|
Day Four -
Thunderhill Raceway - Counter Clockwise (Willows, CA)
"Give me a
Brake"
Another track,
another 7:30am arrival to setup and have time for the driver's
meeting. Our trailer tire was flat again in the morning so we
went by the Arco to fill it up. On the way around the back of
the building, I managed to cut it a little to close and clip a pole
with the trailer fender. I took out one of the marker lights
and bent the fender a bit. Not too bad, but it's not my
trailer. Looks like I've now got four incidents to Dave's one.
Neither Dave or I
have ever been to Thunderhill before and from the looks of the
track, it's going to be very interesting. Thunderhill has
endless elevation changes, blind corners, and roller coaster hills.
Dave decides to ride with me for the first session to learn the lay
of the land. I felt intimidated just looking at the track and
that feeling got even worse once we were out there. I've never
been a natural at learning a new track and picking up the lines.
It usually takes me a while to get comfortable and up to speed.
This made learning Thunderhill even harder. The track has very
limited lines of sight and it's very long (three miles) meaning less
laps per session. Needless to say, I did terrible and was more
than 30 seconds off the pace. Clearly, I had a lot of work to
do. Dave did much better than I did in his first session but
we were still pretty far back overall.
After lunch I decided
that it just wasn't going to happen for me today so I let Dave take
both afternoon sessions to see if he could bring his lap times down.
We walked over to the track office after we ate and found that our
used starter had been delivered. It took just fifteen minutes
to remove the old, hollowed out unit and install the new one.
We turned the power on, crossed our fingers and pressed the button.
We were rewarded with the wonderful sound of our Kawasaki engine
firing up with any pushing! We yelled loud enough that people
at the other end of the paddock knew we had our starter back.
Before Dave went back on track, we also jacked up the trailer and
pulled off the flat tire.
Dave took full
advantage of his two afternoon sessions to reduce his lap time to
2:12.445. He also went four wheels off (but kept going) so now
the incident count is four to two. If Dave keeps this up, we
might even out by day seven! Unfortunately, Dave's time
weren't enough to keep us from slipping a few more notches down the
list for overall points.
After the last
session, Dave was complaining about the brakes feeling weak. We
took a close look and discovered why. Cars like ours are
usually setup for oval racing and left foot braking only (since the
steering column blocks access to the pedal with the right foot).
For our road racing version, the factory installed a pedal extension
which allows braking with either foot (and heel to toe downshifts).
While the idea sounds great, in execution, it was far from perfect.
To start, the support for the pedal extension bottomed out on the
steering column heim joint support and then the chassis. This
prevented full braking force with the right foot. With our
current bias, we measured 300 PSI of braking force with the right
foot. Without changing the pedals, pressing the brake with the
left foot yielded an increase to 600 PSI (double!). Obviously,
we had a serious problem here. We removed the pedal extension
and started working on a solution. With the extension removed,
strong left foot braking got us 1200 PSI of front braking force, a
400% improvement over what we saw at first! We starting
playing with the pedal and after some gentle adjustments to the
support arm (okay, we used a sledge hammer), we put it back on the
car for a test. The new setup netted 600 PSI of front braking
force with the right foot at 900 PSI with the left. This was a
huge improvement and the best we could do at the time so we put
everything back together and called it a night.
We're staying
overnight and running clockwise tomorrow, which should be even more
interesting. At least we get one night to relax a little.
Ron Wasserman put together a dinner at a local Italian restaurant
but Dave and Maria were pretty tired so we skipped it and had a
quick meal at Round Table Pizza instead. We also stopped by a
gas station and had the tire patched (it seems we picked up a big
wood screw somewhere). Believe it or not, there
is a Wall Mart in Willows (population 6000) so we went in for
supplies. We picked up a replacement light for the trailer and
a radio ear bud so we could try and use our FRS radios in the car.
It was nice to get back in the room, take a shower and be in bed by
10:00pm.
Video:
Over the hill and down the dale... er, track
|
