go shopping for a press on my way home tonight. And then I'll have to do a lot of explaining and apologizing for putting my car parts in the oven.

I'm giving myself until midnight tonight. If the car isn't on its wheels by then (or at least making significant progress), I don't think I'll make the race this weekend.

Getting My Bearings

The good people at Lindstrand Motorsports have helped me identify the mysterious noises I thought I was hearing. The noises were real, and they were the result of worn wheel bearings. The left rear wheel can be moved about 1/8" up and down, although it is still tight side to side.

The left rear wheel on a formula car is typically the most heavily loaded wheel in road racing. Road racing courses are generally run clockwise, which emphasizes right hand turns. Turning right transfers weight to the outside wheels (the left side), and the rear of the car is heavier than the front, both because of static weight distribution and because weight transfers to the rear wheels under acceleration. I won't speculate on what percentage of the car's weight is carried by the left rear wheel in a right hand turn, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was more than half. This is the same force that ate up the VW wheel hubs I used a couple of years ago.

What appears to have happened is the outer race of the bearing has become egg-shaped (pointy end up) from the extra weight it has been carrying. It hasn't just generally worn out, which would cause the wheel to be loose in every direction. If you put one hand on the tire at 3 o'clock and your other hand at 9 o'clock and push and pull, you won't feel any play. But put your hands at 6 o'clock and 12 o'clock and you can move the wheel up and down with an audible clunk.

The plan for the next few days is to take the upright off tonight so that I can deliver it (and two new bearings) to LMI tomorrow, as Bruce has offered to stay in the shop after hours to help press the old bearings out and install the new ones. Depending on the hour when I get home Thursday night, I may try to get the car back together that night so I can load up Friday night and head to the track Saturday morning. I don't know if I'll make it in time for the first practice session in the morning, but I should be ready for qualifying in the afternoon.