The last few hours and what really went wrong...
When the dark gremlins struck and stole our lighting it became apparent there was a real issue - no parts to replace a defective light board. To Alan's credit he did help us resolve the issue but first they tried to make the headlights work off the taillight portion of the board. I could have told them right up front that would not work for a number of reasons. The biggest being that not all LED's work the same. As an example, the car we put together for Vic's Halloween ride had 4 LED's and two batteries. Though they were rated the same the red LED's and the white LED's would not run from the same power source. The result was just red lights. The whites were always shut off. Hence a battery for each set. This is the world of electronics...
So after pretty much trying to kludge this for most of half an hour they put in a battery to run the lights removing the faulty light board. In my opinion light boards are not a good solution, too prone to disaster. Have a few dead ones here already. Never had a problem the other way.
Then it got even weirder, or as some might say, the screw became apparent.
Alan then began passing out small battery powered bundles to anyone having light problems. No more 30 minute trips to the pits, just pull over and he'll tape a small bundle to your car.
Random crap! I've been to rallies where they pull this sort of stuff. Arbitrary decisions that affect the final outcome. For us, we lost over 30 minutes, the rest lost seconds.
It wasn't the first time. We had an issue where the car just slowed to a crawl. Took maybe 10 minutes to decide the issue was actually the lane. Race was stopped, track was searched, and a small piece of the track braid was found shorting the lane. Once removed we were back in business but there was another 10 minutes of lost laps.
So when you look at our lap totals remember that we were pretty much robbed of about 40 minutes race time through no fault of our own. That's about 17 laps every two minutes. So if you add about 340 laps to our total that's about where we deserved to be.
That brings us to the last two hours...
Chris had to go to work that night so he had departed a little early. The car had once again needed some work - braids.
When it returned it was once again MAGIC! I decided it was time to kick the tires and light the fires. I turned up the brakes and went after them. Bit by bit we were headed to 6th! However with about 6 minutes to go my rocket pace took the pinion with it. The 8th place team got excited - even though their car was also in the pits and a long ways back. Not gonna happen guys.
Tony got the pinion swapped, Stan took the wheel for the last heat but the distance to 6th was too much to make up - however he did keep us where we were. The best we could hope for at that point barring some miracle.
In the end it was a great team effort. Everyone pulled their weight.
The reverse direction of the track actually made it easier to drive in my opinion. And big credit to Chris. When setting up the car he discovered that the guide blade was sprung forcing the braid down onto the track. This resulted in excessive braid wear. He raised the car slightly and removed the spring. The result was that we went at least three hours if not more without having to change the braid. This was a major advantage for us as the other teams were changing braid right and left. It made our average pace very effective. Others were faster but we were consistently there and it really added up.
Consider those stolen 340 - 350 laps when you see the results. I did make mention to Alan that what he did seemed pretty unfair.
As for next year, Mitch, you can have my spot.
