Oregon Donors Needed Nov 9-12

A maybe from Monte and crickets from everyone else???

Testing....  Is this thing on???

Where is Stan?  Bill?  Fisher?  It's about time Mitch makes it to part of it...  Come on guys.  Al?  Gregg?

Ok, ok,..........I may be the crappiest driver on the team having been away from holding a controller in my hand, but I'M IN.

I believe John Fisher has moved away. I heard through the grapevine he moved to California to be closer to his daughter.

.................guess I'm going to have to search for my controller..................

No need to fight over our inabilities.  Let's just have fun.  24 straight hours of fun.  Who else wants in?

Conveniently, that's exactly when the 24h is!  All the other stuff is support races and such.  Come on up and pull the trigger as life allows.

It's usually a 10A start.

Ain't that the truth.

Two more members added to the team - Tony and Ray - both from my last year's team.  Tony's good on those tracks and last year Ray was our butt-kicker.  Good additions.

Chris
Bill
Monte
Stan
Tony
Ray

18 more to go...

When we pass 10 we may want to consider switching to two teams like last year.  My recall is that Chris likes to try and run for about 20 hours. 

Chris, when are you planning on showing up? And will you have the same "lodgings" as previous years? If so, may I continue my guest status?

Stan

Lodging will be a little different. We downsized to a van so it might be a little cozier than you're up for.

I plan on heading up on Thurs AM. Gives me all sorts of time to make our car slower!

I think you make a cute couple. 

A quick wrap up of the event is best summarized by the quote from some famous author, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."

I headed up to Tacoma on Thurs morning to go see what we had in store for us.  Jokingly during the week before, I had joked about getting there early and having plenty of time to screw things up.  This year, I vowed to do something different.  Make sure we have a decent and neutrally handling car, make sure it's reliable, make sure we're prepared in the pits, and drive to a target pace.  Mind you this has always been our objective in the past, but we generally fall behind for some reason and then try hard to make up the time.

This year was different.  Plainly, the car was fantastic with only minimal tweaks to it.  We were the last team to arrive (~11a on Thurs), so we didn't get to pick a car, we just got the last one in the box- a McLaren F1 GTR.  Powered by the normal black motor, it sported a completely new billet aluminum chassis capable of extremely precise adjustments.  It was fantastic!  It was quick on the straight, stable in the corners... it was imminently driveable.  With some basic set up adjustments, we started getting used to it and the track and just had fun.

None of us fared very well in the support races, which isn't surprising, but the new Trans Am cars were an absolute blast even on the rubber tires right out of the box.  I am very excited about these and hope you guys are willing to give these a go.  I think they'd be a blast to run on Odd Thurs, rotating with the Gp C class.

Moving on to the main event, we had assembled a team of 5: Monte, Stan, Tony, Ray, and me.  We were all hip to the team strategy for this year and all agreed that it was what we needed to do.  I drew up a running order which seemed to make sense and we got ready to rumble.

"It was the best of times...."

At precisely 14 minutes after 10AM, racing got underway.  We started in lane 8, and with only 7 other teams, we ran only on the 8 lane track, three rotations of 1 hour per lane.  To make things new and exciting, we were informed that we would be running the opposite direction from which they normally race it.  This was upsetting to not get any practice time running way, but I can honestly say that it is definitely a fun way to run that track.

For us, Ray was up first and put in a strong heat in the inside gutter lane- strong enough to put us in first place.  Yes, you read that correctly, FIRST PLACE.  Ray is good and maybe lane 8 was easy, so I didn't get too excited...  Tony was next and did a fairly good job in lane 6.  Stan put together a respectable heat in lane 4, followed by Monte on lane 2.  I was next, and after a few minutes of "learning" the track, I had an extremely fun time in lane 1 (yes, a gutter lane!). 

After all this time, I noticed we were still doing fairly well.  With the exception of the first 4-8 minutes of the heat to learn the lane in the new direction, we were staying in the slot and out of the pits.  Not everyone could say this, including the PSSRA team, who ended up in the pits for a braid swap 25 minutes into the FIRST HEAT!!  In turn, we were well set up, could service the car quickly when needed (didn't change the braid til heat 5), and were doing well with staying in the slot.

After the first full rotation (8 hours of racing, everyone had been through all the lanes), WE WERE IN SECOND!!!!

I offer as proof, a shot of the scoreboard during heat 7:

"...it was the worst of times..."

The second trip through the 8 lanes would be in darkness for our simulated 24h cycle.  This was easy- all the teams would drive one rotation through all the lanes, in the dark.  For this, we were supplied a light kit (warned that there were no spares), and part of the rules was the car had to have a functional head and tail light for the entire stint in the dark.  We started heat 9 with our previous running order and Ray jumped back up in lane 8 to start the drive into the dark.

Shortly after the heat started, the EMSA team's entry ended up across our lane (stopped) with Ray not being able to stop for it and ramming it at a very high rate of speed.  Our headlights stopped working.  To the pits...

After an eternity of troubleshooting, swapping a circuit board, testing the LED's (and connectors), etc..., we couldn't figure out which component was bad.  With no spares, Alan eventually snipped the light kit out and soldered a battery into the circuit with the headlights so they were always on.  After THIRTY THREE MINUTES IN THE PIT ROOM, we were finally back out on the track, but you can probably figure out that we weren't in second place any more.  To say this was frustrating is a monumental understatement.

We still tried to make good laps but it was clear we weren't going to make much upward progress as we only had modest speed and were hoping to win through slow and steady, while there were others who were just simply going fast.  We couldn't make up the laps they were gaining by staying out of the pits and we dropped further down the board.

In the early hours of daylight on Sunday morning, we also started to have some power delivery issues, where we were very sporty down the straight but couldn't do a thing to get through a corner and just got walked around by everyone.  For this we spent a bit of time in the the pits as well, still with no remedy.

All in all, it was still a fun time.  I learned more about setting the car up, and as a team, I personally feel we executed flawlessly to plan.  Until we lost literally hundreds of laps in the pits and our plan was no longer applicable.  Tony and Ray were excellent to have on board, and despite arguing amongst ourselves for who was the worst driver, we all did well enough to turn in respectable results.

So, if we had scored it on the first 8.25 heats, we would have done exceptionally well.  Unfortunately, there were still 15.75 heats remaining, and we had to run them all.  In the end, we returned to our roots, wanting to finish high enough to be not last.  Conveniently, that's where we ended up- NOT LAST, but in 7th of 8 teams entered.

It would have been nice to have a few more people up there- even if it was just for the 24h.  Please think about making a weekend of it for next year.  It's a great way to spend some time racing some really good slot cars.

Chris

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.

Excellent job guys, you represented us well!