2005 MC Race I

(Note: during the next several days, my posts will recap the season so far.)

The first race on the 2005 Haydon Racing schedule was on April 10 at Blackhawk Farms Raceway in South Beloit, IL. The day followed the typical Midwestern Council schedule for a one-day race, with a 15-minute practice session in the morning, followed by a 20-minute qualifying session before lunch, and a 30-minute sprint race in the afternoon.

A couple of times during the day, helpful people warned me that my engine didn't sound quite right -- maybe the exhaust header was cracked, or a spark plug wire had failed. A visual inspection showed nothing unusual, and the car seemed to have plenty of power...

Finally, Bruce Lindstrand (a former owner of this car and proprietor of Lindstrand Motorsports Inc) suggested to me that the car had a definite, audible problem. I had qualified on the pole, but I respect Bruce's expertise and asked him to help me investigate further. When he started the engine to listen to it, I thought he was going to be sick*. The look on his face when he heard the engine idle... he clearly did not like what he heard.

Bruce immediately recognized that the car was not firing on all 4 cylinders. He checked the easy things first -- spark plug wire, spark plug, distributor cap -- but nothing made a difference. Finally, he decided to check if the offending cylinder had any compression at all. It didn't. We determined that when the motor exploded last year, the exhaust valve in the #1 cylinder must have been bent. I couldn't see it when I inspected the cylinder head over the winter, but it was enough to let all of the compression and combustion pressure (= energy) leak out of that cylinder.

As I mentioned, I regard Bruce Lindstrand very highly. So of course I asked him what he thought I should do. There wasn't time to fix the problem, so my choices were

1. Run it on 3 cylinders
2. Put it on the trailer (throwing away the pole position) and call it a day.

Bruce admitted that it was a tough choice. "This is one of those situations that can make you a hero or a zero in a heartbeat," he said. "If you run it and win, wow, you're a genius. But if you run it and damage it further... wow, you're an idiot."

I'm not good at taking hints, so I pressed him for a bit more. "I didn't hear you tell me to put it on the trailer," I observed.

"I am not telling you to put it on the trailer," he agreed.

When I heard that Scott Reif (second on the grid) had to pull out due to an oil pressure problem, I decided to race, but to shift about 1000 RPM below my normal shift point (5500 RPM instead of 6500). After a few laps, I got into a rhythm, braking later and carrying more speed through the corners to compensate for the decreased acceleration and top speed. My crew helper for the weekend kept trying to signal me to slow down, to nurse the car more. So I began to shift at 5200 RPM. Well, my helper went nuts. He was frantically waving his arms, trying to slow me down. Apparently, the more relaxed driving style really agreed with the car -- I had beaten my qualifying time by trying to go slower!

I won the race, which gave me the championship points lead for CFF:

1. John Haydon - 25
2. Michael Schindlbeck - 20
3. Denis Downs - 16
4. Scott Reif - 1 (DNS)

Next chapter: A Points-Paying Test Day...

*In the racing business, when an unhappy or abused machine causes such a physical reaction in a person, he is said to have "mechanical empathy." This is one quality that can separate the good drivers from the exceptional drivers. It also separates the drivers of reliable cars from the owners of broken cars.