| Re: Hey guess what? My car runs again! |
Subject: Re: Hey guess what? My car runs again! by SpectatorRacing on 2009/6/15 20:13:25 A few days late, but here's the rest of the story... Soooo....where'd we leave off? Friday morning, 1:00 am. The car's on the trailer. I quickly down a celebratory brownpop and head on down the road. I had planned to go to the track (about 2 hours away) Thursday night, but that just wasn't going to happen. By the time I got there the bonfire would be out and all the beer gone, so I opted for my own bed and a few quality hours of sleep. I hadn't loaded up the trailer, anyway, so I had to go home to get my gear, some tires, a cooler, and perhaps a pillow. By 2:00 I was loaded up, by 2:01 I was asleep. Up again at 5:30, make some coffee, and get on the road. I got to the track around 8:00. I'd like to thank all of my "friends" who were already there (this means you, Carlyle!) for saving me a spot to park....over 100 yards away. Man, I gotta get new friends. Went through all the paperwork of registering, changing class, tech, blah blah blah. Took 2 hours because I kept forgetting things at tech inspection and had to walk back to the truck three times. Did I mention my sweet parking spot? I planned to run Time Trials on Friday to shake the car down, then race on Saturday. I missed the first session, but had 4 left so I wasn't too broken up about it. By the time I got there the bar was already set, Matt (mrc24x) had run a smokin' lap in his C4 that rivalled some of my best from previous years. I hadn't come to win anything, but pride is a dangerous thing - this was kind of my home track, after all. I finally got the car out on the road for the first time, didn't even bother to take off the rain tires. Things were ok, I was puttering around about 15 seconds off the pace, but it ran, temps looked ok, life was good. I had an oil leak, but it's an LT1, I would have worried if it didn't. Went out for the second session, and on the warm up lap things went wrong very quickly. The tach spiked and the car was surging, my heart broke. If this was another optispark failure I was going to torch this thing. I pulled into the pits, climbed out of the car, closed up the trailer, and took a nap inside. I didn't even bring many tools with me that weekend, I was not interested in working on the car anymore. I finally went out to take a closer look. I pulled codes, and had a 16, a 53, and a 66. 16 is the opti, of course. 53 I didn't know, and 66 is something to do with the A/C, which the car hasn't had in 5 years. I didn't have my FSM so I "phoned a friend" to look it up. 53 is a voltage out of range, and means ignore any other codes as they could be set erroneously. I also rememberd Matt commenting that the tach sticking often means alternator. I wasn't 100% certain which wire to put where when I reinstalled it, so maybe I hooked it up incorrectly. There was hope again. I went to check the wiring, and the alternator post came right out of the body. That could be it! Tried to tighten it back down, but the nut inside had fallen off completely, I had to pull it apart. Inside, it was a mess. The nut had fallen off, flipped around in there and destroyed half of the windings. The post was just bouncing around, so it was arcing like crazy while I was driving around. Looks like we found the problem! The closest C4 alternator was 35 miles away, so we hopped in the car and headed to your friendly NAPA. Two hours later, car fired up and ran like a champ. No codes, no misfires, no stutter. Hopefully that was all she wrote. Saturday rolled around to find our hero with a damn hangover. I can't believe the crew held me down all night and forced all of those beers down my throat. However, luckily Spectator-Racing's M-O is that you can't win a title without throwing up in your mouth a little during the race. Took the car out for the first session (stayed in TT again) and things seemed fine. I'll even go so far as to say "delightful". Session 2, stepped it up a little bit. Got the second fastest time on the grid. At this point, Matt faked a clutch problem in his own car because he saw me coming... By the third session I had the pole. Of course, the small oil leak had turned into a geiser, and on every right hand corner the entire cockpit filled with smoke as the oil fell on the header. I was worried that I was going to be black flagged, or worse, catch on fire (again). Still went out and set FTD - luckily Matt wasn't running because it was still 0.4 seconds off the pace he had set on Friday. Attrition is a bitch, I know, usually I'm the guy who's car broke. Went out one more time and lowered the time a bit more. The closest competition was almost a second away at this point, the car was again running like a raped ape. I was beat, the oil leak was getting troublesome, and it looked like rain, so I called it a win. I loaded up the car and sat my tired ass down to watch the rest of the races. I wish the story ended there, but unfortuanately, second place borrowed a set of brand new tires and went out for the last session of the day. He clicked off one magical lap and beat me by 1/10th of a second. If I had gone out I'm sure I would have done whatever it took to keep the win, but c'est la vie. A slight bummer to an otherwise perfect day. |
