A New Track! (9/16/17) - 9 hours - Oregon Raceway Park Clockwise:
Driving to the track the sky has cleared a bit compared to Friday.
During the practice day we dialed our shocks in as much as we knew how (go out, feel it out, stiffen it, try again) and the car was working well. However with most of the other teams having experience at this track we know it's going to be an uphill battle.
Nathan Feigion is in the car first, and he starts in 9th place. He is doing great and runs a 2:01.0 lap time, which was around our target of where we were hoping to get to. Unfortunately he also has a rare miss, and is called in for passing under yellow. This knocks us from 6th place all the way down to 13th place. Nathan is able to claw most of that back, and on lap 46 he pits with us in 7th place. He tells me that he's smelling gas fumes in the car. We take a look during the pit stop, but there is nothing obviously wrong.
I go out in the car next and while I'm not as fast as Nathan, I am entertained and challenged by all the nuances of the elevation change. The braking grip varies in parts of the track. On the front straight stretch the track drops out from under you while you are braking, so you need to compensate for that and brake just a touch earlier. Going into turn 3, the track rises up which really increases the traction. So in that corner you start braking with medium force, but can really ramp it up when the car crams into the uphill. I notice the gas fumes, but they don't seem to be that bad. I make it all the way up to 3rd place (mostly because of cars cycling into the pits) with a fastest lap of 2:02.6.
Dave is in the car next. He spends his session bouncing around 5th and 6th place. He runs a fastest of 2:08.2 and pits on lap 140.
Nathan Feigion is back in the car for his second stint. It's a long race! He gets us solidly up into 5th place during his stint, spending most of the time there. With all the twists and turns of the track, it can be a little tricky to pass a car with more horsepower, especially if they are trying to hold you behind in turns. Nathan reports his frustration with a car that seems to be trying to block any attempt to pass in the corners, but then can run away every time there is an acceleration zone. Apparently our little V6 just isn't enough. Nathan avoids the red mist and finally gets by the car many laps later. On lap 180 he pulls into the pits, having just gotten us up to 4th place and running a 2:01.2.
I go out for the last stint, and while we drop to 8th for a few laps due to the pits, by the time all cars have done their last pit stop we are solidly in 5th place. The gas fumes are worse than earlier in the day, but I am able to manage it. I run a fastest lap of 2:02.9 and bring the car home for a 5th place finish on lap 233! After 536 miles of racing on an unfamiliar track, we got 5th!
We do have some work to do before the next day however. We were getting some clunks from the suspension as well as the gas fumes. For the suspension we find one of our locking rings has backed off, so we add a dab of Loctite to it and crank it down.
With the suspension sorted, we turn to the gas issue. We can see that gas has leaked down the filler neck and onto the tank. Is the cap leaking? We have a spare gas cap, so we swap out the cap. We are also concerned about the vent itself. We try putting some air backwards through the vent, and it seems to flow fine. We try extending the vent hose and tucking it as high as we can in the quarter panel. We also taped all the seams of the trunk and tried to tape up any holes near the gas filler.
We also re-purpose our rain diverter we have on our driver side window to try to pull fresh air into the car.
We head to the hotel concerned that we may not have found the root cause of the gas fumes issue, but hopeful that we can do better than 5th the next day.
A New Track.. Again! (9/16/17) - 6 hours - Oregon Raceway Park Counter-Clockwise:
It's a new day and a new direction of track. Typically tracks are designed to only run one direction, but Oregon Raceway Park is one of the rare tracks that can safely be ran either way. I get in the car first and I start 12th. Right before the race I had talked to Thomas Micich who was driving a Lexus SC300. He said, "Follow me up to the front!" When the green dropped, he slid to the inside and started charging past cars. I miscalculated my gap to him and was not close enough. By the time we got to the first corner I had made up five places, but there were now cars separating us. As I start putting in laps, I radio back to the pits that everything seems fine with the gas fumes, maybe we had fixed it!
However a couple laps later.. I start to get a whiff of gas. Well crap. The gas fumes start to get worse, and I'm having to wipe the tears out of my eyes. I turn on full blast (its only setting), hoping that it will put some positive pressure in the car and help push the fumes out. No such luck. As I am now very distracted by the gas fumes, I now start getting passed by some cars that I had been able to hold off. Am I high on gas fumes? This is a new direction of track so I don't have a great reference of lap times, but my fastest is a 2:03. Is counter-clockwise supposed to be faster or slower? Another car passes me. If I pull in the pits, I don't know what to do with the car at this point, we tried to do what we could come up with last night. Another car passes me. Is my driving degrading? Or is there something wrong with the car? It feels like it's not quite accelerating like I expect it to. Do I hear a misfire? I make a mistake and drop a couple tires into the rocks and dirt. Ok, I'm now convinced that I'm both affected by gas fumes as well as I definitely can hear a misfire. It's time to pull in the pits.
When I get out of the car I head over to the restrooms. When I look at my face in the mirror, I am baffled by what I see. There are white stripes going from my eyes to my ears. I have never seen anything like this. As I stare at my own face, looking like Tonto with war paint, it suddenly hits me. The white stripes are salt stains from my evaporated tears! Wow, I did not realize my eyes were watering that badly. I wash my face and head back outside.
We start troubleshooting the misfire. We find that when we disable cylinder #5, nothing happens. Ok, we found our dead cylinder. We check spark, it has spark. The fuel injectors are freshly rebuilt so it shouldn't be those, right? We ohm the fuel injectors, they are all similar. Ok, at least not a broken coil on an injector. We try removing the upper manifold to see if the injectors are firing. Looking down into the lower manifold.. the fuel injector is squirting fuel. Wait, what? So that cylinder has fuel and spark, but is still not firing right? We try swapping spark plugs around with another cylinder, no change. We try moving the #5 fuel injector.. and the problem moves with the injector. I guess it must be too little fuel, even though it is firing. We have 12 fuel injectors.. on the table.. at home 126 miles away. Well, I guess that's like not bringing the umbrella because it's not *supposed* to rain.
Dave decides he wants to get some practice in the counter-clockwise setup, so we take off the trunk hoping the interior will get some more airflow. Now that we know the problem with the engine, we unplug the bad fuel injector so that the cylinder won't be firing lean. Dave heads out on track.. but he is getting swarmed by faster cars. A combination of being unfamiliar with the track and being down on power is not good. He gets us up from 47th place to 46th place, but pulls the plug after we had put in just 35 laps for the day.
Not the most successful weekend we have had, but ORP is definitely a blast! We will be back one of these days to try to redeem ourselves.
Video overview of the weekend: