Since I blew up the engine.. we picked up a new radiator and a used KA24DE to get the car drivable again.
And Then There Were Two (8/1/2014) - 5 hours - Portland International Raceway:
Nathan Feigion decided to take a little break from racing, so for this race it was just my Dad and myself. I started the race and got a good random start of 11th. It was a Friday, and even warmer than usual for the normally mild Portland track with an afternoon race start. We hit a high of 90 degrees, and that makes the inside of our blue tin box a sweltering sauna! By lap 8 I make it up to 1st place. I had been holding onto 1st place during my whole stint until an hour and 45 minutes later, the car starts bucking and is out of fuel. I make it back to the pits, sweating through my suit and fully exhausted. We are down a driver and not prepared for our pit stop, so it's 8 minutes when we need it to be 5 minutes. This does not help our day at all.
Dave heads out of the pits in 6th place. A Mustang is cruising up the front straight on the right side.. which is the wrong side. Getting to the corner, they lock up the rear brakes and completely loop it, hitting Blue Bayou with their rear bumper on the passenger door. Well.. that's one more area that's not so straight.. Luckily this doesn't affect the drivability of the car at all and Dave continues. Dave makes it back to 1st place by the end of his stint and hands over the car with an hour and 45 minutes remaining. Normally the car should go for that long on gas.. but it will be tight. We do better on our next pit stop, nearly getting it under 5 minutes.
I head out onto the track in 4th, with the sun just dipping below the horizon. I had taped up the top side of my visor to help with glare. I find that my radio connection was missed, and I don't have a way of communicating with the pits. I try unsuccessfully to find the end of the cable and get it plugged in, then give up on it and get to the job at hand.
TECH TIP #10: Remember to plug in your radio, it's helpful.
With 15 minutes to go in the race, I back in 2nd place. The #557 Mustang of Dog & Pony Show is in first, and are just ahead of me. Their car has more power and our car handles better. I can get really close in certain turns, but the straights are an issue. I know that time is running out, and I need to make the pass. I get a run on them leaving turn 7, outbrake them into turn 10 and finish the race! Unfortunately when I get back to the pits, I find out that I was just unlapping myself.. and we finished in 2nd. Considering the mistakes we had, this was still a great result! For ChumpCar being on the podium means going to impound, then once impound is done we can start on replacing all the brake pads as our Hawk Blues on stock brakes eat themselves alive. It is a light setup and brakes just fine, but it gets old having to swap brakes/bleed late into the evening every race.