CAUTION – Lots of Words ahead. 40 degrees and rain is bare minimum weather (no photos or videos). Let my scintillating prose craft the images in your mind.

In Spec E30 terms I’m like the New York Yankees you either love me or you can’t wait to see me fall on my sword. Either way is entertaining I guess. (ed – for the record this is just my perception, in fact most people may be and probably are indifferent).

I meant to type something up after we got the engine installed since a lot of people put forth a ton of effort to help me out but I got lazy and in the end there wasn’t much to talk about just a lot of hours. For the install we had over 100 years of pro mechanic experience so that left little opportunity for me to screw something up and/or hurt myself. So before I go into the Road Atlanta race weekend, let me give my sincere thanks to the following folks:

Craig – for the nearly unlimited use of his awesome garage
Brendan – DTOM crew chief
Jason Mascow – the cobra
Chris Thurman – who handled most of the ‘heavy lifting’ for the install
Ted McMahan – retired mechanic and insurance specialist
My friends at RWL German Imports and BimmerWorld for parts and moral support.

***Just a quick note. Being a mechanic is a hard job, people that don’t understand cars always assume that they’re being cheated, people that do understand cars are always thinking they can do it quicker and cheaper (but won’t). Mechanics are paid on ‘book’ time meaning when you come in and say “I hear a clunk in the trunk”, the mechanic gets paid only for the time the factory thinks it should take to fix the problem, not for deciphering what that means and the actual time they take to fix it. So not only do they have to know and be able to pinpoint the problem, they then have to work against the clock and ‘beat’ whatever time it ‘should’ take them in order to do more work and make a decent wage. It would be very difficult for a mechanic (or service technician) to make a living on 40 hours a week of pay. Some of the best can get paid for 100 hours per week and maybe only in fact put in 50-60. It is still hard physical work and anyone that thinks mechanics are dumb manual laborers should try it for a day and see how quickly they change their mind. And oh by the way, they own all their own tools, in fact most techs that have done this for any length of time may have up to $50k in tools, which they have to pay for on their own. Now for an example, during this endeavor Craig’s starter went bad. We decided to change it out in our spare time. This is a hard job on our cars but one that we’re completely familiar with. The factory (or ‘book’) says it’s a 2 hour job. It took us 4 hours, we pointed that out to Brendan and he said “Not bad, but there were two of you, so that is really like 8 hours”. In other words Craig and I would be poor and hungry if we had to pay our bills this way.***

So after 3-4 months of weekends and making the project much larger than it needed to be, in the end all that went wrong is the junk yard transmission I had bought turned out to be from an early 5-series car meaning it was the right ‘type’ of transmission but the shift linkage wasn’t correct so it wouldn’t work without extensive inventing of parts. Of course somehow no one realized that until it was installed. That cost us probably an hour or so and we got to lift heavy transmissions into place twice, which is good for the pecs.

The goal, ironically (foreshadowing) of all this hard labor was twofold - One, to build a car with a bunch of new parts so that nothing could break without a freakish coincidence and Two, combine my amazing driving talent with amazing horsepower to unleash an unstoppable Spec E30 force on the SouthEast NASA Region. I would dominate all of the remaining races and then look to retire undefeated at the end of the year. I kindly kept the car out of the first CMP race as payment to Craig so that he could win the first two races in return for his garage.

To ensure that this would be the end result I cajoled my loving wife into letting me instruct at a DE the previous weekend so that I could test and tune the car in order to make sure that all systems were go. The motor felt good, everything was in place, I had a minor electrical glitch in the tach and with some of the gauges that we traced back to a loose ground wire, but overall nothing serious.

So I went into the Friday enduro with new tires, new brakes, a mostly new car and feeling pretty good about our chances. My illustrious teammate BMWCCR 2008 JP Champion Dave White was scheduled to take the start, I’d come in during the middle and depending on circumstances we’d see who would finish. At least that was the plan. Dave took off well and was comfortably in the lead after about 40 min. he radioed in to say the coolant temp was rising and he smelled coolant. He came into the pits and a hose had blown off the front of the motor spilling water. We refilled and fixed and sent him back out with a full tank of gas. After an hour he came back in to swap drivers and get a full tank of gas. I went to start the car and noticed the oil pressure light had come on, it flickered a bit and then went out, I shut the motor off. Brendan poked around a bit, I restarted and everything looked / sounded fine. I got on the radio and confidently stated that it was the old electrical gauge gremlin showing back up and that I’d do a lap or two and watch it.

I went out and ran two easy laps, the car felt fine, no lights or anything out of the ordinary. After about 20 minutes the temp started climbing up again on the back straight. I brought it back to the pits. The bleeder screw on the thermostat (another part of the cooling system) had come off and disappeared. We replaced with one from Craig’s car, but at this point with all the pit stops we were out of the race. I figured I’d go out and finish for points and to make sure the car was okay. It was and we finished in maybe 8th place.

Steve Foushee – spec E30 competitor – assuming he had the victory in the enduro stayed out after the checker for some celebratory donuts and burnouts on the front straight. Unlike TV and NASCAR no one at NASA thought that was cool. He was promptly DQ’d for his enthusiasm and forever earned the moniker “Donut King of Augusta” in the SE30 paddock.

Saturday came and it was cold and rainy. Standing in a parking lot with limited shelter and amenities while trying to work on your car in the cold and rain is about as fun as you would think. Like a dumba$$ I wore tennis shoes that were quickly soaked, I spent most of the day worrying about legionnaire’s disease or trench foot. By the time we went to qualify it was a full scale downpour and the track was like roller-skating on an ice rink with a blindfold on. You know how a semi-truck throws off mist on the highway multiply that by 5 and then do 120 mph with a stop sign somewhere up ahead. With 60 cars and 15 minutes you have to be quick and aggressive to get a clean lap, I was neither and earned an awesome 7th spot for my efforts. The race conditions didn’t improve and for some reason the NASA officials thought that combining all the different classes together would be a great idea. So typically I would have been 7 out of 20 because of this I was 20 out of 60. I would usually be racing people I know for points and cars that are about as exactly the same as rules and man can make them. Instead I got to race a bunch of dip sh!ts in 944 cup cars. Specifically Scott Campbell #82. I went to offer him some advice after the race but couldn’t find him unfortunately all racing people out of your class does is slow both of you down for no apparent purpose. (ed – as I pointed this out in my general b!tching and moaning that I’m famous for, an anonymous bystander pointed out WWSCD. To which I replied – Huh? He said, “You know What Would Scott Campbell Do?” To which I replied – Huh? The anonymous bystander explained “The sticker on the back of your car WWSCD, that is the dude, you didn’t know that?” To which I replied – Uh, no?. The anonymous bystander went on, “Yeah the 944 dudes printed those stickers up for him but I think it is an inside joke.”) Well Scott the secret is out of the bag, apparently a bunch of people think you’re a tool – I agree with them OSB – other sports beckon. Someone had put that sticker on my car (like most of my stickers) without my knowledge or understanding what it meant. I was too lazy to remove it, and now I’m glad I didn’t!! Hopefully he saw it when I finally got around him 2 or 3 laps from the end. (ed - A further editorial comment, I’ve had the most problems with stunts like this with the 944’s. Spec Miatas, despite being hairdressers of questionable sexual orientation, are generally good and considerate drivers. It could also be it is really easy just to stay close and overwhelm them with our awesome 150 hp down the straightaway. I don’t think the 944 guys have the car counts so they are always looking for a ‘friend’ to race with instead of realizing that we view them as rolling obstacles vs. a good time. In this specific example I was, generally speaking, 2 seconds a lap faster and when I went to make a pass through turn 12 (in the rain not cool) he came in on me and did even worse and more aggressive things to one of the Lasko / Walsh cars.)

We were scheduled to qualify Sunday morning early. I spent the entire night stewing over the race and my own p!ss poor performance. I put a lot of pressure on myself to do well and even more than usual since a lot of people had put a lot of time into giving me my best shot. I fully intended to be one of the first people on the qualifying grid, and any out of class cars that got in the way were getting the chrome horn. I went to start the car and get it warmed up while I changed into my monkey suit. When it turned over I heard a strange ‘clunking’ noise that I recognized all too well. I went and solicited several independent opinions on what that noise may signify and they all came back terminal – rod knock. I’ll have to save the suspenseful conclusion to this adventure for the future since at this time I don’t really know what happened. Our particular motor is notorious for having this problem with the number 6 cylinder. A piston is connected to a crankshaft by a rod, that rod is ‘suspended’ in oil. So when the car is running this oil provides a cushion that keeps actual metal to metal contact from happening (at least limits it). The number 6 rod may have been deprived of that cushion and then bad stuff happens. Of course I’m not an expert and I have thought things were “A” when they turned out to be “B”. So I have my fingers crossed that I didn’t screw things up too badly and I’ll wait for experts to weigh in with their opinions and judgment.

Of course stuff like this makes you sick to your stomach when it happens, more for the effort and help of friends that is seemingly ‘wasted’, unfortunately disappointment and general suckiness is a large part of racing. I think that is what makes this so addictive when you actually can succeed and triumph. You have to make your peace with these things or you’re in the wrong sport, but it is days like this that make it sometimes feel like a full time job (and not a good one) vs. a fun hobby. Of course it can always be worse, there were several cars that wrecked in the rain and one driver that was rumored to have broken an ankle when a wheel broke through the cage and got into the pedal box. I also thought a lot about when Clay and the BW team wrecked all three of their cars. They managed to put things back together and ended up winning the next race, so while this is a pretty big bump in the road and drastically alters how I envisioned this season working, DTOM will be back and better than ever.

Labels: Bad Attitude, Craig, Race Recap, Road Atlanta