Our race was last weekend. It was pretty dang fun. We ran the Thunderhill track with three different configurations!
My son and I picked up the uhaul truck and trailer on Thursday AM and then brought it home to load it up. The race car wouldn’t start. Just a click and nothing. Turned out there was corrosion inside the cable where it attached to the positive battery terminal. I used a wire brush to comb out the end of the cable then reconnected it and it started up. By the time we were ready to leave it was noon. We got to Thunderhill and got in line. They opened the gates to us at 5, we went in and chose our normal spot under the middle canopy.
The next morning we attached the splitter, put on the race wheels, and got it ready for inspection. Our inspection was at 3pm. They put us in B with 0 penalty laps again, despite our never in more than 15 races finishing well enough to win C. Oh well.
Our neighbors this time were the same as last time at Thunderhill. Ian Korf with his team and his Toyota Yaris (C class). The Stanford team with their CB7 was there again. These kids are real lemons heroes. They keep their car in some obscure corner of a garage at Stanford, which means they aren’t supposed to work on it, so anytime they do they do it overnight and have have it all buttoned up by morning. They have great attitudes and this time they had hardly any problems.
Saturday morning we were running the 5 mile course in reverse. Ewan went first. This was his third race. He started in 51st place and worked his way up into about 25th!!! by the end of his stint. He did go off once in a totally non-damaging way. He set a fast lap of 4:11.6 which was at the time the 20th fastest fast lap! We had a longer stop because Ewan went to the penalty box to see if the black flag he had seen was for him, it wasn’t. Dennis started in 52nd and raced his way into 32nd. Dennis managed a 4:08.5.
https://youtu.be/oKr2rb3Aj_U
https://youtu.be/0g1VU3DjdXY
I was up next and I can say I do not like the 5 mile reverse. I just never got confident and had unimpressive times. I got a black flag for touching the blend line. I started in 40th place and got us up to 32nd and my fast was a 4:20.1. Since we will probably never race that layout again, my son will forever be faster than me on that layout. It was funny because he was making excuses for why his dear old dad was slower. He blamed the tires being all used up. But Jason went last and did a 4:07.4 which proved the tires had grip, it was just me. I finished up my stint in 30th place overall.
https://youtu.be/vZHL85r1EFU (I was not fast on saturday, not a super exciting watch)
Jason took the last stint of the day, started in 35th and finished us up in 29th overall and 13th in B class. One of our best Saturdays ever! The car held up well to 7 hours of racing and there was not much to do. Dennis grilled Tri-tip for us on his new portable grill. Deeeelish.
https://youtu.be/iFEkVJiLiPs
Sunday I got there early to visit the tire guy. You see we had 3 pair of fairly equally worn tires. Jason and I had decided that if we used all 6 we could last the weekend. We ran Saturday on the tires that were already mounted. On Sunday I took the fronts in, which were totally used up, the left front one was completely bald. Turns 8E, 7E, 2E, and 1E were all high speed long right handers and it took a toll on left front. So the tire guy opened at 8 and I was waiting for him when he got there at 8:15. He put our slightly fresher tires on and then we mounted them and managed to get Ewan onto the grid before the 9am start time.
We had planned on all 4 of us driving the reverse 3 mile, but Dennis and I both agreed to drive only on the forward 3 mile so we could all do longer stints. So Ewan went first again. He got a 2:26.5 second lap, and took us from 29th into 27th place. But when he came in there was a bad vibration. Sounded like an axle to me, and sure enough the left axle was a bit wobbly. So we swapped it out. It took us 45 minutes and a bruised forehead to get it in, and with our usual pitstop time of about 10 minutes we were back out there in 43rd place in an hour.
https://youtu.be/ZA8fOJFopoM
This time Jason was driving. He started in 43rd and got us into 38th and set a fastest lap of 2:25.3, a second faster than Ewan. They were changing track direction at 12:15pm by bringing everyone into the pit row, then when everyone was in they led them back out in the other direction. We had Jason come in at 12:10 so we could do our driver change and get gas while no one was moving.
https://youtu.be/iFEkVJiLiPs
So Dennis took over on the 3 mile forward track without losing a place in 38th overall. He got us into 26th. It’s a lot harder to move up through the field late in the race. His fast lap was a 2:28.032. There was a red flag that stopped all cars on the track but Dennis pulled off because the shift linkage had just come loose. So he got towed in at the end of the red flag, we fixed that and got me back on track about 2.
https://youtu.be/Zse191hrOqE
That left a 2 hour stint for me to drive to get us to the checkered flag. We know that 2 hours is at the edge of how long we can go on a tank of gas and 2 hours is the edge of my ability to drive without screwing up. So I vowed to short shift and to try to make it to 4pm. I got a 2:27.9 so the fast lap for 3 mile forward (by 0.2 sec) and I did 10 out of my last 13 laps under 2:30. I started in 43rd place and got us up to 38th when our race abruptly ended about 30 minutes early. We asked too much of the tires, and unbeknownst to me, Ewan had flat spotted the left front right at the end of his drive. The tire blew up as I was breaking for turn 1 at probably 90 mph. I had to fight for control as it went all wonky on me and managed to let two cars past on my right, then I went off on the right into the dirt and waited for a tow. When we got back in we might have been able to mount a tire back and get out there for the last lap, maybe, but we decided to pack up instead. We ended up in 44th place. 1 lap down from the Stanford CB7. Our neighbors in the Yaris finished 2nd in C class in 13th overall.
https://youtu.be/n_kntVED0Us (I did much better sunday, worth a watch)
Overall we all got good seat time, we put in a dang good effort and proved once again that even if we were in C class we wouldn’t win anything.
PicknPull Racing 