My racing team ran in the Sears Pointless LeMons race last weekend at Infineon Raceway in Sonoma- I chose not to drive but stuck around the whole weekend to support my team and work on the car. It was definitely our best LeMons race yet- we had virtually no problems with the car, only a slipping fan belt (we had a spare) and received only minor penalties, resulting in plenty of track time for all our drivers. Infineon is a really nice facility for spectating with fantastic vantage points and seating all around the track and plenty of bathrooms and facilities. It’d be convenient to have power in the pits, but we did OK without. And the word from the drivers is that the track is really fun. Hopefully LeMons will make it back there and we will be able to run there again. I wouldn’t like to have missed my only chance to drive there.

I arrived early Friday morning and secured a pit space nice and close in, and adjacent to three other 300ZX teams, which was pretty neat in itself. In the time I spent waiting for my teammates to arrive I pulled out my paints and a piece of plywood I had kicking around in the back of the car and made a sign matching the colors and design on the car. I painted it with my fingers.

We had replaced the drivers side door with an undented one Christian found on Craigslist, but I hadn’t gotten a chance to paint it before the race, so we started the race just with a spraycanned 5 on the primered door. As we settled into the routine and the car continued to perform well I got the paint out and put coats of paint on the door between driver changes so that it could dry out on the track. While a bit goofy, and leading to some unintended consequences the door did get pretty much painted. Christian leaned into the car to retrieve the extinguisher while the purple paint was wet- and got it all over his front.

On the second day I got out some scraps of steel stock I had brought and designed a little video camera mount for the car, then between driver changes I welded it on and set up my old point and shoot with a 2gb card shooting video, good for about an hour. My first attempt, welded to the rear shock mount tower took nice video of the driver but wasn’t able to see out over the hood and get any kind of view of the track, except on steep downhills. Other than for learning that one of our drivers never, and I mean never puts two hands on the wheel that location turned out to be pretty useless. So I set up another little mount right between the rearview mirror and the windshield, welded to the roof. It gets a real nice view out over the hood of the track and everything going on on it, and even catches a reflection of the gauge cluster every once in a while when the sun is just right. Not to say there isn’t further improvement to be made, but it works pretty well.

Sean brought his DMC-12 for the Concours de LeMons- along with Evil Clint’s more funky DeLorean and the racecar FauxLorean CRX it was quite the scene. We had joked that he would win the “Nicest DeLorean” Concours award, and indeed he won the “Hey look it’s a DeLorean” award. I mean, it’s a DeLorean, you’ve got to give it some kind of award, even if it didn’t really win something. It was pretty neat to see it making parade laps on the track too. Crusing along the back straight behind the wall with its low profile it looked like a crocodile skimming along a lake just under the surface.

The Oldlady Z will race again, but needs a good bit of work before then- Jay mandated some roll cage modifications (again…) and the brakes are really on their last legs. With all the time we spent on the track they’re just getting worn out. Rotors are warped to hell, and pads may be ready to go too. The clutch seems to be behaving itself, but it may be prudent to reinstall a good clutch the right way for future reliability. Or we could just wait until it breaks. The other thing is a persistent tendency to run hot- it doesn’t overheat consistently but overheats too often and generally runs hotter than it ought to. Overheating is known as a destroyer of this engine, so that’s a problem we’d like to “lick”. A new cheap radiator and maybe an electric fan could be in order.

We finished 88th out of 147, and 5th out of 5 300zxs. About average finish for us. We could have done much better if we had just been better organized about spending every minute on the track- and it would help to get the overheating solved for sure, that alone has cost us time most consistently at the last couple races. The judges said they had given us 15 penalty laps for our (junkyard, god’s honest truth) adjustable shocks, but it seems they didn’t actually write it down anywhere. Whatever.

Another good race, good vacation, good time with friends, good meeting people, good food and having a good time. We’ve canceled our acceptance to T-hill in May due to budget and the required work on the car, but we’re hoping to be back before the season is out.

(I would encourage you to click through to YouTube for the “HQ” version)

Now of course, while the engine was fixing itself it was also filling the neighborhood with noxious exhaust vapors- good times!

Can you smell it from there?

The 300zx valvetrain is seriously built tough! I was impressed! (This is the engine Jonathan and I dissected in the junkyard)

A rocker on its shaft, showing oil passages

Hydraulic lifters

Big springs, big cams

Close-up

After all day out at the junkyard and searching for steel for the trailer it was seriously uplifting to have the valve issues resolved. I am seriously looking forward to making our planned mods to the car now, and being able to bring it back for Arse-Freeze ’09!

Long day, job well done

This year’s Arse Freeze-A-Palooza is still many months off, it’s true. But in the members of Project Fate’s collective busyness and brokeness, we decided it would be wise to shoot for one LeMons race a year for now- so Arse-Freeze ’09 is the goal. Last year we scrambled to get our racecar ready for Arse-Freeze ’08, with the rollcage, brakes and mad zip-tie work, this year we know where we stand a bit better and want to prepare in advance. So, where are we?

Last year’s racecar, the “Fatemobile Z” ’86 300zx is in Jonathan’s garage in Davis. After finishing the race last year, we trucked it home, dropped it off and left it for a couple months. When we fired it up the again in January or February it became quickly clear that there was no oil getting into the head- along with deathly sounding ticks coming from the top of the engine, you could see through the filler that there was no oil inside. We replaced the oil with a “suicide mix” of synthetic blend, ATF, seafoam, and magic engine oil treatment that was in the clearance bin- to no avail. We did not replace the filter, though.

Fast forward another month or two- yesterday Jonathan and I spent some more time trying to get the ol’ girl flowing. Right off the bat, we replaced the filter and put one of our spare wheels on so that we could take the passenger side of the car off jack stands… just trying to eliminate possible points of failure. Running the engine gave clear indications of different behavior, the oil pressure gauge made it up to the “30″ line, although was not responsive to revving, and oil was observed through the filler, seemingly flowing well. We popped the non-filler side valve cover off to check that things looked wet under there too… and they did. It’s nice to know that the valves are getting oil- unfortunately the engine still sounds like crap. It clatters and ticks, and runs really unevenly- sporadically the RPMs at idle will bog, or if you hold the throttle partly open and hold the engine at a constant RPM it will hold for a little while then seem to bog again and sound really terrible. I’m not experienced enough with diagnosing engine trouble to say for sure, but it could very well be misfiring.

And by the way- it’s a good thing we didn’t have a flat during the race- we never really tested our spare wheels… the tires rub against the struts, and with the spacers we bought the lug nuts aren’t long enough to really trust… in my quick assesment. The spare wheels are 16′s from a Infiniti Q45. Nice wheels, different offset. We had no idea how rare 16″ 300ZX wheels were until we found a set, bought them, bought tires for them then tried to find two more.

Jonathan and I checked the spark plugs next, one was significantly loose, one had something funny going on with the threads but more interestingly, one showed no evidence of “burn”- that sort of coating of matte gray soot. The plug wire is well attached on both ends and it definitely has fired in the past, the engine used to run nice and smooth- so— ignition? fuel? compression?
We didn’t get to test for all those things. There are definitely some shady things about that car and it’s wiring, I hope we can get a clear answer next time we work on it.

And what if we find no compression? When I talked to them a bit ago Jay and Nick strongly suggested that we stick with the Nissan- we know what handling problems we need to address with it, it’s generally been quite reliable, and it has the potential to make a really quite good racecar. Plus, building that rollcage really was stressful and an amazing pain in the ass- heavy tough DOM steel + hydraulic bender + notcher + TIG welder operator at work all day and no way to tack weld in her absence + frozen fingers + rain… even 6 months later we can’t forget how big a drag that was. So, a junkyard engine, and an engine swap? Oh gawd do I not want to go there!

For now, let’s go with the other possibility- the engine will fix itself, or just require minor work. Then, we just give the car a nice new paint job, install the $50 Eibach springs Christian found on craigslist, fix the CV joints, replace the fuel hoses, and put together all the lights and sound effects and body mods we never even got a chance to consider last year. Plus, we’ve got a trailer that is pretty close to ready to tow a car on, so we can take it to the autocross over the summer and get an idea of how to drive it cleanly… and faster for the next race. Or, of course, work tirelessly on the engine swap for that shitty car in the Davis 110 degree summer heat. Right.

It may not seem it… but you’ve just got to believe it’s worth it.

And maybe a perfect different new racecar will just appear for us, something that it’s worth starting from scratch… I think I’m going to go up and spectate the Reno race May 23, 24- My dad wants to see what these LeMons races look like.

I read Jalopnik regularly, so I became aware this morning of the link they posted to Speed:Sport:Life about the expense of racing. I’m still not totally sure what the purpose of the article is, I guess it’s just to educate people who weren’t aware- and I guess that’s reasonable enough. I have always assumed that real racing is very expensive, but I appreciate the concrete compilation of forms of amateur racing, and their approximate costs.

The author’s brief discussion of LeMons was most interesting for me, having participated in the entire process of preparing and racing a car. My team was really cheap. We didn’t have very much money to spend, and cut just about every corner we could. I would estimate that we invested less than $1500 on the car, all inclusive. We used the original seat, junkyard rims, really cheap tires, and built the roll cage ourselves. We borrowed a trailer, towed with one of our own vehicles. We splurged and rented an RV, but including absolutely everything, I think each of the five of us spent less than $1500, and that’s starting from scratch, owning nothing relevant to the endeavor except mechanics tools and our personal cars. And now we own a (still functioning) car with a cage, as well as all the personal safety equipment to do it again. If When we do it again, I think we should be able to spend less than $500 each.

Like I was wondering about the S:S:L article, you may be wondering what my point is here- I guess I don’t have a point anyways. I think the author was a little harsh on the value of a LeMons event, and I would disagree that “buying a seat” on a LeMons team is the way to go- besides simply “seat time” I think the LeMons preparation and event experience was a big challenge to learn how to better work with my team (my friends), and as really my introduction to anything having to do with car racing, gave me a lot of information, fast, about how it works- all in an setting where people are (generally) tolerant of your inexperience. So, $1500 for 1.5 hrs of  “seat time” isn’t that great by the S:S:L author’s benchmarks- but there was a lot more value than just “seat time” in lemons, for me.

Yesterday I went and checked out the San Fransisco Region SCCA autocross event at the coliseum in Oakland. I was pretty impressed by the scene, there was a good mix of totally stock cars and totally race cars, with a wide spectirum of driving skills not necesesarily paired with the raciness of the cars- in other words there were some great drivers driving mostly stock cars and some crappy drivers driving nicely speced out cars- and a broad range of other car/driver pairings. People were generally friendly once I got the courage to actually introduce myself and engage them, it was generally a nicely spirited, noncompetitive, friendly, well organized event. I’m sure if the S:S:L author had included it on his list it would be described as “not real racing” as LeMons was, but it is reasonably cheap and is a good time- and a reasonable way to get into performance driving. Just because it’s not on a track and not for long distances or durations doesn’t mean it’s not worthwile for beginners, and it’s pretty clear many people have made a serious, long-term commitment to particularly this form of racing. It’s not a “seat time” bargain either- $35 plus dues for 10 min max?

I got rides around the course with a guy and his ’99 M3 and a different guy (Jason) and his ’93 white track Miata (suspension, exhaust work, wheels and tires). The M3 guy was pretty conservative- I think it was his daily driver, and it was his first time autocrossing. Despite that, it’s a quick car, not the slowest one out there. Jason is something of a regular, as far as I could tell- he’s not the fastest or most skilled driver, but he has the ability to drive the car hard without worrying that it won’t be able to get him to work the next morning and is working aggressively to improve his skills- that is to say, his driving was much more spirited than the M3′s drivers was… The Miata really is an excellent car- it was really fun to be in the passenger seat while Jason pushed the boundries of the traction around tight corners. It’s a fraction as powerful as the M3, but barreling through a slalom wide open you’re likely to forget that. He also spun it once- bringing back pleasant memories of LeMons.

So I’m looking forward to taking a car to the autocross to drive- soon- and there are at least five over the summer that are located at the Golden Gate Fields lot, 1 1/4 mile away from my house. I think the EV Miata should be an interesting AutoX contender once I get it put together… I’m not dissapointed by the S:S:L article’s harsh reality check- there are plenty of cheap racing options for me now. Someday when I’m more loaded (haha) I can consider the “real” ameteur racing options described.