Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Day 2: Racin'

Mark took our first stint and everything was pretty uneventful. He actually turned in a few fast laps near the end of the stint despite all of the traffic.

My stint was next and didn't go so smoothly. A couple laps in I was confronted by this:




The driver was fine, and was insisting that someone had hit him. I can understand why.

A little later I earned our first (and luckily only) black flag. I went hot into the inside of turn 1 and couldn't make the turn in the space allotted. I ended up gouging a rather large hole into the door of the LabRat's #63 Colt. Fortunately the cars weren't disabled in any way that a large hammer couldn't fix.


Jeff and Craig's shifts went pretty smoothly.

My second shift involved some extra stops. The car lost power on one of the turns and I realized that I was running out of gas. Then just a few minutes later Craig called me in because I was trailing a cloud of smoke. I assumed we had blown a gasket and sullenly took her to the pits.

I pulled her in to our pit and saw the trail of oil that followed her all the way from the track. The passenger side of the engine compartment was coated with oil. The culprit? One of the engine mount bolts had come loose and allowed the engine to shift enough to rub the transmission on our relocated oil filter.



We were very lucky that the damage wasn't worse. We got her fixed up and back on the track in under an hour.

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