Blue Bayou S13 - VQ30DE Endurance Build (Tons of pics and video!) - Zilvia.net Forums | Nissan 240SX (Silvia) and Z (Fairlady) Car Forum

knate · 12-18-2020, 11:00 PM

Blue Bayou Racing

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In this saga we start with Hawaii 2-4-Oh (KA24DE hatch):

And continue until today's version of Blue Bayou (VQ30DE, race suspension, aero, big brakes, fuel cell):

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Have you ever wanted to get sucked into a hobby that requires a large portion of your time and money, then delivers all of its rewards in a just few bursts per year? With endurance racing that's what I got myself into. You can read here about all of our success and failures, as well as some tips and tricks we learned over the years with endurance racing. It is an absolute blast to do and I highly encourage you to check it out!

I've been meaning to write a build thread for years.. and have just never gotten it together. Now that I have a ton of material, I guess it's time to make up for it. We started with a KA hatch, then KA coupe, then swapped to VQ30, then race suspension, aero, brakes, etc... We've always been a bit behind the curve in horsepower compared to our competition, but we've still managed to be quite successful over the years with such a great-handling platform.

How it all started for me:

As a kid I always thought Lamborghini's and Ferrari's looked cool, but was never interested in how they worked or how fast they were. But as soon as I got my driver's license, suddenly I was interested, and started learning everything I could about cars. My very first car was a 1985 Nissan 200SX, a rear-drive four-cylinder. This was a true 80's car, with a digital dash and voice prompts ("Fuel level is low.."), like the picture below.. complete with the bar-graph tach.

The 240SX was the next obvious car to become interested in, as it was like my first car only better in every way. My 200SX was angular in every way, yet the 240SX was smooth and new looking. I got my first 240SX in 2002 while I was going to college, a car that I still have. This car eventually developed rod knock, which turned into putting in the 2.0 turbo engine, paint/etc, bigger turbos, blowing that up, and eventually an LS1 that is still in the car (used primarily for drifting).

By this point, I had done various autox and track day events, as well as gotten into drifting. I had always been curious about racing, but in the Northwest ITE was the closest my car would fit into SCCA at the time and that would be way outside of my budget.

Building a Race Car:

In 2009, ChumpCar held their first race at Portland International Raceway and this got the ball rolling. A friend, my dad and I kicked around the idea of building a race car, and since we all owned 240SX's that was the logical choice. Rear-drive, cheap, and we already had plenty of spares and leftovers. In 2011 my dad agreed to let us use his stock daily driver. We got a roll cage donated by building the car at the PIR swap meet in the ChumpCar booth (Thanks to Russ at Racetech!) The downside was this meant leaving the car alone until about a week before the race, then trying to go from street car to working race car in a matter of days. Below is some of the last minute prep in the garage the day of tech. We chose the name "Hawaii 2-4-Oh", and everything was absolutely down to the wire including installing our fire extinguisher in the line at tech.

TECH TIP #1: Figure everything will take at least twice as long as you expect! When building a car there are always unexpected twists and turns that pop up.

Maiden Voyage (4/9/11) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway:

We had various failures in our first race, as to be expected in a car that had never been on the track and just barely slapped together. Our car ran too hot, our brand new fuel pressure gauge just started leaking right out of the gauge face, I thought the car caught on fire when our brakes started smoking, and my dad pit when he couldn't see out of a fogged visor thinking he couldn't open it. This was my dad's first ever time on a race track, and he entered a race track that was hot! Very intense, not the best way to do it! We finished 28th of 56 teams and had the 17th fastest lap time (1:39.9). Not too bad for a first outing!

TECH TIP #2: The race track is unforgiving; if a part can fail, it will on track. Replace ALL hoses and belts, and anything rubber that you are able to. It's really sad to see someone spend hours putting a junkyard engine in a car, only to have a hose under the intake manifold end their race.

Mysterious Failure (4/10/11) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway:

For the second race it was sopping wet, a pretty typical condition for Portland. Nathan Feigion was in the car and you can see where the drifting experience really pays off. Unfortunately while he is driving the car suddenly loses power, and we spent hours trying to diagnose the issue. The car didn't want to rev over 4000rpm unless you gave it easy throttle, which led us down the path of fuel filter/fuel pump/exhaust restriction/etc. In the end it turned out to be a failed ECU, which we didn't have a spare of. After borrowing a spare from Paul Newman's Revenge (thanks guys!), we were back on track. We finished 41st out of 52 cars at this event. We had a blast and all loved it! My dad had rented his race gear, figuring he would just do this first weekend and we would rent out spare seats. However after the weekend, he decided he wanted to race with us every time.

TECH TIP #3: Bring spares of everything you can fit! It's like the Umbrella Effect, if you bring it then you probably won't need it.

The Long One (10/29/2011) - 12 hours - Portland International Raceway:

This time we had a chance to get the car prepped for the event, which was good as this would be our longest race at 12 hours. We had a laundry list of things to do, building a new exhaust/lexan windows/gutting weight/etc. We were using an open trailer, so the door windows actually got reinstalled after the race to keep the interior from getting too soaked. We had installed a new light setup, HID bulbs in Hella projectors. This actually worked surprisingly well. One thing we tried was hanging a tinted piece of lexan of over our wink mirror, but this was a flop. Headlights would show up in multiple mirrors plus the tinted plastic, so even with one car behind you might see 6+ white dots in the mirror. This was enough for me to decide to get rid of the wink mirror and move to a convex mirror. We were running factory brakes with Axxis Ultimate brake pads, and we found their limit. We ended up having to swap pads during the race, pulling it off in 12 minutes. It's not fun changing brakes when they are this hot! We still managed our best finish yet at 14th place, and dropped our fastest lap from a 1:39.9 to a 1:37.4!

TECH TIP #4: For night races, put a piece of masking tape (or two) across the top of your visor. You can block the rearview mirror when needed, but easily look up and check the mirror.

Our custom headlights:

The brake pads..

This is the custom rear lexan we put in, this definitely helped reduce drag on the car!

Here's a pumpkin that I carved for a contest at this race.. Frankenstein in a crash helmet:

Left to right: Ken, Nathan, Nate, Dave

The Soaker (10/30/2011) - 6 hours - Portland International Raceway:

My dad (Dave) started the race, and struggled in the wet conditions. It was sopping wet all day, so drifting experience really helped here. We had a reasonably clean race and managed to bring it home with a 7th place, our best finish yet!

Lots more to come!

knate · 12-19-2020, 11:59 PM

The Dream (2/1/2012) - 7 hours - Laguna Seca:

Like many, ever since I was a kid playing Gran Turismo I was a fan of Laguna Seca. I still remember the computer trying to drive the Shelby Cobra would crash every lap in the Corkscrew. I had driven the track so many times in games, I felt like I really knew the track, but there were a few things that struck me when we arrived. I hadn't realized how much elevation really changed going down into the first corner, and the enormity of the Corkscrew itself. The very first time driving over the Corkscrew it was really just, "Ok, from what I know I should be pointing here... woooo!!" The games really did help me dial in my laps much quicker.

We upgraded to an enclosed trailer for this event which was a big plus! Much better for packing spares and keeping things clean and dry. We put some KYB GR2s on the car, which helped to tame some of the floppiness of the previous shocks. We also slotted the shocks to give some extra camber.

The Disaster (3/31/2013) - 10 hours - Portland International Raceway:

We started this race in the rain in 26th place. Nathan Feigion ran an excellent first stint and got us up to 5th place! I get in the car and we are fighting back and forth for 1st place in the rain with the front-wheel drive cars. This is the best we have ever ran and it is looking great for a podium! It's still wet when I pit in 2nd place to turn the car over to Dave. A dry line has developed, but is still quite wet off of that dry line. While coming down the straight at PIR, a car pops out to try to outbrake a bunch of cars. However those cars are on the dry line, so it is a very overly optimistic move. Dave never sees it coming, and gets slammed in the front end while going into the chicane. The right front strut tower is moved over a foot, our day is done.

Crash at 7:00 in this video:

Now we need to decide what we do about the car..

knate · 12-20-2020, 12:50 AM

Building Blue Bayou:

We had a few issues with our first hastily-built car we wanted to address:

-Roll cage had X-bars in the doors, difficult to climb in/out
-Roll cage was too close to my head. We tried cutting the floor out and lowering the seat, but it was not enough.
-Lots of weight left on the table. With ChumpCar rules we could cut/weld just about anything, but adding horsepower was not in the cards.

With these items and a smashed chassis, we decided to look to the spare 240SX coupe chassis for my drift car. This already had a roll cage in it, but the design was not great. It also had the rear fenders cut out for massive tires, but we would be running factory tires. We rolled the drift chassis into the shop and got to work. We had never built a roll cage before, but had done enough reading to be confident if we took our time we could make something safe we would be happy with.

We bought a tubing bender and a pile of tubing. We also bought a plasma cutter, which I cannot recommend highly enough! It seems a lot of people think plasma cutters are only for bigger shops, but I think this tool should be right in line behind a welder. Every single time I use this thing I am so happy that we bought it. It is SOOO fast, easy to use, and compact. It also does not leave a sharp edge, which makes it perfect for chopping out sheet metal in a race car.

TECH TIP #5: Buy a plasma cutter, you will thank me! They aren't that expensive any more, and save so much time!

In a dual-purpose move, we chopped out the A-pillar and ran the roll cage up in this area. This drops weight from the factory structure up top as well as getting the roll cage further from my head. With the old car, I was constantly bumping the cage, with the new one I have plenty of room. Here you can see how the A-pillar bar was ran.

Since our strut tower moved so far when we got hit.. we also wanted to help support the strut towers, so we ran the cage up to them as well.

We made use of the old roll cage pad to make a little bit of footwell anti-intrusion, and moved to more of a Nascar-style door bars tied into the sill.

Here you can see we put the bars as far out as possible (touching the door skin) in order to make the car easier to get in and out of. We also tried to tie the cage as much as possible into the sheetmetal to stiffen the chassis.

Roll cage finished and painted:

We got some quarterpanels from the local junkyard and welded those in.

I never liked how unfinished our car looked with no dash, so I put a modified factory dash in.

I also redid the entire wiring harness, simplifying and shortening the factory harness down. This was so much more work than I had expected. Hours with the factory manual, removing circuits one at a time, then consolidating relays, shortening wires, re-purposing fuses, consolidating fuse boxes.. over 40 hours just in wiring. While I did save weight and money, it just wasn't worth it.

TECH TIP #6: Either do basic simplification of factory wiring, or rewire from scratch. Completely re-engineering the factory harness is not worth the time!

To help with our cooling situation, I made a vent in the factory hood.

We set up a makeshift paint booth, and I tried spraying a car for the first time ever. With a race car, less pressure if I screw it up.

While it's far from perfect, I was pretty happy with how it came out. The biggest issue was I put three coats of paint on the rear quarterpanels and only two on the rest of the car and it was super obvious next to the door.

I cut the lexan rear window with a skill saw, masked the back side, and spray painted the edge with black to give a little more factory look.

I was super happy with how they came out!

I borrowed our new team name based on the Mitsubishi paint named "Blue Bayou", this was my original sketch of the logo:

We are not from the South, and I know nothing about any real bayous, it's just a play on "Blew by you". I thought this was obvious enough, but I've had a variety of people come up to us saying that they hadn't realized this for a long time. There was even a Reddit thread about it that blew up:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/c...y_put/er672bn/

Here she is all done up and pretty!

This is a time lapse video I put together of this build:

knate · 12-23-2020, 10:54 PM

It shows potential! (4/13/2013) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway:

This was the first race with our new chassis. We had done a lot of work to strip weight out of the car, and had shed around 100 lbs between the old and new chassis. The entire drivetrain/suspension was just transferred over, so that portion was exactly the same. With the lighter/stiffer chassis, this thing is good. Surprisingly good! Nathan Feigion starts the race in 23rd place and starts working his way through traffic. By the time he is done with his stint, he is in 2nd place and has ran a team-best 1:35.0!

I get in the car and make it up into 1st place with a fastest lap of 1:34.7, a whopping 2.7 seconds faster than our previous fastest! The car feels great as I slowly put a full lap up on second place. We have never before been in the lead of a race, much less have a lap up on 2nd! By the end of my stint I have been in 1st for 43 laps, and it's time to pull in for a driver change. We have a great pit stop, put my dad in the car, and send him out.

Immediately we get back on the radio that the engine is running on three cylinders. What? No... that can't be right.. it has been working so perfectly! We did check the oil during the pitstop, and the dipstick is right next to the distributor.. Did a plug wire get pulled out? We call my dad into the pits and start checking the easy stuff. Plug wires all look good, everything seems seated good. Fuel injectors are plugged in well, nothing obvious.. but we do figure out that it's cylinder #3 not firing. Let's send him out and come up with a plan. We don't have a spare cap or wires with us, so Ken drives to grab some while Dave circulates PIR, running 1:43-1:50s.. we are down to 5th and sliding. Ken gets back with our parts and we try swapping #3 plug wire and spark plug. No help... send him back out again while we regroup. We are now down to 10th. We suspect we have a failed fuel injector. We have a spare fuel rail with injectors in it, so we decide to swap the entire setup out. 20 minutes later, we are back on four cylinders! However we are also in 21st place.

Ken gets in the car and he starts moving through traffic again. We finish the race in 16th. We are happy we triumphed over our fuel injector issue, but we know we have the capability of running up front. We finished with the third fastest lap behind two modified V8 cars. We start the ritual of swapping out brake pads and check things over for the next day, then get some rest.

TECH TIP #7: If the rules don't have a minimum weight, take advantage of that! With ChumpCar rules we had very limited modifications we could do to the engine, but cutting out weight was open. Losing 100 lbs (a lot of it high in the chassis) and gaining the stiffness was worth over 2 seconds for us! (I'm sure we had some driver improvement as well..)

The First Trip to the Podium (4/14/2013) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway:

We send Ken out in wet conditions, and he starts in 25th place (random starts in ChumpCar). PIR is notoriously tricky in the wet. Old racing surfaces with a lot of rubber worn in, flocks of geese that like to deposit poop that is more slippery than baby oil, and the track is absolutely flat. Zero elevation change. A fellow Nissan team with a Z31 300ZX (Red Square Racing) goes hard into the wall right in front of us. It is treacherous out there, but Ken keeps moving through traffic and in one piece. By the end of his stint the track starts drying out.

Dave gets in the car and heads out on a mostly dry track. Things are looking up as Dave gets into 6th place until.. it starts raining more. With the least amount of experience on track, Dave is struggling in the treacherously slippery conditions of PIR. The front-wheel drive cars are now walking away from us and we drop down to 9th place. The track starts drying out again as Dave pits to turn the car over to me.

I have a lot of ground to make up, but the sun is out, the track is dry and I can really push. We are six laps away from a podium finish, but I start the work of unlapping ourselves. We have good cornering speed, but quite a few cars can outpull us on the straights. I run a 1:34.8 as my fastest lap, and turn the car over to Nathan for the last stint two laps away from the podium.

Nathan also has dry track and starts laying down some great laps. With 44 minutes left in the race, Nathan passes the 4th place car to put us on the same lap. At 27 minutes to go, he passes the same car again for 3rd place! Our team is ecstatic, this is our first trophy! The welded together scraps making an alien from the movie 'District 9' is unique and so awesome looking! it's so cool... we want another one!

Left to right: Nathan, Nate (me), Dave, Ken

You can see in the picture below that Nathan just beat my lap time at 1:34.7, starting a friendly intra-team competition for fastest lap.

TECH TIP #8: After a race weekend, go out for pizza (or whatever favorite food)! If the race went great, you are celebrating. If it didn't go well, you are drowning your sorrows. Either way everybody wins!

Video from the race:

knate · 12-23-2020, 11:01 PM

Learning a New Track (8/24/2013) - 10 hours - Ridge Motorsports Park:

This was our first time racing at The Ridge Motorsports Park in Shelton, WA. The track just opened 2012, but I missed last year's race because I was in Europe for work. On Friday we did a practice day, but it didn't work out very well with the track being crowded and slow. At tech we get our first glimpse of the awesome trophies. The 1st place trophy is a massive Predator, definitely the coolest one I have seen yet. Knowing that other teams were racing here last year and we are newbs, we know chances are extremely slim of a trophy at this track.

At the beginning of the 10 hour race, our pitmates Son of Andre (#16 V8 Mustang) are putting in such fast laps they are lapping the field easily. We can see that unless they have major mechanical issues there is no hope of catching them. We set our sights on a top three finish and start pushing. Dave is out first, and he is doing a great job of whittling a 2:20 down to 2:10. He brings us from 28th up to 14th place. When he pits, we are already four laps behind Son of Andre as their fastest lap is a 2:01. While in the pits, there is a red flag. Car #128 had rolled and is pulled off the track (this is key later).

Nathan Feigion goes out next, and starts putting in some fast laps. He gets us up to third place before pitting.

I go out next, and get to second place, two laps ahead 3rd place. Around 2pm, there is a car off course in turn 8 and they are stuck, really stuck. There is a local yellow flag, but no safety vehicle yet. We circle around again, and turn 8 is still yellow, now with a Safety Truck. I slow for the yellow behind a pack of cars, when I hear tire squeel and BANG! I am suddenly rotating 90 and come to a stop with the engine stalled. I look in the mirror, and with the massive impact I expect to be staring at the bottom of my trunk. Amazingly, all I can see from the inside is that the taillight internals popped out of the clips on one side. (I have a camera pointing exactly this direction in the video)

I restart the engine, and start to straighten on course when the red flag comes out. The corner worker tells me I have a gashed tire that is completely flat, and they will need to flat tow me. However they only have one truck that can flat tow, and since I can limp they have me follow the flat tow of #60 (the car that hit us) to the pits. The driver came by our pits to apologize, no hard feelings. We have to wait until the red flag is over, then we swap out the tire. The fuel tank has a softball sized dent, but no leaks. The tire has a 1? chunk missing from the sidewall, but the wheel is not bent. Sheet metal is smashed in that corner, but the suspension looks straight. We can't believe how lucky we are that we have no leaks and a driving car. #60's front suspension is demolished, it will be many hours before they have their car together.

I get back out on course with the new tire. Our lead on 3rd place has evaporated, but we are still in 2nd. We had made sure to set the tire pressure correctly before putting it on the car. Unfortunately there are two tires.. and the wrong tire was grabbed. So for the next twenty laps I deal with a car that wants to oversteer at the thought of trailbraking and I am pushing hard trying to get a gap on 2nd. When I pit I am told the tire has nearly 45 psi!

TECH TIP #8: Set the tire pressure on all your spare tires!

Ken Feigion goes out next, and he is having an epic battle with Socket Monkeys (#39 Civic). Every lap when he passes the pits, Socket Monkeys is in direct tow behind him. This continues for around ten laps with Socket Monkeys not able to get by and Ken not able to create a gap.

It is towards the end of Ken's stint, and we see Son of Andre in the pits early with cooling issues. They are venting steam and refilling with water as their four lap lead dwindles. We get on the same lap at one point. We look at the clock and see that there are two hours and 15 minutes left in the race. Son of Andre will have to pit again, but will they need fuel? This is going to be a race!

Nathan Feigion had our fastest times, so we send him out for the last stint. He is battling hard with Martini Racers (#10 VW Golf) in traffic and they are excellent at sneaking through traffic. It is back and forth for a good portion of the session, when Son of Andre comes into the pits for their last driver change. They have a two lap lead, but they need fuel. This is going to be close! If we can pass them in the pits, we might be able to stay ahead in traffic. If they get out in front of us, the car is too fast for us to pass.

We radio Nathan when Son of Andre is about to leave the pits, and he is just entering the straight. We are all on pins and needles watching, and the Mustang exits the pits just ahead of us. We are disappointed, but hope that with a fresh driver getting warmed up Nathan might be able to put some pressure on. This seems to work, as the Mustang is not up to their typical lap times and making some mistakes. Soon we are watching the downhill section, and we see our car exit first! Martini Racers are also pressuring from behind, and Nathan begins to slowly stretch a lead.

Car #128, that had rolled earlier, is allowed out to make some parade laps just to take the checkered flag. Nathan had already lapped the car once when we got a scare on the last lap. We hear that we were called in for passing #128 during a yellow. After some discussion with the officials they luckily decided to cancel the black flag as it was a car that shouldn't have really been out there running. This is a really close call for us, but this allows us to take the checkered flag in 1st place!

For a ChumpCar podium we had to bring the car to impound, but we were not prepared for a podium and had to borrow two jack stands from Paul Newman's Revenge (thanks!) Then when those jack stands were too tall for our jack, we also had to borrow a jack from 2nd place Martini Racers, who are always great competitors and great guys (thanks!)

The car is mostly straight... except for this corner. You can really see in this picture how bad the paint doesn't match having three coats on the quarter and two on the door..

This is the massive and awesome Predator trophy, I love this thing!

Look at the awesome details here, how many hours does this take to build?? Way better than a generic chrome trophy..

We were also voted "Corner Worker's Choice" for the small trophy to the right, as they were entertained by drifter Nathan's "Amazing Saves" into turn 2.

The highlight video:

knate · 12-28-2020, 12:58 AM

After the Ridge race we had some damage to try clean up. We picked up a Porta Power and try to straighten the sheet metal a bit. We did some pulling with a bracket on the outside, some hammering from the inside, and some Porta Power work. We also swapped the fuel tank as it had a softball sized dent.

We got the corner a lot straighter, as well as installed a new fire system.

With the corner mostly where it belonged, I took the car for a short trip to the gas station.

I couldn't resist getting a picture from the unmolested side as well!

Penalty Laps Are Painful (8/25/2013) - 6 hours - Ridge Motorsports Park:

With ChumpCar, we had an MOV (Margin of Victory) penalty coming to us. Even though we had only finished 15 seconds ahead of 2nd place, we were given 2 penalty laps. Given that we barely made it up front by the skin of our teeth, a 2 lap penalty was a massive uphill battle for us. We start the race in 27th and make it as high as 4th place. In the end we are technically in 5th, but dropped to 7th based on our penalty laps. Our fastest lap was a 2:05.9 compared to Son of Andre's 2:00.5, so we are definitely not up to their pace.

Another New Track (3/22/2014) - 7 hours - Pacific Raceways:

At Pacific Raceways event Nathan and Ken Feigion decided to not drive, so it is my dad and myself driving with Nathan . This is a track I have done one track day years before but my dad has never been here. I put my dad in the car first so he has a chance to do some yellow flag laps and scout out the course a little. In our random draw for a start, we start in 5th place, what a great way to start the day! On lap 5, my dad radios in that he has lost a tire. Ugh, terrible.. these are brand new Direzza II Star Specs that were working quite well. We throw on a spare in the pits and drop all the way to 36th place. Well this just soured our race.

Pacific Raceways is infamous for the amount of race cars that it eats on the back side. It is one hungry track.. while my dad is driving he comes to 5a looking at the bottom side of a car on the side of the track. Never a good situation!

I get into the car in 26th place and start to get used to the track. This is a busy track. Normally there is a nice long straight to relax, check gauges, and reset. At Pacific Raceways the straight has a kink where you cross over to the end of the drag strip. That means you are lining up between cement barriers to get onto the straight, where you then move over to the left to prepare for a very fast turn 1. There is also some good elevation change dropping down a very tight 3a and 3b before you make it to the dangerous 5a and 5b corners with Grand Theft Auto style ramp curbing and a steep dropoff to the right.

For the next session my dad gets back into the car in 15th place. This time there's another car off this time in 5b, stuck partway up the hill. My dad finds that this track can be tricky to find safe places to pass, and without a lot of power the uphill sections and straight are difficult to make it past people.

I get in the car in 11th place, and this time I'm already warmed up so I start trying to see if I can improve on my lap time. I am pushing hard, but maybe just pushing too hard. I only get to within 0.5 seconds of my previous fastest. I get up to 8th place by the time the checkered flag is waved. Not bad for a first time and having a punctured tire! During the race we had tried to get the tire repaired, and found that it was a 2" long piece of a wheel weight that had gone all the way into the tire, and just doing a partial lap was enough to completely destroy the tire inside. So unfortunately with the tire looking brand new on the outside, it was now garbage.

It Was Fun While It Lasted (3/23/2014) - 7 hours - Pacific Raceways:

My dad starts the second race of the weekend in 33rd place. Not quite the luck of the draw from the first day, but hopefully no flat tires today. The Flying Lumberjacks go off in 5a and nearly go down the steep dropoff! While they did not go down the steep area, this off does end their race.

I get into the car in 26th place and soon after I get into an epic battle with Kyle in the General Leif Volvo. He carries more speed than I do into turn 2, but I am able to pass him back later in the lap. He then proceeds to pass me in turn 2 again, and this continues for many laps. We were giving each other room, fighting hard but fair. What an absolute blast, this is what it's all about!

General Leif pits, and I begin to focus on trying to beat my 1:43.8 from the first day. While in 11th I pass The Gray Cloud RX-7 and am now looking at the gap in the cement barriers to transition to the main straight. I shift into 5th, and something doesn't feel right. The car doesn't pull very hard in 5th normally, but this feels weak. Suddenly I realize that I have not been checking my gauges on the straight. I look down at the coolant gauge, and the engine is hot. Way too hot. I see around 260*F on the gauge and immediately know our day is done. I missed it, and I killed this engine. I limp back to the pits, and the car cuts out as I roll back to the pits.

We later found that the radiator had failed, and reviewing video showed that the engine had been hot for 20 minutes while I did not check the gauges. I was looking at lap times while trying to push as well as keeping an eye on the cement barriers, and our poor KA24DE paid for it.

TECH TIP #9: Check your gauges EVERY lap on the straight. It is also very helpful to put big warning lights in the car the light up when the engine gets into the danger zone.

knate · 12-31-2020, 01:20 AM

In our story we are now into 2014, and I had swapped out the 2.0 turbo in my purple drift car and put in an LS1. So we now take a little interlude for some drifting and drag racing.

We got a chance to drift at the Ridge as a demo (Nathan Feigion in the blue hatchback, me in the purple coupe).

NASA (National Auto Sport Association) finally came to the Northwest and we were able to run at Portland International with them. Very well ran events, I am a big fan!

Generally when I make a big power change I like to go drag racing once just to see what the car can do.. then I'm bored with drag racing again. These were my first couple runs, and you can see I'm used to watching for a finish line (not cones) and I stay in it too long. This gives a decent feel for what the car is like to lay into it and how quick it goes through gears, it's fun!

knate · 01-06-2021, 07:50 PM

Since I blew up the engine.. we picked up a new radiator and a used KA24DE to get the car drivable again.

And Then There Were Two (8/1/2014) - 5 hours - Portland International Raceway:

Nathan Feigion decided to take a little break from racing, so for this race it was just my Dad and myself. I started the race and got a good random start of 11th. It was a Friday, and even warmer than usual for the normally mild Portland track with an afternoon race start. We hit a high of 90 degrees, and that makes the inside of our blue tin box a sweltering sauna! By lap 8 I make it up to 1st place. I had been holding onto 1st place during my whole stint until an hour and 45 minutes later, the car starts bucking and is out of fuel. I make it back to the pits, sweating through my suit and fully exhausted. We are down a driver and not prepared for our pit stop, so it's 8 minutes when we need it to be 5 minutes. This does not help our day at all.

Dave heads out of the pits in 6th place. A Mustang is cruising up the front straight on the right side.. which is the wrong side. Getting to the corner, they lock up the rear brakes and completely loop it, hitting Blue Bayou with their rear bumper on the passenger door. Well.. that's one more area that's not so straight.. Luckily this doesn't affect the drivability of the car at all and Dave continues. Dave makes it back to 1st place by the end of his stint and hands over the car with an hour and 45 minutes remaining. Normally the car should go for that long on gas.. but it will be tight. We do better on our next pit stop, nearly getting it under 5 minutes.

I head out onto the track in 4th, with the sun just dipping below the horizon. I had taped up the top side of my visor to help with glare. I find that my radio connection was missed, and I don't have a way of communicating with the pits. I try unsuccessfully to find the end of the cable and get it plugged in, then give up on it and get to the job at hand.

TECH TIP #10: Remember to plug in your radio, it's helpful.

With 15 minutes to go in the race, I back in 2nd place. The #557 Mustang of Dog & Pony Show is in first, and are just ahead of me. Their car has more power and our car handles better. I can get really close in certain turns, but the straights are an issue. I know that time is running out, and I need to make the pass. I get a run on them leaving turn 7, outbrake them into turn 10 and finish the race! Unfortunately when I get back to the pits, I find out that I was just unlapping myself.. and we finished in 2nd. Considering the mistakes we had, this was still a great result! For ChumpCar being on the podium means going to impound, then once impound is done we can start on replacing all the brake pads as our Hawk Blues on stock brakes eat themselves alive. It is a light setup and brakes just fine, but it gets old having to swap brakes/bleed late into the evening every race.

knate · 01-06-2021, 07:51 PM

That Time It Really Wanted to Overheat (8/2/2014) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway:

For the second day of the weekend it was a 7 hour race. Having just placed 2nd to the Dog & Pony Show Mustang the previous day, our sights were set on trying to beat that car. Dave starts the race in 14th place while our newfound rivals Dog & Pony Show start up in 2nd! Dave quickly moves up through the field getting to 7th place by lap 5. My dad is still not that experienced on track (these races are his only track experience), but he gets down to a 1:36.4! By the time we are ready for our first pitstop, we pit after Dog & Pony Show and are leading the race for six laps. We add oil to the engine during the pitstop, which is normal for us as all of our KA24DE engines have burned oil.

We drop to 5th during the pitstop and I head out on track. I make it up to 2nd behind Dog & Pony Show, then inherit first when they pull into the pits on lap 109. Things are looking good, but we still seem to be just a step behind the Mustang. I run a personal best 1:34.0 and turn the car over on lap 127 in 1st place.

Dave heads out late in the afternoon. We had planned our driver swaps so that I would end up in the car last when it was dark. Dave makes it through his stint setting another 1:36.4, but he stays in 2nd for his whole stint.

I throw some tape on my visor again to help with glare at night, and get ready to go out. As I am waiting at the end of the pit lane, Dog & Pony Show pulls up right next to me. Man this is going to be close! I get to leave the pits first, but the Mustang catches me on the next straight and passes me. Knowing that this is the team holding us between our second victory, I slot in right behind them and start applying pressure. I can get right on his bumper in turns 4,5,6 but he runs away on each straight stretch. I have my lights on and keep poking out to the side to distract him, but it's just not working. I keep putting pressure lap, after lap, after lap... 10 laps go by with me putting as much pressure as I can, and this Mustang has not put a wheel wrong once! Who is this guy??

I finally am able to get on the inside of him going right into turn 4, but he's not intimidated. We stick side-by-side through 4, then again to the right through 5, still side-by-side in 6 but I am gaining ground. By the time we get to turn 7 I have the inside line and I am able to pull ahead! I take the same defensive line that he has been driving into 10 and keep him behind me... but at this point I realize the engine is getting hot. I radio to my crew chief (Trish, my wife) and she asks if it's maybe just a false reading. Unfortunately no, as I have two temperature readings that both say it's hot, as well as water pressure sensors reading very low pressure. I keep racing, hoping some miracle will happen and the car will cool down..

The engine hits 214 degrees, and I could keep running hard and risk blowing the engine, or I can take it easy and potentially salvage a 2nd or 3rd place finish. There's just too much time left in the race, and so I start backing out of it to see if I can get it to cool down at all. As I slow down and the Mustang disappears into the distance, I have the defrost and fan blasting trying to take it easy. Even this isn't working... so the next lap I slow down even more. Eventually I am cruising half-throttle as the water pressure bobs around from zero to six psi as the water sloshes around. After a few laps of this and me thinking the engine will never cool down, I suddenly get my miracle. The engine drops down to 180 degrees and I start building water pressure again!

I try running a hard lap, and the temperature is actually staying OK! There is 30 minutes left in the race now. In the pits they do some math, and tell me that since my fastest laps are about 1.5 seconds faster than the Mustang, in theory there is just enough time to catch the Mustang by the end of the race. Well that's all well and good.. but the last time it took me well over 10 laps to pass him while on his bumper! But.. I have to at least try. I need to run my fastest laps and not get slowed by a single lapped car and hope that he gets caught up on some lapped cars.

It's getting dark, and I get my head down and start knocking out laps. There's lots of calculating as I come up to cars trying to figure out the best line to pass them without slowing down. I keep getting closer, until I can finally see the Mustang! As I come onto the front straight, Trish tells me that this is the last lap. It's do or die! I see traffic ahead that we will both be catching, this could work out! As I come into the chicane, he is coming up behind a yellow Taurus, and I try to pinch the first part of the chicane to get a little run on the exit. As I am coming up alongside him, HE MISHIFTS! This is exactly the opportunity I needed, and I make it by. I'm in 1st place on the last lap! Unfortunately there are also two straight stretches between me and the finish line, and he is faster on the straight. I need to get a gap! I make it around the Taurus, and then after nearly blowing it with a slight lockup into 7, I also make it past a BMW on the back straight. I make it onto the front straight with enough of a gap and the most incredible feeling I have ever had in a race car! Math said it was barely theoretically possible, and we did it! To give you some context here, I am definitely an introvert and normally a bit reserved with my emotions. But when I pulled next to that Mustang in impound the first thing I did was go over and give the guy a big hug!

Now remember I was wondering who he was? He is Steve Mahre, silver medalist at the 1984 Winter Olympics for skiing. His twin brother Phil won gold at the same Olympics and they have both been racing since the 80's (Koni Challenge, SCCA, etc). Now I know why my amateur racing was not able to intimidate at all! They are both awesome guys, always very helpful and friendly while racing hard but fair on the track!

knate · 01-06-2021, 08:01 PM

We only had a few weeks to get ready for the next race, and knew we had some overheating issues. I had added water pressure sensors to our datalogger, and in reviewing our datalogs I found where the car was venting pressure during a pitstop. I chalked this up to a bad radiator cap, since during the race we had seen the pressure disappear, then build back up again after the engine had cooled down. We replaced the water pump, thermostat, and radiator cap.

I also found myself completely exhausted and soaked with sweat getting out of the car in the last unexpectedly hot race (for the NW), so I went after building a cool suit cooler. Following some other directions online, I put together a cheap cooler using an Engel cooler, bilge pump, and a bilge timer.

Here it is attached in the car:

And here I am quite proud of my new Cool Shirt:

Until I realized the shirt was designed for the metal fittings, and I had the plastic fittings and it didn't clip in..

This groove was too narrow:

Mr. Generic Dremel to the rescue..

After being trimmed a bit, the fitting worked perfectly.

With that cleaned up we were ready for our race at the Ridge! Well, at least we thought we were.. I meant to get a warning light for the temperature gauge, but that didn't happen in time.

Rain at the Ridge (8/30/2014) - 4.5 hours - Ridge Motorsports Park:

I head out in the car during the yellow flag, but immediately find that the defrost is not working. I dive in the pits, and luckily my dad is able to quickly find a loose connection and my defrost is going again. There is massive spray everywhere and visibility is terrible, but the Ridge has relatively new pavement, and is much better than PIR to drive in the rain. I start in 36th place and start making my way forward in the field. The high horsepower cars are really struggling to put power down, so we really have just enough power for these conditions. I make it up to 11th place, then pit for my dad's turn with a best lap of 2:23.

My dad is out there and gets tagged in the back at the bottom of the hill. He manages to steer out of it without too much issue and continues on. By the time he pits, it's still wet and he has gotten us up to 6th place.

Since it's just the two of us at this race, I get back in the car and there is something wrong with the power. The car really seems to struggle to accelerate on the top end and is just not its usual self. I think it may be something with the knock sensor and the ecu pulling timing. The best lap I can muster is 5 seconds slower than my first sesssion! Luckily with all the rain this is less of a hit than it would normally be, so we manage to pull home a 4th place finish.

Drying up.. (8/30/2014) - 4.5 hours - Ridge Motorsports Park:

The ECU was showing a knock sensor code, so I dummy out the knock sensor with a resistor in hopes of fixing the power. I set out in the car for our second race, and it's starting to dry up. With the track drying up, I am reminded that the Ridge is definitely a "horsepower track". There are many long acceleration zones, and the 1/2 mile long front straight is preceded by a very slow corner.. so it's really a drag race.

The car is still down on power and I am getting killed on the straight stretch. I manage a 2:17, but this is not going to cut it with the leaders having ran a 2:04. I'm in 8th but since we have a few more races coming up, I decide to pull in the pits and we do a quick swap of the ECU. Success! We are back down to 36th place but the car now pulls like it used to, and I immediately knock 6 seconds off my lap time getting down to a 2:11. This is still not enough to win a race, but with our 7 minute pit stop to swap the ECU we are out of the running for a podium anyway. At least the car is working, we still have more races. The car works great for the rest of my stint. Temps are holding perfectly and power is OK. I'm still left wishing for power every time I'm near one of the V8 Mustangs, or the BMWs, or V6 anything..

I pull into the pits, we top off with oil (like we do on every pit stop), and my dad gets in. The track now dries up completely, and we are getting dusted by every car with more power than us. Which is most cars. When my dad pulls into the pits, he says that the power just doesn't quite seem as good as it used to, and that it doesn't pull past 5500 as hard as it used to. While I am exiting the pits, multiple tents get blasted over the pit wall and into the hot pits! The wind is really gusting, although it is dry out.

A few laps into my driving stint, I see the temperature start climbing. I radio in that I'm getting to 200F, where the temperature had been sitting rock solid at 180F. Just a few corners later the temperature starts to rocket up and I cruise it into the cold pits for the car to cool down. We discuss thermostat and other possibilites, then I loop around the pits slowly and the temps drop. I decide to take it back out on the track to see what happens. Just like at Portland.. I start pushing on the car again and temps are still right at 180F.. how strange, and frustrating. That pit stop dropped me from 20th to 29th. I get back to 25th with a fastest lap of a 2:08 before the car decides to randomly overheat and I pull into the pits to end our race for the day.

We swap in a known good fuel rail (complete with good injectors) as it seems like our fuel mileage is a little too good.

Please don't overheat.. (8/31/2014) - 9 hours - Ridge Motorsports Park:

My dad heads out on course for the first stint and sets a 2:07 lap time! He says the car is working good and feels great. My dad is still out on course and after about an hour we radio my dad to ask him how much fuel he has left and he says he has 3/4 tank. What?? That cannot be right.. fuel gauge must have quit working.. The temps are holding rock solid and the car is working good. My dad pulls into the pits in 9th place on lap 44. We can't even get two fuel jugs into the car... how is this fuel mileage possible?

I head out in the car and within two laps.. the car has decided it's time to overheat. I pull into the cold pits and let the engine start cooling down. At this point we have realized that our issues are serious enough that the easy fixes have not helped, and we likely have an issue with the headgasket. That's not something we are going to fix in the pits at a race track (I know many of you have done that, but we are not prepared and motivated enough to do that). We figure we will run as hard as we can while we can, then if it overheats, let it cool down, and try for more later.

This was really a turning point for our weekend. We had started getting really focused on trying to get onto the podium, and to some degree seemed like fun was equal to doing well in the race. Having problems meant frustration. However once we knew there was no hope for a podium and we would just learn and have some fun runs here and there it changed everything. We were now hanging out with family and friends at a race track, with a car that would at least last for a few laps, so if one of us felt like going out, we could. If we felt like hanging out in the pits, we could.

We pulled the spark plugs, and they are WHITE! This confirms that we were running super lean with the other fuel rail, so that comes right back out and the original one goes in. This is super strange, as this was a known working spare..

I head out on track.. and the car overheats on me within a few laps and I pull in. More time to hang out with family and friends! I start chatting with Paul Newman's Revenge, who also drive a 240SX, and they are wondering if I would drive their car to see how it feels compared to our car. Their car has a full 300ZX brake system with custom dual master cylinder and significantly stiffer springs than our factory cut springs. Hey, this is cool, normally I would be too focused on our own race to jump in other people's cars.

I get in their car during the next pit stop, but I sit for an extra long stop as their rear pads were worn out and they had to swap them. What they forgot to mention, is that they had Autozone pads in the back before, and were now switching to Hawk Blues. The bias adjuster doesn't work anymore, because the system requires so much leg pressure to work that the balance bar is bent. The Kirkey seat feels like it is straight up, and is definitely an awkward position for me.

I head out of the pits, and immediately notice the clutch pedal has a lot of movement side-to-side. As I shift from 1st to 2nd, I accidentally slip the clutch a bit. Oof, I never have this issue in our car, the engagement point seems way too high. Luckily it's yellow when I head out onto the track, but when I step on the brake pedal it just feels like a rock.. and I'm not really slowing down. I start standing on the pedal for all I am worth.. and the car starts slowing down some. Ouch, this is going to be a lot of getting used to! I start to get a little bit of a feel for it, and start pushing the car a little harder, then putting the 150+ lbs of leg force into the pedal for the braking zones. Their engine feels pretty strong (same KA24DE but with a bigger exhaust), but the shocks are terrible. The springs are extremely stiff but paired with stock shocks, so it's as if they don't exist. The car skips and hops in corners that our car has no issue with at all.

My dad had decided to jump in Blue Bayou and try to chase me down. As he was closing down on me, I see our old rival Son of Andre come on track and I decide to see how well I can hang with them. Despite the bouncy suspension and brakes that require way too much leg force I am hanging on behind Son of Andre, and my dad is catching me from behind. I head into the sharp left-hander turn 13, and brake hard. As I crest the hill I am trail braking and there is a slight bump and the back end snaps out. I had been drifting at this track in my personal car a few months prior, no big deal, just spin the wheel to catch the slide... except with no shocks and rock hard springs... the back end just won't grip up. I am at full lock and end up in the world's slowest rotation going nose first into the gravel off to the left. And I'm stuck. I have never been stuck on the side of the track before during a race, and now I did it in someone else's car. How embarassing! The only small consolation was.. most people don't know it was me. After getting pulled out of the gravel I pull into the pits ashamed and give my report on how the car felt. Thanks for the opportunity to drive it though!

Tech Tip #11: If a car works OK from the factory, make small tweaks, don't start from scratch! Our 240SX with lengthened control arms (for more camber) and cut springs is SO much easier to drive than the one with custom steering column, custom race car brakes, custom suspension setup, etc.

We end up 38th in this forgettable race.

Ok, we know you are going to overheat.. (9/1/2014) - 4 hours - Ridge Motorsports Park:

I head out first and run a bunch of 2:04s, setting our fastest lap at the Ridge! I get up into 6th place before on lap 17 the car decides it's time for me to hang out with friends in the pits. We have a blast catching up with other teams and treating the day more like a track day. We finish a forgettable 28th place but have lots of fun in the process.

Tech Tip #13: Don't take things so seriously that you forget to have fun regardless of the outcome!

Now for our fuel issue.. this was a bit of a head scratcher. We ordered new fuel injectors.. and those also came up as super lean. We finally figured out that the injectors that came with our mystery engine were actually bigger than factory injectors, and our fuel pump was starting to fail. Since the fuel pump had started failing at the same time the bigger injectors went in... it actually balanced out and we won a race with that setup! With a new fuel pump and new injectors, everything was good. We also bought an Air/Fuel ratio gauge so we could catch these kinds of issues in the future.

We also found corrosion on the ECU pins for the knock sensor and believe that is why it was triggering for phantom knock even with the dummy resistor. I believe our ECU was mounted too low in the car and water was able to splash up there.

Video overview of the weekend:

knate · 01-06-2021, 08:07 PM

With an overheating engine, it was time to go through the head and put in a new headgasket. With the head off I put a little work into porting:

We were also getting much too familiar with changing brake pads after every single race. We were using Hawk Blues and stock brakes with ducting, but we needed more mass. However going with bigger brakes, meant bigger wheels, bigger tires, which would all keep adding more weight to the car. Not to mention when we had spares of everything, it's an expensive changeover. So we keep changing brakes...

We had an S14 subframe (95-98), but with ChumpCar rules we would have to take points for installing it. Cutting/welding the S13 subframe to match the geometry however was free. The S14 subframe has less antisquat, which gives a little better grip under power. Here you can see my very scientific measuring..

Here you can see how raised the front of the control arm is on the S13:

Compared to the mostly flat LCA on the S14:

This was my solution:

When putting the engine together we tried to use an S14 front cover.. and discovered that it causes an oil leak..

We had some room in points, so we put on a header that had come with an engine:

Then fit the factory heatshield over it:

We had seat sliders, but they were stiff to adjust and we never moved them. So in order to drop the seat a little more, I made some custom seat mounts:

We also used an Airbake cookie sheet where the exhaust goes near our heel. This worked fantastically! I kept melting the glue on the heel of my shoe previously.. and it would get quite toasty and uncomfortable.

We also installed some more lights for our next race which would have some night running:

With the engine together and running and car cleaned up, we were ready for the next race!

knate · 01-06-2021, 10:57 PM

Ugly Rain (10/24/2014) - 5 hours - Portland International Raceway:

With a typical Northwest weather day facing us, we put our wet weather good luck charm on our antenna:

We also got a sneak peak at the trophies for the weekend, and there is an AT-AT, I want it!

Dave starts in the car on a mostly dry track in 44th place. He still has a bad habit of holding the steering wheel at the top, but is getting much better overall. He runs a 1:35.9 and is in 14th place, but if it wasn't for the penalty laps (for winning a previous race) we would be in 2nd!

Nathan Feigion takes the second stint and it has started to rain. His drifting experience really shines here as the car sliding a bit here and there does not spook him and get him to slow way down like some of the other racers. Portland gets extremely slick in the rain, but from geese laying their unpredictable marks on the track and rubber worn into the groove. Coupled with no elevation change on the track, it just gets really slippery. As Nathan's stint goes on the traction gets worse and worse, but he gets up into 8th place.

I get in the car next, and while the amount of hydroplaning is definitely very disconcerting, I also have experience drifting on this track with my V8 car. There is a fine line between brave and stupid, and I try to keep from toeing too far over the stupid line and let the front-wheel drive cars go when I am hydroplaning too much and try to keep it on the track. At one point I am coming up to the chicane, a very slow right-hander. I am on the brakes and slowing to turn in a little late when suddenly out of the corner of my eye I catch a yellow CRX that is flying into the braking zone. I turn the wheel to the left, and the CRX goes flying past my nose, missing by inches! Whew, this is nearly the same as what took out our Hawaii 2-4-Oh car!

Towards the end of the race I am in 4th, right behind 3rd (Celica Supra) and 2nd (Jetta?). 1st place is our full two laps of penalty ahead of us. With thoughts of an AT-AT on my mind.. I push forward trying to get by the two cars to try snag 2nd place. After the VW blows the braking zone into the chicane, I'm now just behind the Celica Supra which I manage to be patient enough to get by when he also outbrakes himself into the chicane on a later lap. Both cars are just behind me, but as they battle it out behind me they collide allowing me to take home 2nd place. I got my AT-AT! Still one of my favorite trophies ever, as it is the only 'mechanical' one. With the MOV penalty laps, it would have been *really* close with 1st place.

Rain, With A Healthy Dose of Wind (10/25/2014) - 13 hours - Portland International Raceway:

The next day we have our longest race yet ahead of us, 13 hours long. Nathan Feigion starts this one off on a wet track in 43rd place. It is slippery, but starting to dry some. Nathan is putting his drifting skills on display as he slip-slides his way to the front of the pack, although with a longer race we now had 3 "Margin of Victory" penalty laps.

Dave gets in the car on a mostly dry track, which still has the treacherous damp areas at the edges and wet soggy grass all around it. While he is nervous over the radio, he keeps it together and brings the car back in one piece.

Nathan Feigion gets in the car next, and the rain is back. While he is out there, some severe wind picks up, and starts destroying pop-up tents! We manage to get multiple ratchet straps across ours to keep it from folding and falling apart, but some tents decide to jump the wall and make a run through the hot pits while others just decide to fold in half and give up life where they are. Again Nathan slithers through traffic and keeps us in great position.

I get in the car next, and it has started to dry out. Nathan Feigion gets his chance to drive the Paul Newman's Revenge 240SX. He has very similar feedback to them as I gave, much too stiff without enough damping and way too much pedal force for the brakes. The wind is still really kicking around, which in most cases is not affecting the race much. However at one point I get to the back straight where I see some leaves swirling around in a little dust devil. As the car hits it, I get tossed around a bit and have to correct. Definitely not what I expected to see out on track!

Dave goes out next for a dusk drive, which is one of the most difficult times. He forgot to put masking tape on his visor, so he didn't have the option of using that to block the mirror. Having lights shining in your mirror and constantly changing lighting conditions is always difficult.

I go out next and it is now fully dark. I have my masking tape on my visor, so I am able to help block out the really aggravating bright lights in the mirror. Compared to the last time we drove at night though, we have now switched to a convex mirror instead of the multi-panel 'wink' mirror. This makes it much better! Now two white dots means there is a car, rather than making many different reflections in the wink mirror.

Dave goes out for our last stint, and while we complete 395 laps compared to the winner's 393, we finish the race in 3rd place due to the 3 MOV laps. We were behind the #10 Martini Racers VW Golf and Dog and Pony Show Mahre Brothers, both fantastic competitors and great people to hang out with. Luckily it rained most of the day, so that is the only reason our brakes made it that far! We swapped the brakes in the evening again and get ready for a third race of the weekend.

Still Burning Oil (10/26/2014) - 6 hours - Portland International Raceway:

I get the honor of starting our last race of the weekend in 9th place. This race our MOV penalty has finally dropped off, so no penalty laps! It is wet and quite slippery out (even more so when some fuel is spilled on the track), and I am struggling to keep up with the front-wheel drive cars on the slick track. The back straight is nearly a game of chicken as there is a partially dry line on the right, and a wide sweeping off camber turn (back straight is really a misnomer). I turn over the car at the end of my stint at 8th place. I haven't lost anything, but didn't make up a lot of ground.

Dave goes out next, fairly quickly having to dive off track to avoid a spinning Miata. It's still slick out there, but just barely raining. PIR is like driving on an ice rink in places with our car able to easily spin the tires in 3rd and 4th gear. During Dave's stint he is braking for the chicane, and locks up the brakes. He manages to avoid a car and use the runoff into the chicane, but it's a close one! The sun is out and Dave pits the car in 5th place, having made up three places!

The rain starts to fall again as Nathan Feigion hits the track. Later Nathan tells me that he "had a moment" in the car on the back stretch. I say, "Oh yeah, me too" but don't think too much of it. His moment was quite a bit different than mine.. While going into turn 8 he shifts into 4th gear and the back end starts moving to the right. No big deal, Nathan countersteers with it to the right and gets it under control. The next turn, turn 9, is known as the back straight, but as I said earlier, it's not a straight. It's a long sweeping right hander with a cement wall on the right, and then grass and cement wall on the left. If you touch the wall on the right, you are bouncing off of there and then through the grass and hitting the outside wall. I've seen it multiple times, often times it totals the car. This is where Nathan has his "moment". At close to 100mph he is steering right, on the drying line next to the wall, and the back end starts moving out on him. He keeps his foot in it, just calmly countersteering, now starting to look at the wall towards his right. As the back tires get into the more wet pavement the car continues to rotate and he has to give it another big helping of countersteer, now looking right at the wall. Easing out of the gas he manages to get it back in line without it tank-slapping into the wall, which is now just inches off the right side of the car as he continues down the back straight. He shifts into 5th, shakes his head a bit, and continues on.

Nathan takes the car home into 3rd place, with the Mahre Brother's Dog and Pony show in 1st place. On this engine even though the head was nicely rebuilt, we are still burning oil and having to add oil at every pit stop. Our next race is at Laguna Seca, so we decide to build an entirely new engine and bring our current one as a spare. It's three days of racing in California, and we don't want a possibility of not being able to race all three days.

At the end of the day our lucky duck helped us to bring home three different trophies.

The now all-too-familiar for us impound. Look at those tiny brakes! Also look how filthy the car was.. those are silver wheels. During impound we have to jack the car up and let people look at the car for 30 minutes. Most people were pretty uninterested or baffled when they looked at our little 4-cylinder engine and super tiny stock brakes. After impound we would then put the wheels back on, bring it back to the pits, jack it up and then swap the brake pads out, bleed the brakes, and then typically leave when it's dark and we longing for a nice warm bed.

Now off to go build a new engine and a way to store it..

knate · 01-06-2021, 11:00 PM

Every engine we have had so far has burned oil. Enough oil that we are checking the oil at every pit stop, adding a bit, and heading out again. We are jealous of other cars that roll into the pits and don't even pop the hood. Since this engine burns oil after a fresh head, we know that it's bottom end, so we yank it out and keep it as a spare.

Another thing I want to work on is getting more real-time feedback from our data in the car. It is very useful to look at the data later and see why one driver is faster than another, but sometimes I want to know if it's faster to take an earlier apex, but I won't know until I get on a laptop later. I have a Race Technology DL1 with the small display, but trying to read numbers on that in a corner is nearly impossible. I decide to see if I can make something that will be easier to see.

This is my first proof of concept, just learning to drive some LEDs and an LCD display. Initially this is just based off of a potentiometer for input.

The next evolution is to get it talking to the Race Technology through serial. For this first test I was using horizontal acceleration as the output since it's easy to see it change just by tipping the DL1.

The further I tilt the DL1, the more the LEDs show.

Next I got some multi-colored LEDs, a dimmable LED driver, a smaller Arduino, and fit it into an old stereo faceplate carrying case.

The LEDs are Red/Orange/Yellow/Green/Blue as they go across. I also added water temp, water pressure, and oil pressure warning lights.

With that project out of the way, we also wired up the car with wireless video. We chose to go with the setups used for RC airplanes mainly due to how expensive it was to use cell phone data for race car video. Being able to see what the car was doing live on the track seemed like it would be really handy with a monitor in the pits. This led to an interesting looking little blue antenna on the car.

This transmitted back to our pit station exactly what the GoPro was seeing.

We got our freshly rebuilt engine into the race car:

So we then moved to making our transport setup for our spare engine. With a little hacking, chopping, and welding, we had a car that would roll into our race trailer.

We added the shelves to help make use of space:

At home in the trailer:

Good use of space and neatly packed with our spares for Laguna Seca:

knate · 01-08-2021, 11:58 PM

My friend Matt and I attended college together, and after living on the East Coast for quite a while, he was now living in Boise. As he is an aviation enthusiast and pilot and he flew his Van's RV-6A over to meet us in Washington State. He had done some autocrossing with an RX-8, but had never actually driven on track. He was going to ride down with us while we drove to Laguna Seca.

This was a three day event spanning Friday to Sunday. We drove down and arrived on a Thursday, went through tech, then loaded our car into the garages. This was our first time having an actual garage and it was really nice! Even though we had nothing to plug into it, it was cool seeing the nitrogen plumbed on the wall where the pros use it. We had racers coming from all across the country for this race, including Tubby Butterman Racing. They have some Hawk Blue brake pads for us they brought with them, but we decide to leave the mostly good pads on the car. Our first race is only a six hour, and with Matt in the car we figure he won't be using nearly as much brake as we do (Bad idea! Bad idea!)

To Finish First, You Must First Finish (7/3/15) - 6 hours - Laguna Seca:

Since the race starts under yellow, we put Matt in the car first so he could have a chance to feel out the car a little before racing. Going from autocross to straight to a race start at Laguna Seca is definitely a way to jump straight into the deep end of the pool. Not ideal, as it is very intimidating. There are plenty of walls, elevation change, and gravel traps at the track. Luckily since it's also one of the most famous race tracks in the world.. Matt knew the layout from various video games.

Matt was very nervous about wrecking our car and was trying to get used to things while not getting in other people's way or cause any problems. He runs a very respectable 2:00.8 lap time, excellent for never having driven this car or on track before! He's doing a great job of watching his mirrors and giving people room when disaster strikes on lap 16. Matt is going into turn 6 when he downshifts into 3rd, and it's just enough to upset the back end of the car. He tries to catch the slide, but it pitches him off to the right and he spins off track. A camouflage Celica Supra dives off track to avoid him, and narrowly avoids the crash.

Matt is spooked and wants to come in, so on lap 18 he pulls in the pits. We talked to the Celica Supra driver later who is insistent that we never touched their car, although their camo paint is smeared up the nose of our sparkling blue front bumper all the way to the hood. I don't even quite understand how there isn't really any damage. That was a close one!

Nathan Feigion gets into the car with a little over 5 hours left in the race. He brings us from 29th all the way up to 7th during his stint, running a 1:51.3!

Dave gets in the car next and he is struggling a bit. He hasn't played all the video games that we have, so the track is not nearly as familiar to him. He spins early on, which shakes his confidence. However by the end of his run he has done a 1:57.6 and we are in 8th place.

I get in the car last, so it's all up to me now. Having a new driver in the car our original goal was to crack a top 10 finish. We had dropped to 14th during our pit stop, but I'm pretty consistently below the 2 minute mark so we are looking OK. The car is working great, the coolant temp is perfect and engine power is up to normal. Adequate, but not great, just like normal. It's now lap 150, there's just 30 minutes left in the race and I'm in 10th place. The brakes don't feel right, not stopping as good as they have been. I have a very fast and aggressive BMW behind me, so I point him by, not wanting to try fight with him with unknown brakes. He goes by me, and I tuck in behind him for turn 11, the extremely sharp left-hand turn before the straight. As I get to the brake marker I hit the brakes, AND THE PEDAL HITS THE FLOOR! Since I'm not slowing down, to avoid rear-ending the BMW I yank the wheel to the right and fly off into the gravel trap.

After I get pulled backwards out of the gravel, our undertray scooped up enough gravel they might have wanted to send us a bill! When talking to my dad afterwards he asked me if I had tried to use the emergency brake. I told him, "There was zero time for that! All I could do was yank the wheel to avoid hitting the other car." The interesting thing was when I watched the video back.. I actually start pulling the e-brake, but because I had just swerved the back end starts coming around. Going sideways into a gravel trap is a major risk for rollover. I put the e-brake back down while counter-steering with my left hand to try get the car going nose-first, and mostly succeed. All of this was essentially reflexes from drifting, as I didn't even remember touching the e-brake!

The cause of all this? Me being cheap/lazy with the brake pads, and thinking that the car would make it six hours on slightly used pads. Once the pad was gone, the piston over-extended and blew brake fluid all over when I went for the brakes that last time.

Tech Tip #12: Brake pads don't have linear life. A pad with 100% material stays cooler than one with 50% material, so once the pad is low it goes quickly! 50% thickness is beyond 50% of it's lifespan.

Now for a late night replacing calipers, pads, bleeding, and sweeping up a massive amount of gravel that we needed to return to turn 11..

And for the video highlights of the race:

*brndck* · 01-09-2021, 12:48 AM

This is by far the best new thread on Zilvia in a LONG time!!!

knate · 01-09-2021, 12:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by brndck

This is by far the best new thread on Zilvia in a LONG time!!!

Thanks for being my first comment, I really appreciate it! I've still got plenty of stuff left to write to catch us up to today where we are prepping our VQ35DE..

Rustys14 · 01-11-2021, 08:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by brndck

This is by far the best new thread on Zilvia in a LONG time!!!

Agreed, this thread is awesome!

knate · 01-11-2021, 10:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rustys14

Agreed, this thread is awesome!

Thanks, happy to hear it! If you ever have any questions just throw them out there!

knate · 01-11-2021, 10:52 PM

At Least the Brakes Were Good (7/4/15) - 7 hours - Laguna Seca:

With our brakes sorted out and some sleep we were ready to hit the track again. Matt had told us he didn't know if he wanted to get back in the car again, but we knew we needed him to get another chance so we figured we would talk him into it later in the day. Dave went out first. And for the first time, we got the lucky drop of the flag and we started in 1st place! Dave was feeling a little more comfortable on track, and pulled off a 1:55.4! There are a lot of fast cars (and drivers) out there however, and Dave drops down to 11th when he is stopped for a red flag. Once he can move, Dave pulls into the pits and the crew dives into action. After a little bit of troubleshooting, we find that the water pressure sensor has failed and is leaking. We engineer a quick plug for it and seal it up. This drops us all the way back to 44th place, not looking good for today.

I take the car out next partway into my stint, I am trying to work my way around a gray 5-series BMW. The car is fast, but the driver is erratic and having issues with oversteer. I find out later that he is an experienced Spec E30 driver (experienced.. not necessarily skilled). I can't keep up on the straights, but can reel him back in again in corners. As I follow him into turn 11 I see him go wide and he is going off course. This is my chance! He will have to back out of it and I will have a chance to sail by. Except... he doesn't back out of it. Major Mistake #1: Even though he's fully off track, he stays in the throttle... and comes back on the track fully sideways! I aim left trying to miss his car but the gap is closing quickly. There just isn't enough room, and while I manage to miss his car by about one inch.. I am pointed towards the barrier and there is now no avoiding it. I smash the barrier with the front, then the back, then come to a halt. I now have a smashed car, and the guy that needed to just back out of throttle has a perfectly intact car. But he's not done yet.

There is a massive cloud of dust on track now and he is sideways on track on the left side of the track. This is off line, where nobody drives. Major Mistake #2: For some reason he panics, thinking someone may hit him, so he floors it trying to turn the car around quickly. The cloud of dust is mainly on the left side of the track as well. Mopar 4 Life (Dodge Neon) suddenly sees the BMW reappear out of the dust onto the racing line and turns left to avoid the BMW.

And.. here's where we get to Major Mistake #3: Thinking he can drift and can execute a quick donut to get going. He over-rotates, and now is coming back LEFT! Mopar 4 Life is trying to dodge, but the BMW driver thinks he is a Mustang leaving a Cars and Coffee and won't stop until there is some destruction.

At this point the BMW driver's insatiable appetite for chaos has been satisfied. The Neon slams into the BMW sending steam, glass and car parts everywhere. The BMW is totalled, and the Neon that has been towed from across the country has a destroyed front right corner and a broken windshield. Three smashed up cars due to one driver's poor choices.

Tech Tip #13: If you go off track, don't try to be a hero and save it. Just back out of it, gather it up, make sure it is safe to enter the track, and get on with your race.

After I get checked out for a concussion (all good) I limp the car back into the garages. Time to fire up some A-team music and get to work! We assess the damage, and aside from all the smashed up sheetmetal, our worst problem is the lower control arm. We don't have any spare arms, and this arm is custom. We had cut and welded extra metal into it to lengthen it for more camber.

This arm is supposed to be straight across the top.. that's pretty bent. On the plus side, the area I had welded up showed now issue.

Even if we can find a stock arm, we would need both arms, and then we would destroy the outer edge of the tire due to lack of camber. Time to try fix it.

We borrow a torch and try getting it hot and putting 1 Lard-Ton of force into it. That doesn't work.

We end up cutting it most of the way through, bending it, then welding it back up. We had reinforcement metal borrowed from Wrecked'em Racing and a welder I believe borrowed from Tubby Butterman. Fellow racers are so awesome!!

We used some chain binders to pull the corner of the car out some and were feeling pretty happy about our progress. It's July 4th, the race is over, and the day is winding down. Wayne from Scrap Attack walks over to see how things are going, and says, "Hey, you guys are using the factory radiator brackets. We never use those anymore as it tends to crack the plastic end tanks if you hit something." I pull off the brackets and sure enough, our radiator is cracked! Thanks for saving us from some more pain Wayne! Unfortunately.. while we have an entire engine with us, we do not have a spare radiator. Time to see if we can fix this one. I had heard of 'plastic welding' using zip ties, so I grab my soldering iron and melt the crack together and use zip ties for filler.

We had hopes of watching some fireworks and hitting Monterey for some nice food, but instead it was a late night finishing up the car. We managed to get the fender straight enough to fit back on the car and were done for the night. I was a little leery of the radiator fix, as I didn't know how well it would hold up to vibration/heat during the race, but we went back to the hotel to get some sleep.

I woke up at 3am and could not stop thinking about the radiator. As I lay in bed I was trying to think of what I could do to make the fix more robust. RTV on it's own wasn't going to help, but if I could cap it to contain the RTV that should hold up. Unfortunately it was at the post on the radiator where the crack was, so I needed cap with a hole in it. I realize if I use a washer I could hold some RTV in. But if I wait until we go to the track in the morning, the RTV won't have time to cure. At around 4am I slip out of the hotel room, and head to the track. It was a little weird arriving in the dark and working on the car in the brightly lit garages with a ton of race cars and me being the only person there. I put together my washer stack and got it all RTV'd together and used zip ties to hold it down. While I didn't get very much sleep, I felt a whole lot better about the robustness of the fix now.

Toxocara995 · 01-21-2021, 06:40 PM

I've been reading this thread for the last 2 hours while getting tattooed and I am in love. So we'll written, it's like a novel. Ready for more!

Sent from my HD1900 using Tapatalk

knate · 01-22-2021, 12:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toxocara995

I've been reading this thread for the last 2 hours while getting tattooed and I am in love. So we'll written, it's like a novel. Ready for more!

Sent from my HD1900 using Tapatalk

Great to hear, thanks! I will get some more posted by the weekend.

knate · 01-23-2021, 01:00 AM

Will It Hold? (7/5/15) - 7 hours - Laguna Seca:

So after barely any sleep due to fixing the car, I was pretty beat. But I was pretty upbeat about our chances of the car holding together for the final day. Matt in his first ever race weekend, had not gotten a chance to drive on the second day.

After all the repairs, we still didn't know how the car handled or if everything worked. We sent Nathan Feigion out first to shake down the car. He started in 31st place, and the car is working good! Nathan slices and dices his way through traffic, while the temps stay cool and brakes are working great. By the end of his stint, he has made it up to 5th place and ran our fastest lap of the weekend at 1:50.4! For reference, the fastest time of the day was a 1:49.5.

Originally Matt had said that he didn't want to get in the car again, but we talked him into trying it out again now that it wouldn't be completely new and overwhelming. However, we don't do him any favors and we pull a rookie move, we forget to put up his window net. He gets black flagged and looped back around for us to correct it, dropping us to 21st place. Matt is a lot more confident in the car and is pushing it more, which does end up in one spin. He is really getting a lot more comfortable with the car and gets back up to 15th place. Then Matt gets a black flag for passing under a yellow flag. Oops! He pulls in, apologizes, and is off again in 22nd place. By the end of his stint he has made it back to 16th place before pitting. Matt pulls off a 1:57.7, a full three seconds faster than the first stint!

I get in the car next. I push as much as I can trying to beat Nathan's lap time, but I just can't pull it off. I got down to a 1:51.9 during my session, but did manage to get up to 9th place. On the plus side, the car is still driving around the track and the radiator fix is holding perfectly.

Dave is in the car for the final stint. Will the car hold all the way to driving on the trailer? Dave struggles a bit with some understeer, but pulls off a respectable 1:54.3 lap time and brings the car home in 12th. Success! Our only day of the weekend we actually finished the race!

The LED device I made showing "Time slip" worked.. somewhat. The refresh rate is not nearly as quick as I was hoping for, and if it ever lost communication it would just hang at the last value shown. So with the somewhat intermittent updates and not really being able to trust it.. it didn't prove to have a ton of value. On the plus side it did have a cool little startup animation!

Video overview of day 3:

So after the race we got the car home and checked out all the damage a little more closely. The front was really scraped up, but looked reasonably close.

With a little "footwork" at the track, the quarterpanel wasn't too terrible:

We had another race within a month, so we needed to work quickly. We got the car up on the lift, and yikes! That doesn't look right... A couple other tires had this as well, and we had never seen this before. I can only assume we were hitting the curbing harder than normal.

The track-fixed lower control arm:

We pulled the engine out to have better access to fixing the damage. Definitely a lot worse looking with the fender off!

I also did some comparison to my purple coupe.. and we discovered our left front strut wasn't where it belonged...

I welded up a quick and dirty strut pulling device:

I also made a backing plate to help pull out the left corner of the car:

Then with the help of a Porta Power a couple of excavators..

We got the strut tower brace to match my other 240SX and got the corner looking roughly correct.

Then I took a spare fender, some hammers, and some carpet, and I got the fender roughly back to the factory shape.

A little paint on the chassis, and it wasn't looking so bad.

I also wanted to remake the lower control arms, and then we could use the old ones as spares. I picked up some new arms from RockAuto.

I cut the arm and added in the new metal to space the arm. Again the reason for extended control arms was this was "free" in ChumpCar points compared to commercially available camber adjustment.

Next up I added a bridge across the bottom (with my OK at best welding skills on display here).

At this point I have two extended control arms that would likely be strong enough.

But to reduce stress on the joint, I then wrap the top with sheet metal and plug weld some holes in it.

I add some more braces on the bottom, and then I'm sufficiently happy that the rest of the arm will bend before anything I cut breaks (just like the last arm proved).

A little paint, and they are ready for the car.

And here is the car all back together. We added a factory front lip as well as a bit more of an air dam below that to try to reduce some drag on the straights. We always get killed on the straights, so every little bit helps. You can also see the aggressive negative camber we need for a Mcpherson strut car to have relatively even tread wear.

knate · 03-09-2021, 10:33 PM

These Brakes.. (8/8/15) - 12 hours - Portland International Raceway:

So after all the work to get the car straight again and a factory front lip added, we were ready to race in Portland. Our last event at Portland we had a 2nd, 3rd, and 3rd with 1st place eluding us. So we had a goal ahead of us!

Dave starts off the 12 hour race in 29th place. Dave puts in some solid laps and gets us up into 7th place. He's pushing the car hard, likely a little bit past his comfort zone. While approaching turn 10, he's still on the brakes a bit too much at turn-in, and the car starts rotating at 80+ mph. His countersteer is not quite quick enough, and to gasps of the people in the bleachers.. ("Oh no! Oh no!") he is headed off course... towards a barrier! Luckily he is far enough past the barrier to not hit it, and gets slowed down before getting to the tire wall. If it was raining, the car would be a balled up mess, as cars don't slow down much at all in wet grass. However even with the Brown Pants Moment, Dave makes it up into 3rd place before pitting!

Nathan Feigion is in the car next, putting in solid laps and moving forward in the pack. 19 laps into his stint I hear over the radio, "I think I've got a flat tire or something." Oh no! We aren't quite a prepared Nascar crew... we are in the pits for 6 minutes changing the tire before sending him back out. This knocks us back to 12th place, giving Nathan some work to do. Nathan then proceeds to set our fastest lap of the race (1:33.98) and get us up into 5th place.

It was my turn next, and I have my sights set on a podium finish. At this point we have gotten a trophy every single race in Portland since our first 3rd place trophy and I don't want to break that streak! I put in a straightforward two hour session and pit in 3rd place.

Dave goes out next, and then pits in 1st place! With four hours left, Nathan Feigion is back in the car. On lap 318, disaster strikes. No brakes! Nathan uses a combination of engine braking and emergency brake use to get the car slowed down, repeatedly pumping the emergency brake like Flintstone ABS. The car skids just past our pits with the rears locked up and the front brakes on fire! I hit the brakes with the fire extinguisher, dousing the flames and my hopes of a podium finish.

We jump into action to repair the car. This is the first time we've tried to do a caliper swap live during a race. And ... as you might imagine, it's HOT!! Like still smoking after being removed and on the ground kind of hot. The reason we lost brakes is our pads were so far gone that the piston popped out of the caliper. Again. Dave swaps the caliper on the right while I change the pads on the left side. I can't grab anything, even just my glove grazing the caliper is enough to send an instant wisp of smoke. I am trying to use a tool in each hand like some kind of caveman salad tongs. We get the new pads in and some new fluid in, and then bleed the brakes. Total time: 15 minutes. Not bad for a first time doing a hot change in the pits! In the picture below you can see the caliper smoking on the ground.

This brakes thing is getting ridiculous. To have 1st place snatched away due to brakes like this is frustrating. This will be our last race weekend on these brakes.. These Hawk Blue pads provide fantastic stopping power and feel, but in combination with stock brake hardware they just get too hot and disappear (even with our ducting). They used to be fine, but as we get faster we push the car harder.

I jump in the car last, and we are down to 7th place. I do what I can, but there's no making up for a 15 minute pit stop. We finish in 5th place, not too bad considering that included a flat tire and brakes+caliper change in the pits!

Video overview:

*brndck* · 03-10-2021, 09:37 AM

jeezus that's insane changing calipers and brakes that fast!!!

knate · 03-10-2021, 09:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by brndck

jeezus that's insane changing calipers and brakes that fast!!!

We were pretty happy with it but we are also really slow if you watch the Corvette racing team swap calipers..

knate · 03-27-2021, 12:51 AM

Just Keep It Together... (8/9/15) - 6 hours - Portland International Raceway:

On our second day of the weekend, we are on old tires trying to use up our 15 inch to get ready to switch to something bigger. The sun is shining as Dave takes the first stint in the car. He starts in 15th place, and battles his way all the way up to 3rd!

Nathan is in the car next, battling with an SC300 and MK3 Supra turbo. Both cars have more horsepower than us, but our cars light weight helps in the corners. Nathan pits with us in 2nd place behind the SC300!

I get in the car last. I put in a solid session and we finish up the race in 3rd. I didn't quite hang onto the 2nd place, but we got our trophy!

Highlight video:

After the race, it was time to figure out what we were doing with our brakes. I want to go overkill, as we really need some serious life. We have been overheating the brakes due to such little mass in the rotors. The front calipers would start leaking about every other race, and the pads needed swapped around every 7 hours. We had originally resisted upgrading brakes, as light weight was one of our few advantages and bigger brakes meant bigger heavier wheels/tires.

We pick up some adapters that will allow us to bolt Wilwood calipers and use 350Z Track rotors.

The four-piston Wilwoods calipers are significantly bigger than the stock single pistons. I ordered the smallest caliper Wilwoods, which is almost a perfect match hydraulically to the single piston so the rear brakes could be left alone.

Rotors go from 9.8" (10 lbs) to 12.8" (21 lbs).

We first try fitting them behind some factory 16" wheels, trying to not add any more wheel weight than we have to.. but they just don't quite clear.

While the 16" just didn't quite fit, some 17x9 fit great:

In addition to more weight, the pads are significantly thicker:

Here's an example of how tiny the stock rotors looked in there.

The difference in tire is pretty significant as well:

The 17x9s with 225s definitely change the look of the car:

I tape up the brake ducts to try keep some heat in them, and head out to bed in the brakes. We are running Raybestos ST43 pads, and wow do they squeel! But.. it's a race car and if they are going to last, I can live with that. The brakes were already plenty enough to lock the tires, and the new brakes feel just as strong. The pedal is definitely softer with the extra fluid going from single piston to four piston. Now these should last, next up it's time to see what they can do!

Zenki_Kouki.5 · 03-27-2021, 11:53 PM

great stuff! It's nice to see people doing other types of racing with 240s.

Alex Mcknz · 03-28-2021, 09:27 PM

I had so much fun watching videos and seeing the progress of this build.

knate · 03-30-2021, 09:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zenki_Kouki.5

great stuff! It's nice to see people doing other types of racing with 240s.

Yeah, these cars may not be as popular as Miatas on the road course, but they do great!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alex Mcknz

I had so much fun watching videos and seeing the progress of this build.

Thanks Alex! There's still plenty more to come as I get this written.. I am getting closer to our VQ30DE swap writeup in here, while right now we are actually in the middle of a Rev-Up VQ35DE swap!

Follow us on Facebook for the newest updates while I continue to write up this backlog.. https://www.facebook.com/BlueBayou24/

knate · 03-30-2021, 08:08 PM

PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/2/15) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway:

This is our first race with the new brakes, and a new format for us. This week is a combination of endurance and sprint racing, and we had only done endurance races so far. We also had ChumpTrucks in two for this weekend! These are some pretty wild beasts and very entertaining.

I take the car out for our first practice runs with the new setup. While the extra grip feels good, there is something unnerving about the way the car handles. When I push the car really hard and get a lot of lateral G's, the back end starts to get nervous. Pushing hard into turn 10 (very fast left hander), the car seems great.. then suddenly a snap of oversteer. We had been running both front/rear swaybars, but when I pull into the pits I decide to disconnect the rear sway bar to see if that helps the back end. As I'm laying on the ground unbolting it, someone swings by to tell me, "Dude, when you were going through turn 10 you were three-wheeling!" Well, that explains it.. and confirms that disconnecting the rear sway should help. I take the car out again, and confirm that the snappiness is gone and have my dad take the car out.

For this first race, Dave starts in 19th place. This time around it was just my dad and myself racing. Dave gets us up into third, and it's now my turn.

The extra grip feels great, although with cut factory springs there is a decent amount of body roll. The brakes squeal any time you touch the pedal, to the point where it becomes completely engrained into my brain and I can pretty much ignore it. I turn our fastest lap ever in the car at 1:33.7 and return the car in 3rd place.

Dave is in the car again, and gets called for a black flag for passing under yellow. I reviewed the video later, and was not able to find it happen. The black flag knocks us back to 9th place. It's now getting dark, and an out of control Acura Integra hits both my dad and a Probe while dive-bombing into a corner. Luckily the damage to our car is minor, and Dave continues on and pits in 5th place.

It's dark now so I get my stripes of tape on my visor and jump in the car. It's time to see if I can turn this into a podium position! The headlights are definitely not as bright as I would like.. but they are somewhat workable. I have to use very specific reference points on the track. Exiting Turn 6 becomes ".. roll in the throttle, aim left.. 1 second.. 2 seconds.. white paint stripe, turn right... Ok, there is the apex of 7.." In some ways I actually do slightly better at night, as it FORCES me to use my markers exactly. There's really no ability for my brain to try to get my throttle foot to lift coming to a corner early.. because I can't see it. I turn a 1:33.4, our fastest ever PIR time before it starts to lightly rain and throw some more variables into the mix. Since most people slow down at night, I was able to work my way back up to 3rd place again. Another trophy! This time it was a very cool looking dragon. And the best part? We did not touch the brakes at the end of the evening!

Video Overview:

PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/3/15) - Sprint #1 - Portland International Raceway:

The sprint race addition to the event is an absolute blast! When we have a long race, you never want to venture too far away in case you are needed. But for the sprint race, if there is an issue the race is over anyway, so there is no problem going to the stands and watching. This is also one of the only times we've had that many competitors up in the stands together. It was a great atmosphere and a lot of fun.

Dave takes the Sprint #1 and finishes 9th overall, 3rd place in B class. Classes were done by engine size, and we were in the 2-3 liter class with our KA24DE.

PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/3/15) - Sprint #2 - Portland International Raceway:

I get in for Sprint #2, and start of in 7th place. I get a good jump at the green flag, with two Mustangs and a Porsche 924 turbo in front of me. A pesky Miata keeps making his way into the fight, but eventually falls out of it. I slowly pick off one car after another, until the Porsche and I are battling it out. I pass him, he passes me back. He can't shake me but I can't stay ahead of him. Finally as we keep pushing each other further and further, he spins while braking into the chicane. I win the race by 36 seconds, which means we ge a "Margin of Victory" penalty of 36 seconds applied to our next couple races. This isn't exactly fair to my dad, who was out next.

Sprint Race #2 Video:

PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/3/15) - Sprint #3 - Portland International Raceway:

Dave goes out for Sprint #3, and he finishes in 12th overall, 4th place in B class.

PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/3/15) - 6 Hours - Portland International Raceway:

The next race is a six hour endurance race. The car has been working great, and the brakes are still working nice and strong. I start the race in 19th place in the late afternoon. I have the top of my visor taped up in preparation to act as a sun visor. I am battling it out with various E36s, including #177 Finally Racing. They drive clean and are fast, and are difficult to pass. I finally manage to sneak by them, then it's on to our friendly rivalry with the Dog and Pony Show Mustang. I pit in 3rd place with a fastest lap of 1:34.5.

Dave is in the car next, and the sun is really killer at this point. On the front straight it's directly in your eyes. Dave also employs the taped visor trick and starts putting in some solid laps. The sun sets, and eventually it's completely dark and Dave is still circling the track. He sets a lap time just a second off of my pace at 1:35.5 and pits in 2nd place!

I get in the car and things are going well. The car feels good and I am creeping my way closer to the Lexus SC300 that is in 1st place. One problem however, is my headset never got plugged in so I have no communication with the pits. The Lexus is factory rated at 70 more horsepower and is also a great handling chassis. It's heavier than our car, but this is a bit of David and Goliath. In the dark my headlights finally pick up the black Lexus in front of me. I pressure my way past the Lexus, but then get caught up on lapped traffic and the Lexus disappears into the distance. I can catch them in the corners, but they have the horsepower advantage. I manage to get by them and keep them behind me by the time the race ends, only to find out that I was actually a lap up, and I fought that hard just to give us an extra lap of Margin of Victory penalty. Oops!

6 Hour Endurance Race Video:

PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/4/15) - Sprint #4 - Portland International Raceway:

It's a new day and Dave goes out for Sprint #4, and he does great! With the MOV penalty of 26 seconds for winning a spring + another 30 seconds for winning the endurance race, he runs a personal best 1:33.9 and finishes 4th overall and 2nd in B class, which would be a 1st place overall with no time penalties!

PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/4/15) - Sprint #5 - Portland International Raceway:

I take Sprint #5, and with the 56 second penalty I effectively need to lap the entire field, in 30 minutes. I am very focused, and in the Zone. The first lap I get past all the cars except for the two MK3 turbo Supras. The second lap I make it by them. My brain is calm and my senses are heightened. I am noticing things that I have not felt before. I can feel precisely how much grip I am giving up when I am not smooth enough on the brakes exiting the last corner. I can see the path I want to take through traffic ahead of me as if the other cars are just cones in an autocross course. Well.. moving ones that don't want me to pass them, but you get the point. I feel like I have hit the next level in my driving, and I am extracting that extra little bit out of the car I couldn't feel before. During this session with 18 laps, I turn 10 laps faster than my previous fastest lap! In those 18 laps I manage to lap every single car... except one. And while I don't get a trophy for this race, I came off the track feeling like I had really won something. I had just found the next level in my own driving and ran a 1:31.984, less than a second off of the fastest lap of the weekend in our little 4-cylinder!

Sprint Race #5 Video:

PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/4/15) - Sprint #6 - Portland International Raceway:

Dave gets in the car for Sprint Race #6. We are now down to just a 20 second handicap for me having won a sprint race. Dave finishes in 4th place, 1st in B class.

PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/4/15) - Sprint #7 - Portland International Raceway:

Well it sure was fun being in the Zone in the previous sprint race.. but I'm not quite there this time. Things are going well, but I don't have Super Feeling or even Spidey sense. I get hung up trying to get past one of the Toyota Supras, and while I can get a good run at him, I just can't get a pass to stick before he walks by me on the straight. I also have a 20 second time penalty, so I need to also put more than a 20 second gap on him and that's just not happening. I finish the race in 2nd overall, 1st in B class.

Sprint Race #7 Video:

We got a super cool Batman trophy for our 1st place in addition to a little Predator for my sprint race and the dragon for 3rd place the first day. A very successful weekend!

And here is the best part.. I measured the brake pads after the race. We used up only 3 millimeters of front pad, and essentially none off the rears. That is with 13 hours of endurance races, 3.5 hours of sprint races, and another hour of practice! Finally some brakes that are not a maintenance nightmare, this is the best upgrade we have ever done for the car!

You can see the rears were hot and working.. but no measurable loss of pad thickness.

Here's a view of the dust shield turned brake duct. You can also see our camber spacers, currently set to 'MAX' (the other side says 'POOP').

A new series called Lucky Dog started by Cathy McCause popped up, but with their first race happening in the same month as our Chump Car race, we were not planning on doing it. I was contacted by Mark Scholz, who's rental driver had caused our crash at Laguna Seca. He said his car was not going to be fixed in time for the race, and he wanted to give us his spot. Wow, not going to turn that down. Thanks Mark!

It was originally planned to be my dad and myself again. Then disaster struck and my dad had a heart attack and needed a triple bypass. While the surgery was successful and he was going to be OK, there was no way he could race. One of our friendly rivals #177 Finally Racing put together a Get Well card and signed it with their whole team, forever cementing them as an awesome team and great friends. Now with a new series and a free entry, I asked Nathan Feigion if he would sub in, and he was up for it. So next up will be a late October race at PIR with Lucky Dog!

01-08-2021, 11:58 PM	#14
knate Leaky Injector Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Washington Posts: 117 Trader Rating: (0) Feedback Score: 0 reviews	My friend Matt and I attended college together, and after living on the East Coast for quite a while, he was now living in Boise. As he is an aviation enthusiast and pilot and he flew his Van's RV-6A over to meet us in Washington State. He had done some autocrossing with an RX-8, but had never actually driven on track. He was going to ride down with us while we drove to Laguna Seca. This was a three day event spanning Friday to Sunday. We drove down and arrived on a Thursday, went through tech, then loaded our car into the garages. This was our first time having an actual garage and it was really nice! Even though we had nothing to plug into it, it was cool seeing the nitrogen plumbed on the wall where the pros use it. We had racers coming from all across the country for this race, including Tubby Butterman Racing. They have some Hawk Blue brake pads for us they brought with them, but we decide to leave the mostly good pads on the car. Our first race is only a six hour, and with Matt in the car we figure he won't be using nearly as much brake as we do (Bad idea! Bad idea!) To Finish First, You Must First Finish (7/3/15) - 6 hours - Laguna Seca: Since the race starts under yellow, we put Matt in the car first so he could have a chance to feel out the car a little before racing. Going from autocross to straight to a race start at Laguna Seca is definitely a way to jump straight into the deep end of the pool. Not ideal, as it is very intimidating. There are plenty of walls, elevation change, and gravel traps at the track. Luckily since it's also one of the most famous race tracks in the world.. Matt knew the layout from various video games. Matt was very nervous about wrecking our car and was trying to get used to things while not getting in other people's way or cause any problems. He runs a very respectable 2:00.8 lap time, excellent for never having driven this car or on track before! He's doing a great job of watching his mirrors and giving people room when disaster strikes on lap 16. Matt is going into turn 6 when he downshifts into 3rd, and it's just enough to upset the back end of the car. He tries to catch the slide, but it pitches him off to the right and he spins off track. A camouflage Celica Supra dives off track to avoid him, and narrowly avoids the crash. Matt is spooked and wants to come in, so on lap 18 he pulls in the pits. We talked to the Celica Supra driver later who is insistent that we never touched their car, although their camo paint is smeared up the nose of our sparkling blue front bumper all the way to the hood. I don't even quite understand how there isn't really any damage. That was a close one! Nathan Feigion gets into the car with a little over 5 hours left in the race. He brings us from 29th all the way up to 7th during his stint, running a 1:51.3! Dave gets in the car next and he is struggling a bit. He hasn't played all the video games that we have, so the track is not nearly as familiar to him. He spins early on, which shakes his confidence. However by the end of his run he has done a 1:57.6 and we are in 8th place. I get in the car last, so it's all up to me now. Having a new driver in the car our original goal was to crack a top 10 finish. We had dropped to 14th during our pit stop, but I'm pretty consistently below the 2 minute mark so we are looking OK. The car is working great, the coolant temp is perfect and engine power is up to normal. Adequate, but not great, just like normal. It's now lap 150, there's just 30 minutes left in the race and I'm in 10th place. The brakes don't feel right, not stopping as good as they have been. I have a very fast and aggressive BMW behind me, so I point him by, not wanting to try fight with him with unknown brakes. He goes by me, and I tuck in behind him for turn 11, the extremely sharp left-hand turn before the straight. As I get to the brake marker I hit the brakes, AND THE PEDAL HITS THE FLOOR! Since I'm not slowing down, to avoid rear-ending the BMW I yank the wheel to the right and fly off into the gravel trap. After I get pulled backwards out of the gravel, our undertray scooped up enough gravel they might have wanted to send us a bill! When talking to my dad afterwards he asked me if I had tried to use the emergency brake. I told him, "There was zero time for that! All I could do was yank the wheel to avoid hitting the other car." The interesting thing was when I watched the video back.. I actually start pulling the e-brake, but because I had just swerved the back end starts coming around. Going sideways into a gravel trap is a major risk for rollover. I put the e-brake back down while counter-steering with my left hand to try get the car going nose-first, and mostly succeed. All of this was essentially reflexes from drifting, as I didn't even remember touching the e-brake! The cause of all this? Me being cheap/lazy with the brake pads, and thinking that the car would make it six hours on slightly used pads. Once the pad was gone, the piston over-extended and blew brake fluid all over when I went for the brakes that last time. Tech Tip #12: Brake pads don't have linear life. A pad with 100% material stays cooler than one with 50% material, so once the pad is low it goes quickly! 50% thickness is beyond 50% of it's lifespan. Now for a late night replacing calipers, pads, bleeding, and sweeping up a massive amount of gravel that we needed to return to turn 11.. And for the video highlights of the race: __________________ Blue Bayou Youtube Channel Facebook Last edited by knate; 04-18-2021 at 01:28 AM..

01-11-2021, 10:52 PM	#19
knate Leaky Injector Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Washington Posts: 117 Trader Rating: (0) Feedback Score: 0 reviews	At Least the Brakes Were Good (7/4/15) - 7 hours - Laguna Seca: With our brakes sorted out and some sleep we were ready to hit the track again. Matt had told us he didn't know if he wanted to get back in the car again, but we knew we needed him to get another chance so we figured we would talk him into it later in the day. Dave went out first. And for the first time, we got the lucky drop of the flag and we started in 1st place! Dave was feeling a little more comfortable on track, and pulled off a 1:55.4! There are a lot of fast cars (and drivers) out there however, and Dave drops down to 11th when he is stopped for a red flag. Once he can move, Dave pulls into the pits and the crew dives into action. After a little bit of troubleshooting, we find that the water pressure sensor has failed and is leaking. We engineer a quick plug for it and seal it up. This drops us all the way back to 44th place, not looking good for today. I take the car out next partway into my stint, I am trying to work my way around a gray 5-series BMW. The car is fast, but the driver is erratic and having issues with oversteer. I find out later that he is an experienced Spec E30 driver (experienced.. not necessarily skilled). I can't keep up on the straights, but can reel him back in again in corners. As I follow him into turn 11 I see him go wide and he is going off course. This is my chance! He will have to back out of it and I will have a chance to sail by. Except... he doesn't back out of it. Major Mistake #1: Even though he's fully off track, he stays in the throttle... and comes back on the track fully sideways! I aim left trying to miss his car but the gap is closing quickly. There just isn't enough room, and while I manage to miss his car by about one inch.. I am pointed towards the barrier and there is now no avoiding it. I smash the barrier with the front, then the back, then come to a halt. I now have a smashed car, and the guy that needed to just back out of throttle has a perfectly intact car. But he's not done yet. There is a massive cloud of dust on track now and he is sideways on track on the left side of the track. This is off line, where nobody drives. Major Mistake #2: For some reason he panics, thinking someone may hit him, so he floors it trying to turn the car around quickly. The cloud of dust is mainly on the left side of the track as well. Mopar 4 Life (Dodge Neon) suddenly sees the BMW reappear out of the dust onto the racing line and turns left to avoid the BMW. And.. here's where we get to Major Mistake #3: Thinking he can drift and can execute a quick donut to get going. He over-rotates, and now is coming back LEFT! Mopar 4 Life is trying to dodge, but the BMW driver thinks he is a Mustang leaving a Cars and Coffee and won't stop until there is some destruction. At this point the BMW driver's insatiable appetite for chaos has been satisfied. The Neon slams into the BMW sending steam, glass and car parts everywhere. The BMW is totalled, and the Neon that has been towed from across the country has a destroyed front right corner and a broken windshield. Three smashed up cars due to one driver's poor choices. Tech Tip #13: If you go off track, don't try to be a hero and save it. Just back out of it, gather it up, make sure it is safe to enter the track, and get on with your race. After I get checked out for a concussion (all good) I limp the car back into the garages. Time to fire up some A-team music and get to work! We assess the damage, and aside from all the smashed up sheetmetal, our worst problem is the lower control arm. We don't have any spare arms, and this arm is custom. We had cut and welded extra metal into it to lengthen it for more camber. This arm is supposed to be straight across the top.. that's pretty bent. On the plus side, the area I had welded up showed now issue. Even if we can find a stock arm, we would need both arms, and then we would destroy the outer edge of the tire due to lack of camber. Time to try fix it. We borrow a torch and try getting it hot and putting 1 Lard-Ton of force into it. That doesn't work. We end up cutting it most of the way through, bending it, then welding it back up. We had reinforcement metal borrowed from Wrecked'em Racing and a welder I believe borrowed from Tubby Butterman. Fellow racers are so awesome!! We used some chain binders to pull the corner of the car out some and were feeling pretty happy about our progress. It's July 4th, the race is over, and the day is winding down. Wayne from Scrap Attack walks over to see how things are going, and says, "Hey, you guys are using the factory radiator brackets. We never use those anymore as it tends to crack the plastic end tanks if you hit something." I pull off the brackets and sure enough, our radiator is cracked! Thanks for saving us from some more pain Wayne! Unfortunately.. while we have an entire engine with us, we do not have a spare radiator. Time to see if we can fix this one. I had heard of 'plastic welding' using zip ties, so I grab my soldering iron and melt the crack together and use zip ties for filler. We had hopes of watching some fireworks and hitting Monterey for some nice food, but instead it was a late night finishing up the car. We managed to get the fender straight enough to fit back on the car and were done for the night. I was a little leery of the radiator fix, as I didn't know how well it would hold up to vibration/heat during the race, but we went back to the hotel to get some sleep. I woke up at 3am and could not stop thinking about the radiator. As I lay in bed I was trying to think of what I could do to make the fix more robust. RTV on it's own wasn't going to help, but if I could cap it to contain the RTV that should hold up. Unfortunately it was at the post on the radiator where the crack was, so I needed cap with a hole in it. I realize if I use a washer I could hold some RTV in. But if I wait until we go to the track in the morning, the RTV won't have time to cure. At around 4am I slip out of the hotel room, and head to the track. It was a little weird arriving in the dark and working on the car in the brightly lit garages with a ton of race cars and me being the only person there. I put together my washer stack and got it all RTV'd together and used zip ties to hold it down. While I didn't get very much sleep, I felt a whole lot better about the robustness of the fix now. __________________ Blue Bayou Youtube Channel Facebook Last edited by knate; 04-18-2021 at 01:27 AM..

01-23-2021, 01:00 AM	#22
knate Leaky Injector Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Washington Posts: 117 Trader Rating: (0) Feedback Score: 0 reviews	Will It Hold? (7/5/15) - 7 hours - Laguna Seca: So after barely any sleep due to fixing the car, I was pretty beat. But I was pretty upbeat about our chances of the car holding together for the final day. Matt in his first ever race weekend, had not gotten a chance to drive on the second day. After all the repairs, we still didn't know how the car handled or if everything worked. We sent Nathan Feigion out first to shake down the car. He started in 31st place, and the car is working good! Nathan slices and dices his way through traffic, while the temps stay cool and brakes are working great. By the end of his stint, he has made it up to 5th place and ran our fastest lap of the weekend at 1:50.4! For reference, the fastest time of the day was a 1:49.5. Originally Matt had said that he didn't want to get in the car again, but we talked him into trying it out again now that it wouldn't be completely new and overwhelming. However, we don't do him any favors and we pull a rookie move, we forget to put up his window net. He gets black flagged and looped back around for us to correct it, dropping us to 21st place. Matt is a lot more confident in the car and is pushing it more, which does end up in one spin. He is really getting a lot more comfortable with the car and gets back up to 15th place. Then Matt gets a black flag for passing under a yellow flag. Oops! He pulls in, apologizes, and is off again in 22nd place. By the end of his stint he has made it back to 16th place before pitting. Matt pulls off a 1:57.7, a full three seconds faster than the first stint! I get in the car next. I push as much as I can trying to beat Nathan's lap time, but I just can't pull it off. I got down to a 1:51.9 during my session, but did manage to get up to 9th place. On the plus side, the car is still driving around the track and the radiator fix is holding perfectly. Dave is in the car for the final stint. Will the car hold all the way to driving on the trailer? Dave struggles a bit with some understeer, but pulls off a respectable 1:54.3 lap time and brings the car home in 12th. Success! Our only day of the weekend we actually finished the race! The LED device I made showing "Time slip" worked.. somewhat. The refresh rate is not nearly as quick as I was hoping for, and if it ever lost communication it would just hang at the last value shown. So with the somewhat intermittent updates and not really being able to trust it.. it didn't prove to have a ton of value. On the plus side it did have a cool little startup animation! Video overview of day 3: So after the race we got the car home and checked out all the damage a little more closely. The front was really scraped up, but looked reasonably close. With a little "footwork" at the track, the quarterpanel wasn't too terrible: We had another race within a month, so we needed to work quickly. We got the car up on the lift, and yikes! That doesn't look right... A couple other tires had this as well, and we had never seen this before. I can only assume we were hitting the curbing harder than normal. The track-fixed lower control arm: We pulled the engine out to have better access to fixing the damage. Definitely a lot worse looking with the fender off! I also did some comparison to my purple coupe.. and we discovered our left front strut wasn't where it belonged... I welded up a quick and dirty strut pulling device: I also made a backing plate to help pull out the left corner of the car: Then with the help of a Porta Power a couple of excavators.. We got the strut tower brace to match my other 240SX and got the corner looking roughly correct. Then I took a spare fender, some hammers, and some carpet, and I got the fender roughly back to the factory shape. A little paint on the chassis, and it wasn't looking so bad. I also wanted to remake the lower control arms, and then we could use the old ones as spares. I picked up some new arms from RockAuto. I cut the arm and added in the new metal to space the arm. Again the reason for extended control arms was this was "free" in ChumpCar points compared to commercially available camber adjustment. Next up I added a bridge across the bottom (with my OK at best welding skills on display here). At this point I have two extended control arms that would likely be strong enough. But to reduce stress on the joint, I then wrap the top with sheet metal and plug weld some holes in it. I add some more braces on the bottom, and then I'm sufficiently happy that the rest of the arm will bend before anything I cut breaks (just like the last arm proved). A little paint, and they are ready for the car. And here is the car all back together. We added a factory front lip as well as a bit more of an air dam below that to try to reduce some drag on the straights. We always get killed on the straights, so every little bit helps. You can also see the aggressive negative camber we need for a Mcpherson strut car to have relatively even tread wear. __________________ Blue Bayou Youtube Channel Facebook Last edited by knate; 04-18-2021 at 01:26 AM..

03-09-2021, 10:33 PM	#23
knate Leaky Injector Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Washington Posts: 117 Trader Rating: (0) Feedback Score: 0 reviews	These Brakes.. (8/8/15) - 12 hours - Portland International Raceway: So after all the work to get the car straight again and a factory front lip added, we were ready to race in Portland. Our last event at Portland we had a 2nd, 3rd, and 3rd with 1st place eluding us. So we had a goal ahead of us! Dave starts off the 12 hour race in 29th place. Dave puts in some solid laps and gets us up into 7th place. He's pushing the car hard, likely a little bit past his comfort zone. While approaching turn 10, he's still on the brakes a bit too much at turn-in, and the car starts rotating at 80+ mph. His countersteer is not quite quick enough, and to gasps of the people in the bleachers.. ("Oh no! Oh no!") he is headed off course... towards a barrier! Luckily he is far enough past the barrier to not hit it, and gets slowed down before getting to the tire wall. If it was raining, the car would be a balled up mess, as cars don't slow down much at all in wet grass. However even with the Brown Pants Moment, Dave makes it up into 3rd place before pitting! Nathan Feigion is in the car next, putting in solid laps and moving forward in the pack. 19 laps into his stint I hear over the radio, "I think I've got a flat tire or something." Oh no! We aren't quite a prepared Nascar crew... we are in the pits for 6 minutes changing the tire before sending him back out. This knocks us back to 12th place, giving Nathan some work to do. Nathan then proceeds to set our fastest lap of the race (1:33.98) and get us up into 5th place. It was my turn next, and I have my sights set on a podium finish. At this point we have gotten a trophy every single race in Portland since our first 3rd place trophy and I don't want to break that streak! I put in a straightforward two hour session and pit in 3rd place. Dave goes out next, and then pits in 1st place! With four hours left, Nathan Feigion is back in the car. On lap 318, disaster strikes. No brakes! Nathan uses a combination of engine braking and emergency brake use to get the car slowed down, repeatedly pumping the emergency brake like Flintstone ABS. The car skids just past our pits with the rears locked up and the front brakes on fire! I hit the brakes with the fire extinguisher, dousing the flames and my hopes of a podium finish. We jump into action to repair the car. This is the first time we've tried to do a caliper swap live during a race. And ... as you might imagine, it's HOT!! Like still smoking after being removed and on the ground kind of hot. The reason we lost brakes is our pads were so far gone that the piston popped out of the caliper. Again. Dave swaps the caliper on the right while I change the pads on the left side. I can't grab anything, even just my glove grazing the caliper is enough to send an instant wisp of smoke. I am trying to use a tool in each hand like some kind of caveman salad tongs. We get the new pads in and some new fluid in, and then bleed the brakes. Total time: 15 minutes. Not bad for a first time doing a hot change in the pits! In the picture below you can see the caliper smoking on the ground. This brakes thing is getting ridiculous. To have 1st place snatched away due to brakes like this is frustrating. This will be our last race weekend on these brakes.. These Hawk Blue pads provide fantastic stopping power and feel, but in combination with stock brake hardware they just get too hot and disappear (even with our ducting). They used to be fine, but as we get faster we push the car harder. I jump in the car last, and we are down to 7th place. I do what I can, but there's no making up for a 15 minute pit stop. We finish in 5th place, not too bad considering that included a flat tire and brakes+caliper change in the pits! Video overview: __________________ Blue Bayou Youtube Channel Facebook Last edited by knate; 04-18-2021 at 01:23 AM..

03-27-2021, 12:51 AM	#26
knate Leaky Injector Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Washington Posts: 117 Trader Rating: (0) Feedback Score: 0 reviews	Just Keep It Together... (8/9/15) - 6 hours - Portland International Raceway: On our second day of the weekend, we are on old tires trying to use up our 15 inch to get ready to switch to something bigger. The sun is shining as Dave takes the first stint in the car. He starts in 15th place, and battles his way all the way up to 3rd! Nathan is in the car next, battling with an SC300 and MK3 Supra turbo. Both cars have more horsepower than us, but our cars light weight helps in the corners. Nathan pits with us in 2nd place behind the SC300! I get in the car last. I put in a solid session and we finish up the race in 3rd. I didn't quite hang onto the 2nd place, but we got our trophy! Highlight video: After the race, it was time to figure out what we were doing with our brakes. I want to go overkill, as we really need some serious life. We have been overheating the brakes due to such little mass in the rotors. The front calipers would start leaking about every other race, and the pads needed swapped around every 7 hours. We had originally resisted upgrading brakes, as light weight was one of our few advantages and bigger brakes meant bigger heavier wheels/tires. We pick up some adapters that will allow us to bolt Wilwood calipers and use 350Z Track rotors. The four-piston Wilwoods calipers are significantly bigger than the stock single pistons. I ordered the smallest caliper Wilwoods, which is almost a perfect match hydraulically to the single piston so the rear brakes could be left alone. Rotors go from 9.8" (10 lbs) to 12.8" (21 lbs). We first try fitting them behind some factory 16" wheels, trying to not add any more wheel weight than we have to.. but they just don't quite clear. While the 16" just didn't quite fit, some 17x9 fit great: In addition to more weight, the pads are significantly thicker: Here's an example of how tiny the stock rotors looked in there. The difference in tire is pretty significant as well: The 17x9s with 225s definitely change the look of the car: I tape up the brake ducts to try keep some heat in them, and head out to bed in the brakes. We are running Raybestos ST43 pads, and wow do they squeel! But.. it's a race car and if they are going to last, I can live with that. The brakes were already plenty enough to lock the tires, and the new brakes feel just as strong. The pedal is definitely softer with the extra fluid going from single piston to four piston. Now these should last, next up it's time to see what they can do! __________________ Blue Bayou Youtube Channel Facebook Last edited by knate; 04-18-2021 at 01:22 AM..

12-18-2020, 11:00 PM	#1
knate Leaky Injector Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Washington Posts: 117 Trader Rating: (0) Feedback Score: 0 reviews	Blue Bayou S13 - VQ30DE Endurance Build (Tons of pics and video!) Blue Bayou Racing Subscribe to our Youtube Channel! Blue Bayou Racing Follow our Facebook Page to see the latest with the car! https://www.facebook.com/BlueBayou24/ In this saga we start with Hawaii 2-4-Oh (KA24DE hatch): And continue until today's version of Blue Bayou (VQ30DE, race suspension, aero, big brakes, fuel cell): ----------------------------------------- Have you ever wanted to get sucked into a hobby that requires a large portion of your time and money, then delivers all of its rewards in a just few bursts per year? With endurance racing that's what I got myself into. You can read here about all of our success and failures, as well as some tips and tricks we learned over the years with endurance racing. It is an absolute blast to do and I highly encourage you to check it out! I've been meaning to write a build thread for years.. and have just never gotten it together. Now that I have a ton of material, I guess it's time to make up for it. We started with a KA hatch, then KA coupe, then swapped to VQ30, then race suspension, aero, brakes, etc... We've always been a bit behind the curve in horsepower compared to our competition, but we've still managed to be quite successful over the years with such a great-handling platform. How it all started for me: As a kid I always thought Lamborghini's and Ferrari's looked cool, but was never interested in how they worked or how fast they were. But as soon as I got my driver's license, suddenly I was interested, and started learning everything I could about cars. My very first car was a 1985 Nissan 200SX, a rear-drive four-cylinder. This was a true 80's car, with a digital dash and voice prompts ("Fuel level is low.."), like the picture below.. complete with the bar-graph tach. The 240SX was the next obvious car to become interested in, as it was like my first car only better in every way. My 200SX was angular in every way, yet the 240SX was smooth and new looking. I got my first 240SX in 2002 while I was going to college, a car that I still have. This car eventually developed rod knock, which turned into putting in the 2.0 turbo engine, paint/etc, bigger turbos, blowing that up, and eventually an LS1 that is still in the car (used primarily for drifting). By this point, I had done various autox and track day events, as well as gotten into drifting. I had always been curious about racing, but in the Northwest ITE was the closest my car would fit into SCCA at the time and that would be way outside of my budget. Building a Race Car: In 2009, ChumpCar held their first race at Portland International Raceway and this got the ball rolling. A friend, my dad and I kicked around the idea of building a race car, and since we all owned 240SX's that was the logical choice. Rear-drive, cheap, and we already had plenty of spares and leftovers. In 2011 my dad agreed to let us use his stock daily driver. We got a roll cage donated by building the car at the PIR swap meet in the ChumpCar booth (Thanks to Russ at Racetech!) The downside was this meant leaving the car alone until about a week before the race, then trying to go from street car to working race car in a matter of days. Below is some of the last minute prep in the garage the day of tech. We chose the name "Hawaii 2-4-Oh", and everything was absolutely down to the wire including installing our fire extinguisher in the line at tech. TECH TIP #1: Figure everything will take at least twice as long as you expect! When building a car there are always unexpected twists and turns that pop up. Maiden Voyage (4/9/11) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway: We had various failures in our first race, as to be expected in a car that had never been on the track and just barely slapped together. Our car ran too hot, our brand new fuel pressure gauge just started leaking right out of the gauge face, I thought the car caught on fire when our brakes started smoking, and my dad pit when he couldn't see out of a fogged visor thinking he couldn't open it. This was my dad's first ever time on a race track, and he entered a race track that was hot! Very intense, not the best way to do it! We finished 28th of 56 teams and had the 17th fastest lap time (1:39.9). Not too bad for a first outing! TECH TIP #2: The race track is unforgiving; if a part can fail, it will on track. Replace ALL hoses and belts, and anything rubber that you are able to. It's really sad to see someone spend hours putting a junkyard engine in a car, only to have a hose under the intake manifold end their race. Mysterious Failure (4/10/11) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway: For the second race it was sopping wet, a pretty typical condition for Portland. Nathan Feigion was in the car and you can see where the drifting experience really pays off. Unfortunately while he is driving the car suddenly loses power, and we spent hours trying to diagnose the issue. The car didn't want to rev over 4000rpm unless you gave it easy throttle, which led us down the path of fuel filter/fuel pump/exhaust restriction/etc. In the end it turned out to be a failed ECU, which we didn't have a spare of. After borrowing a spare from Paul Newman's Revenge (thanks guys!), we were back on track. We finished 41st out of 52 cars at this event. We had a blast and all loved it! My dad had rented his race gear, figuring he would just do this first weekend and we would rent out spare seats. However after the weekend, he decided he wanted to race with us every time. TECH TIP #3: Bring spares of everything you can fit! It's like the Umbrella Effect, if you bring it then you probably won't need it. The Long One (10/29/2011) - 12 hours - Portland International Raceway: This time we had a chance to get the car prepped for the event, which was good as this would be our longest race at 12 hours. We had a laundry list of things to do, building a new exhaust/lexan windows/gutting weight/etc. We were using an open trailer, so the door windows actually got reinstalled after the race to keep the interior from getting too soaked. We had installed a new light setup, HID bulbs in Hella projectors. This actually worked surprisingly well. One thing we tried was hanging a tinted piece of lexan of over our wink mirror, but this was a flop. Headlights would show up in multiple mirrors plus the tinted plastic, so even with one car behind you might see 6+ white dots in the mirror. This was enough for me to decide to get rid of the wink mirror and move to a convex mirror. We were running factory brakes with Axxis Ultimate brake pads, and we found their limit. We ended up having to swap pads during the race, pulling it off in 12 minutes. It's not fun changing brakes when they are this hot! We still managed our best finish yet at 14th place, and dropped our fastest lap from a 1:39.9 to a 1:37.4! TECH TIP #4: For night races, put a piece of masking tape (or two) across the top of your visor. You can block the rearview mirror when needed, but easily look up and check the mirror. Our custom headlights: The brake pads.. This is the custom rear lexan we put in, this definitely helped reduce drag on the car! Here's a pumpkin that I carved for a contest at this race.. Frankenstein in a crash helmet: Left to right: Ken, Nathan, Nate, Dave The Soaker (10/30/2011) - 6 hours - Portland International Raceway: My dad (Dave) started the race, and struggled in the wet conditions. It was sopping wet all day, so drifting experience really helped here. We had a reasonably clean race and managed to bring it home with a 7th place, our best finish yet! Lots more to come! __________________ Blue Bayou Youtube Channel Facebook Last edited by knate; 04-18-2021 at 01:33 AM..

12-19-2020, 11:59 PM	#2
knate Leaky Injector Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Washington Posts: 117 Trader Rating: (0) Feedback Score: 0 reviews	The Dream (2/1/2012) - 7 hours - Laguna Seca: Like many, ever since I was a kid playing Gran Turismo I was a fan of Laguna Seca. I still remember the computer trying to drive the Shelby Cobra would crash every lap in the Corkscrew. I had driven the track so many times in games, I felt like I really knew the track, but there were a few things that struck me when we arrived. I hadn't realized how much elevation really changed going down into the first corner, and the enormity of the Corkscrew itself. The very first time driving over the Corkscrew it was really just, "Ok, from what I know I should be pointing here... woooo!!" The games really did help me dial in my laps much quicker. We upgraded to an enclosed trailer for this event which was a big plus! Much better for packing spares and keeping things clean and dry. We put some KYB GR2s on the car, which helped to tame some of the floppiness of the previous shocks. We also slotted the shocks to give some extra camber. The Disaster (3/31/2013) - 10 hours - Portland International Raceway: We started this race in the rain in 26th place. Nathan Feigion ran an excellent first stint and got us up to 5th place! I get in the car and we are fighting back and forth for 1st place in the rain with the front-wheel drive cars. This is the best we have ever ran and it is looking great for a podium! It's still wet when I pit in 2nd place to turn the car over to Dave. A dry line has developed, but is still quite wet off of that dry line. While coming down the straight at PIR, a car pops out to try to outbrake a bunch of cars. However those cars are on the dry line, so it is a very overly optimistic move. Dave never sees it coming, and gets slammed in the front end while going into the chicane. The right front strut tower is moved over a foot, our day is done. Crash at 7:00 in this video: Now we need to decide what we do about the car.. __________________ Blue Bayou Youtube Channel Facebook Last edited by knate; 04-18-2021 at 01:32 AM..

12-20-2020, 12:50 AM	#3
knate Leaky Injector Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Washington Posts: 117 Trader Rating: (0) Feedback Score: 0 reviews	Building Blue Bayou: We had a few issues with our first hastily-built car we wanted to address: -Roll cage had X-bars in the doors, difficult to climb in/out -Roll cage was too close to my head. We tried cutting the floor out and lowering the seat, but it was not enough. -Lots of weight left on the table. With ChumpCar rules we could cut/weld just about anything, but adding horsepower was not in the cards. With these items and a smashed chassis, we decided to look to the spare 240SX coupe chassis for my drift car. This already had a roll cage in it, but the design was not great. It also had the rear fenders cut out for massive tires, but we would be running factory tires. We rolled the drift chassis into the shop and got to work. We had never built a roll cage before, but had done enough reading to be confident if we took our time we could make something safe we would be happy with. We bought a tubing bender and a pile of tubing. We also bought a plasma cutter, which I cannot recommend highly enough! It seems a lot of people think plasma cutters are only for bigger shops, but I think this tool should be right in line behind a welder. Every single time I use this thing I am so happy that we bought it. It is SOOO fast, easy to use, and compact. It also does not leave a sharp edge, which makes it perfect for chopping out sheet metal in a race car. TECH TIP #5: Buy a plasma cutter, you will thank me! They aren't that expensive any more, and save so much time! In a dual-purpose move, we chopped out the A-pillar and ran the roll cage up in this area. This drops weight from the factory structure up top as well as getting the roll cage further from my head. With the old car, I was constantly bumping the cage, with the new one I have plenty of room. Here you can see how the A-pillar bar was ran. Since our strut tower moved so far when we got hit.. we also wanted to help support the strut towers, so we ran the cage up to them as well. We made use of the old roll cage pad to make a little bit of footwell anti-intrusion, and moved to more of a Nascar-style door bars tied into the sill. Here you can see we put the bars as far out as possible (touching the door skin) in order to make the car easier to get in and out of. We also tried to tie the cage as much as possible into the sheetmetal to stiffen the chassis. Roll cage finished and painted: We got some quarterpanels from the local junkyard and welded those in. I never liked how unfinished our car looked with no dash, so I put a modified factory dash in. I also redid the entire wiring harness, simplifying and shortening the factory harness down. This was so much more work than I had expected. Hours with the factory manual, removing circuits one at a time, then consolidating relays, shortening wires, re-purposing fuses, consolidating fuse boxes.. over 40 hours just in wiring. While I did save weight and money, it just wasn't worth it. TECH TIP #6: Either do basic simplification of factory wiring, or rewire from scratch. Completely re-engineering the factory harness is not worth the time! To help with our cooling situation, I made a vent in the factory hood. We set up a makeshift paint booth, and I tried spraying a car for the first time ever. With a race car, less pressure if I screw it up. While it's far from perfect, I was pretty happy with how it came out. The biggest issue was I put three coats of paint on the rear quarterpanels and only two on the rest of the car and it was super obvious next to the door. I cut the lexan rear window with a skill saw, masked the back side, and spray painted the edge with black to give a little more factory look. I was super happy with how they came out! I borrowed our new team name based on the Mitsubishi paint named "Blue Bayou", this was my original sketch of the logo: We are not from the South, and I know nothing about any real bayous, it's just a play on "Blew by you". I thought this was obvious enough, but I've had a variety of people come up to us saying that they hadn't realized this for a long time. There was even a Reddit thread about it that blew up: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/c...y_put/er672bn/ Here she is all done up and pretty! This is a time lapse video I put together of this build: __________________ Blue Bayou Youtube Channel Facebook Last edited by knate; 04-18-2021 at 01:32 AM..

12-23-2020, 10:54 PM	#4
knate Leaky Injector Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Washington Posts: 117 Trader Rating: (0) Feedback Score: 0 reviews	It shows potential! (4/13/2013) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway: This was the first race with our new chassis. We had done a lot of work to strip weight out of the car, and had shed around 100 lbs between the old and new chassis. The entire drivetrain/suspension was just transferred over, so that portion was exactly the same. With the lighter/stiffer chassis, this thing is good. Surprisingly good! Nathan Feigion starts the race in 23rd place and starts working his way through traffic. By the time he is done with his stint, he is in 2nd place and has ran a team-best 1:35.0! I get in the car and make it up into 1st place with a fastest lap of 1:34.7, a whopping 2.7 seconds faster than our previous fastest! The car feels great as I slowly put a full lap up on second place. We have never before been in the lead of a race, much less have a lap up on 2nd! By the end of my stint I have been in 1st for 43 laps, and it's time to pull in for a driver change. We have a great pit stop, put my dad in the car, and send him out. Immediately we get back on the radio that the engine is running on three cylinders. What? No... that can't be right.. it has been working so perfectly! We did check the oil during the pitstop, and the dipstick is right next to the distributor.. Did a plug wire get pulled out? We call my dad into the pits and start checking the easy stuff. Plug wires all look good, everything seems seated good. Fuel injectors are plugged in well, nothing obvious.. but we do figure out that it's cylinder #3 not firing. Let's send him out and come up with a plan. We don't have a spare cap or wires with us, so Ken drives to grab some while Dave circulates PIR, running 1:43-1:50s.. we are down to 5th and sliding. Ken gets back with our parts and we try swapping #3 plug wire and spark plug. No help... send him back out again while we regroup. We are now down to 10th. We suspect we have a failed fuel injector. We have a spare fuel rail with injectors in it, so we decide to swap the entire setup out. 20 minutes later, we are back on four cylinders! However we are also in 21st place. Ken gets in the car and he starts moving through traffic again. We finish the race in 16th. We are happy we triumphed over our fuel injector issue, but we know we have the capability of running up front. We finished with the third fastest lap behind two modified V8 cars. We start the ritual of swapping out brake pads and check things over for the next day, then get some rest. TECH TIP #7: If the rules don't have a minimum weight, take advantage of that! With ChumpCar rules we had very limited modifications we could do to the engine, but cutting out weight was open. Losing 100 lbs (a lot of it high in the chassis) and gaining the stiffness was worth over 2 seconds for us! (I'm sure we had some driver improvement as well..) The First Trip to the Podium (4/14/2013) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway: We send Ken out in wet conditions, and he starts in 25th place (random starts in ChumpCar). PIR is notoriously tricky in the wet. Old racing surfaces with a lot of rubber worn in, flocks of geese that like to deposit poop that is more slippery than baby oil, and the track is absolutely flat. Zero elevation change. A fellow Nissan team with a Z31 300ZX (Red Square Racing) goes hard into the wall right in front of us. It is treacherous out there, but Ken keeps moving through traffic and in one piece. By the end of his stint the track starts drying out. Dave gets in the car and heads out on a mostly dry track. Things are looking up as Dave gets into 6th place until.. it starts raining more. With the least amount of experience on track, Dave is struggling in the treacherously slippery conditions of PIR. The front-wheel drive cars are now walking away from us and we drop down to 9th place. The track starts drying out again as Dave pits to turn the car over to me. I have a lot of ground to make up, but the sun is out, the track is dry and I can really push. We are six laps away from a podium finish, but I start the work of unlapping ourselves. We have good cornering speed, but quite a few cars can outpull us on the straights. I run a 1:34.8 as my fastest lap, and turn the car over to Nathan for the last stint two laps away from the podium. Nathan also has dry track and starts laying down some great laps. With 44 minutes left in the race, Nathan passes the 4th place car to put us on the same lap. At 27 minutes to go, he passes the same car again for 3rd place! Our team is ecstatic, this is our first trophy! The welded together scraps making an alien from the movie 'District 9' is unique and so awesome looking! it's so cool... we want another one! Left to right: Nathan, Nate (me), Dave, Ken You can see in the picture below that Nathan just beat my lap time at 1:34.7, starting a friendly intra-team competition for fastest lap. TECH TIP #8: After a race weekend, go out for pizza (or whatever favorite food)! If the race went great, you are celebrating. If it didn't go well, you are drowning your sorrows. Either way everybody wins! Video from the race: __________________ Blue Bayou Youtube Channel Facebook Last edited by knate; 04-18-2021 at 01:32 AM..

12-23-2020, 11:01 PM	#5
knate Leaky Injector Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Washington Posts: 117 Trader Rating: (0) Feedback Score: 0 reviews	Learning a New Track (8/24/2013) - 10 hours - Ridge Motorsports Park: This was our first time racing at The Ridge Motorsports Park in Shelton, WA. The track just opened 2012, but I missed last year's race because I was in Europe for work. On Friday we did a practice day, but it didn't work out very well with the track being crowded and slow. At tech we get our first glimpse of the awesome trophies. The 1st place trophy is a massive Predator, definitely the coolest one I have seen yet. Knowing that other teams were racing here last year and we are newbs, we know chances are extremely slim of a trophy at this track. At the beginning of the 10 hour race, our pitmates Son of Andre (#16 V8 Mustang) are putting in such fast laps they are lapping the field easily. We can see that unless they have major mechanical issues there is no hope of catching them. We set our sights on a top three finish and start pushing. Dave is out first, and he is doing a great job of whittling a 2:20 down to 2:10. He brings us from 28th up to 14th place. When he pits, we are already four laps behind Son of Andre as their fastest lap is a 2:01. While in the pits, there is a red flag. Car #128 had rolled and is pulled off the track (this is key later). Nathan Feigion goes out next, and starts putting in some fast laps. He gets us up to third place before pitting. I go out next, and get to second place, two laps ahead 3rd place. Around 2pm, there is a car off course in turn 8 and they are stuck, really stuck. There is a local yellow flag, but no safety vehicle yet. We circle around again, and turn 8 is still yellow, now with a Safety Truck. I slow for the yellow behind a pack of cars, when I hear tire squeel and BANG! I am suddenly rotating 90 and come to a stop with the engine stalled. I look in the mirror, and with the massive impact I expect to be staring at the bottom of my trunk. Amazingly, all I can see from the inside is that the taillight internals popped out of the clips on one side. (I have a camera pointing exactly this direction in the video) I restart the engine, and start to straighten on course when the red flag comes out. The corner worker tells me I have a gashed tire that is completely flat, and they will need to flat tow me. However they only have one truck that can flat tow, and since I can limp they have me follow the flat tow of #60 (the car that hit us) to the pits. The driver came by our pits to apologize, no hard feelings. We have to wait until the red flag is over, then we swap out the tire. The fuel tank has a softball sized dent, but no leaks. The tire has a 1? chunk missing from the sidewall, but the wheel is not bent. Sheet metal is smashed in that corner, but the suspension looks straight. We can't believe how lucky we are that we have no leaks and a driving car. #60's front suspension is demolished, it will be many hours before they have their car together. I get back out on course with the new tire. Our lead on 3rd place has evaporated, but we are still in 2nd. We had made sure to set the tire pressure correctly before putting it on the car. Unfortunately there are two tires.. and the wrong tire was grabbed. So for the next twenty laps I deal with a car that wants to oversteer at the thought of trailbraking and I am pushing hard trying to get a gap on 2nd. When I pit I am told the tire has nearly 45 psi! TECH TIP #8: Set the tire pressure on all your spare tires! Ken Feigion goes out next, and he is having an epic battle with Socket Monkeys (#39 Civic). Every lap when he passes the pits, Socket Monkeys is in direct tow behind him. This continues for around ten laps with Socket Monkeys not able to get by and Ken not able to create a gap. It is towards the end of Ken's stint, and we see Son of Andre in the pits early with cooling issues. They are venting steam and refilling with water as their four lap lead dwindles. We get on the same lap at one point. We look at the clock and see that there are two hours and 15 minutes left in the race. Son of Andre will have to pit again, but will they need fuel? This is going to be a race! Nathan Feigion had our fastest times, so we send him out for the last stint. He is battling hard with Martini Racers (#10 VW Golf) in traffic and they are excellent at sneaking through traffic. It is back and forth for a good portion of the session, when Son of Andre comes into the pits for their last driver change. They have a two lap lead, but they need fuel. This is going to be close! If we can pass them in the pits, we might be able to stay ahead in traffic. If they get out in front of us, the car is too fast for us to pass. We radio Nathan when Son of Andre is about to leave the pits, and he is just entering the straight. We are all on pins and needles watching, and the Mustang exits the pits just ahead of us. We are disappointed, but hope that with a fresh driver getting warmed up Nathan might be able to put some pressure on. This seems to work, as the Mustang is not up to their typical lap times and making some mistakes. Soon we are watching the downhill section, and we see our car exit first! Martini Racers are also pressuring from behind, and Nathan begins to slowly stretch a lead. Car #128, that had rolled earlier, is allowed out to make some parade laps just to take the checkered flag. Nathan had already lapped the car once when we got a scare on the last lap. We hear that we were called in for passing #128 during a yellow. After some discussion with the officials they luckily decided to cancel the black flag as it was a car that shouldn't have really been out there running. This is a really close call for us, but this allows us to take the checkered flag in 1st place! For a ChumpCar podium we had to bring the car to impound, but we were not prepared for a podium and had to borrow two jack stands from Paul Newman's Revenge (thanks!) Then when those jack stands were too tall for our jack, we also had to borrow a jack from 2nd place Martini Racers, who are always great competitors and great guys (thanks!) The car is mostly straight... except for this corner. You can really see in this picture how bad the paint doesn't match having three coats on the quarter and two on the door.. This is the massive and awesome Predator trophy, I love this thing! Look at the awesome details here, how many hours does this take to build?? Way better than a generic chrome trophy.. We were also voted "Corner Worker's Choice" for the small trophy to the right, as they were entertained by drifter Nathan's "Amazing Saves" into turn 2. The highlight video: __________________ Blue Bayou Youtube Channel Facebook Last edited by knate; 04-18-2021 at 01:31 AM..

12-28-2020, 12:58 AM	#6
knate Leaky Injector Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Washington Posts: 117 Trader Rating: (0) Feedback Score: 0 reviews	After the Ridge race we had some damage to try clean up. We picked up a Porta Power and try to straighten the sheet metal a bit. We did some pulling with a bracket on the outside, some hammering from the inside, and some Porta Power work. We also swapped the fuel tank as it had a softball sized dent. We got the corner a lot straighter, as well as installed a new fire system. With the corner mostly where it belonged, I took the car for a short trip to the gas station. I couldn't resist getting a picture from the unmolested side as well! Penalty Laps Are Painful (8/25/2013) - 6 hours - Ridge Motorsports Park: With ChumpCar, we had an MOV (Margin of Victory) penalty coming to us. Even though we had only finished 15 seconds ahead of 2nd place, we were given 2 penalty laps. Given that we barely made it up front by the skin of our teeth, a 2 lap penalty was a massive uphill battle for us. We start the race in 27th and make it as high as 4th place. In the end we are technically in 5th, but dropped to 7th based on our penalty laps. Our fastest lap was a 2:05.9 compared to Son of Andre's 2:00.5, so we are definitely not up to their pace. Another New Track (3/22/2014) - 7 hours - Pacific Raceways: At Pacific Raceways event Nathan and Ken Feigion decided to not drive, so it is my dad and myself driving with Nathan . This is a track I have done one track day years before but my dad has never been here. I put my dad in the car first so he has a chance to do some yellow flag laps and scout out the course a little. In our random draw for a start, we start in 5th place, what a great way to start the day! On lap 5, my dad radios in that he has lost a tire. Ugh, terrible.. these are brand new Direzza II Star Specs that were working quite well. We throw on a spare in the pits and drop all the way to 36th place. Well this just soured our race. Pacific Raceways is infamous for the amount of race cars that it eats on the back side. It is one hungry track.. while my dad is driving he comes to 5a looking at the bottom side of a car on the side of the track. Never a good situation! I get into the car in 26th place and start to get used to the track. This is a busy track. Normally there is a nice long straight to relax, check gauges, and reset. At Pacific Raceways the straight has a kink where you cross over to the end of the drag strip. That means you are lining up between cement barriers to get onto the straight, where you then move over to the left to prepare for a very fast turn 1. There is also some good elevation change dropping down a very tight 3a and 3b before you make it to the dangerous 5a and 5b corners with Grand Theft Auto style ramp curbing and a steep dropoff to the right. For the next session my dad gets back into the car in 15th place. This time there's another car off this time in 5b, stuck partway up the hill. My dad finds that this track can be tricky to find safe places to pass, and without a lot of power the uphill sections and straight are difficult to make it past people. I get in the car in 11th place, and this time I'm already warmed up so I start trying to see if I can improve on my lap time. I am pushing hard, but maybe just pushing too hard. I only get to within 0.5 seconds of my previous fastest. I get up to 8th place by the time the checkered flag is waved. Not bad for a first time and having a punctured tire! During the race we had tried to get the tire repaired, and found that it was a 2" long piece of a wheel weight that had gone all the way into the tire, and just doing a partial lap was enough to completely destroy the tire inside. So unfortunately with the tire looking brand new on the outside, it was now garbage. It Was Fun While It Lasted (3/23/2014) - 7 hours - Pacific Raceways: My dad starts the second race of the weekend in 33rd place. Not quite the luck of the draw from the first day, but hopefully no flat tires today. The Flying Lumberjacks go off in 5a and nearly go down the steep dropoff! While they did not go down the steep area, this off does end their race. I get into the car in 26th place and soon after I get into an epic battle with Kyle in the General Leif Volvo. He carries more speed than I do into turn 2, but I am able to pass him back later in the lap. He then proceeds to pass me in turn 2 again, and this continues for many laps. We were giving each other room, fighting hard but fair. What an absolute blast, this is what it's all about! General Leif pits, and I begin to focus on trying to beat my 1:43.8 from the first day. While in 11th I pass The Gray Cloud RX-7 and am now looking at the gap in the cement barriers to transition to the main straight. I shift into 5th, and something doesn't feel right. The car doesn't pull very hard in 5th normally, but this feels weak. Suddenly I realize that I have not been checking my gauges on the straight. I look down at the coolant gauge, and the engine is hot. Way too hot. I see around 260F on the gauge and immediately know our day is done. I missed it, and I killed this engine. I limp back to the pits, and the car cuts out as I roll back to the pits. We later found that the radiator had failed, and reviewing video showed that the engine had been hot for 20 minutes while I did not check the gauges. I was looking at lap times while trying to push as well as keeping an eye on the cement barriers, and our poor KA24DE paid for it. TECH TIP #9: Check your gauges EVERY lap on the straight. It is also very helpful to put big warning lights in the car the light up when the engine gets into the danger zone. __________________ Blue Bayou Youtube Channel Facebook Last edited by knate; 04-18-2021 at 01:30 AM..*

12-31-2020, 01:20 AM	#7
knate Leaky Injector Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Washington Posts: 117 Trader Rating: (0) Feedback Score: 0 reviews	In our story we are now into 2014, and I had swapped out the 2.0 turbo in my purple drift car and put in an LS1. So we now take a little interlude for some drifting and drag racing. We got a chance to drift at the Ridge as a demo (Nathan Feigion in the blue hatchback, me in the purple coupe). NASA (National Auto Sport Association) finally came to the Northwest and we were able to run at Portland International with them. Very well ran events, I am a big fan! Generally when I make a big power change I like to go drag racing once just to see what the car can do.. then I'm bored with drag racing again. These were my first couple runs, and you can see I'm used to watching for a finish line (not cones) and I stay in it too long. This gives a decent feel for what the car is like to lay into it and how quick it goes through gears, it's fun! __________________ Blue Bayou Youtube Channel Facebook Last edited by knate; 04-18-2021 at 01:30 AM..

01-06-2021, 07:50 PM	#8
knate Leaky Injector Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Washington Posts: 117 Trader Rating: (0) Feedback Score: 0 reviews	Since I blew up the engine.. we picked up a new radiator and a used KA24DE to get the car drivable again. And Then There Were Two (8/1/2014) - 5 hours - Portland International Raceway: Nathan Feigion decided to take a little break from racing, so for this race it was just my Dad and myself. I started the race and got a good random start of 11th. It was a Friday, and even warmer than usual for the normally mild Portland track with an afternoon race start. We hit a high of 90 degrees, and that makes the inside of our blue tin box a sweltering sauna! By lap 8 I make it up to 1st place. I had been holding onto 1st place during my whole stint until an hour and 45 minutes later, the car starts bucking and is out of fuel. I make it back to the pits, sweating through my suit and fully exhausted. We are down a driver and not prepared for our pit stop, so it's 8 minutes when we need it to be 5 minutes. This does not help our day at all. Dave heads out of the pits in 6th place. A Mustang is cruising up the front straight on the right side.. which is the wrong side. Getting to the corner, they lock up the rear brakes and completely loop it, hitting Blue Bayou with their rear bumper on the passenger door. Well.. that's one more area that's not so straight.. Luckily this doesn't affect the drivability of the car at all and Dave continues. Dave makes it back to 1st place by the end of his stint and hands over the car with an hour and 45 minutes remaining. Normally the car should go for that long on gas.. but it will be tight. We do better on our next pit stop, nearly getting it under 5 minutes. I head out onto the track in 4th, with the sun just dipping below the horizon. I had taped up the top side of my visor to help with glare. I find that my radio connection was missed, and I don't have a way of communicating with the pits. I try unsuccessfully to find the end of the cable and get it plugged in, then give up on it and get to the job at hand. TECH TIP #10: Remember to plug in your radio, it's helpful. With 15 minutes to go in the race, I back in 2nd place. The #557 Mustang of Dog & Pony Show is in first, and are just ahead of me. Their car has more power and our car handles better. I can get really close in certain turns, but the straights are an issue. I know that time is running out, and I need to make the pass. I get a run on them leaving turn 7, outbrake them into turn 10 and finish the race! Unfortunately when I get back to the pits, I find out that I was just unlapping myself.. and we finished in 2nd. Considering the mistakes we had, this was still a great result! For ChumpCar being on the podium means going to impound, then once impound is done we can start on replacing all the brake pads as our Hawk Blues on stock brakes eat themselves alive. It is a light setup and brakes just fine, but it gets old having to swap brakes/bleed late into the evening every race. __________________ Blue Bayou Youtube Channel Facebook Last edited by knate; 04-18-2021 at 01:29 AM..

01-06-2021, 07:51 PM	#9
knate Leaky Injector Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Washington Posts: 117 Trader Rating: (0) Feedback Score: 0 reviews	That Time It Really Wanted to Overheat (8/2/2014) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway: For the second day of the weekend it was a 7 hour race. Having just placed 2nd to the Dog & Pony Show Mustang the previous day, our sights were set on trying to beat that car. Dave starts the race in 14th place while our newfound rivals Dog & Pony Show start up in 2nd! Dave quickly moves up through the field getting to 7th place by lap 5. My dad is still not that experienced on track (these races are his only track experience), but he gets down to a 1:36.4! By the time we are ready for our first pitstop, we pit after Dog & Pony Show and are leading the race for six laps. We add oil to the engine during the pitstop, which is normal for us as all of our KA24DE engines have burned oil. We drop to 5th during the pitstop and I head out on track. I make it up to 2nd behind Dog & Pony Show, then inherit first when they pull into the pits on lap 109. Things are looking good, but we still seem to be just a step behind the Mustang. I run a personal best 1:34.0 and turn the car over on lap 127 in 1st place. Dave heads out late in the afternoon. We had planned our driver swaps so that I would end up in the car last when it was dark. Dave makes it through his stint setting another 1:36.4, but he stays in 2nd for his whole stint. I throw some tape on my visor again to help with glare at night, and get ready to go out. As I am waiting at the end of the pit lane, Dog & Pony Show pulls up right next to me. Man this is going to be close! I get to leave the pits first, but the Mustang catches me on the next straight and passes me. Knowing that this is the team holding us between our second victory, I slot in right behind them and start applying pressure. I can get right on his bumper in turns 4,5,6 but he runs away on each straight stretch. I have my lights on and keep poking out to the side to distract him, but it's just not working. I keep putting pressure lap, after lap, after lap... 10 laps go by with me putting as much pressure as I can, and this Mustang has not put a wheel wrong once! Who is this guy?? I finally am able to get on the inside of him going right into turn 4, but he's not intimidated. We stick side-by-side through 4, then again to the right through 5, still side-by-side in 6 but I am gaining ground. By the time we get to turn 7 I have the inside line and I am able to pull ahead! I take the same defensive line that he has been driving into 10 and keep him behind me... but at this point I realize the engine is getting hot. I radio to my crew chief (Trish, my wife) and she asks if it's maybe just a false reading. Unfortunately no, as I have two temperature readings that both say it's hot, as well as water pressure sensors reading very low pressure. I keep racing, hoping some miracle will happen and the car will cool down.. The engine hits 214 degrees, and I could keep running hard and risk blowing the engine, or I can take it easy and potentially salvage a 2nd or 3rd place finish. There's just too much time left in the race, and so I start backing out of it to see if I can get it to cool down at all. As I slow down and the Mustang disappears into the distance, I have the defrost and fan blasting trying to take it easy. Even this isn't working... so the next lap I slow down even more. Eventually I am cruising half-throttle as the water pressure bobs around from zero to six psi as the water sloshes around. After a few laps of this and me thinking the engine will never cool down, I suddenly get my miracle. The engine drops down to 180 degrees and I start building water pressure again! I try running a hard lap, and the temperature is actually staying OK! There is 30 minutes left in the race now. In the pits they do some math, and tell me that since my fastest laps are about 1.5 seconds faster than the Mustang, in theory there is just enough time to catch the Mustang by the end of the race. Well that's all well and good.. but the last time it took me well over 10 laps to pass him while on his bumper! But.. I have to at least try. I need to run my fastest laps and not get slowed by a single lapped car and hope that he gets caught up on some lapped cars. It's getting dark, and I get my head down and start knocking out laps. There's lots of calculating as I come up to cars trying to figure out the best line to pass them without slowing down. I keep getting closer, until I can finally see the Mustang! As I come onto the front straight, Trish tells me that this is the last lap. It's do or die! I see traffic ahead that we will both be catching, this could work out! As I come into the chicane, he is coming up behind a yellow Taurus, and I try to pinch the first part of the chicane to get a little run on the exit. As I am coming up alongside him, HE MISHIFTS! This is exactly the opportunity I needed, and I make it by. I'm in 1st place on the last lap! Unfortunately there are also two straight stretches between me and the finish line, and he is faster on the straight. I need to get a gap! I make it around the Taurus, and then after nearly blowing it with a slight lockup into 7, I also make it past a BMW on the back straight. I make it onto the front straight with enough of a gap and the most incredible feeling I have ever had in a race car! Math said it was barely theoretically possible, and we did it! To give you some context here, I am definitely an introvert and normally a bit reserved with my emotions. But when I pulled next to that Mustang in impound the first thing I did was go over and give the guy a big hug! Now remember I was wondering who he was? He is Steve Mahre, silver medalist at the 1984 Winter Olympics for skiing. His twin brother Phil won gold at the same Olympics and they have both been racing since the 80's (Koni Challenge, SCCA, etc). Now I know why my amateur racing was not able to intimidate at all! They are both awesome guys, always very helpful and friendly while racing hard but fair on the track! __________________ Blue Bayou Youtube Channel Facebook Last edited by knate; 04-18-2021 at 01:29 AM..

01-06-2021, 08:01 PM	#10
knate Leaky Injector Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Washington Posts: 117 Trader Rating: (0) Feedback Score: 0 reviews	We only had a few weeks to get ready for the next race, and knew we had some overheating issues. I had added water pressure sensors to our datalogger, and in reviewing our datalogs I found where the car was venting pressure during a pitstop. I chalked this up to a bad radiator cap, since during the race we had seen the pressure disappear, then build back up again after the engine had cooled down. We replaced the water pump, thermostat, and radiator cap. I also found myself completely exhausted and soaked with sweat getting out of the car in the last unexpectedly hot race (for the NW), so I went after building a cool suit cooler. Following some other directions online, I put together a cheap cooler using an Engel cooler, bilge pump, and a bilge timer. Here it is attached in the car: And here I am quite proud of my new Cool Shirt: Until I realized the shirt was designed for the metal fittings, and I had the plastic fittings and it didn't clip in.. This groove was too narrow: Mr. Generic Dremel to the rescue.. After being trimmed a bit, the fitting worked perfectly. With that cleaned up we were ready for our race at the Ridge! Well, at least we thought we were.. I meant to get a warning light for the temperature gauge, but that didn't happen in time. Rain at the Ridge (8/30/2014) - 4.5 hours - Ridge Motorsports Park: I head out in the car during the yellow flag, but immediately find that the defrost is not working. I dive in the pits, and luckily my dad is able to quickly find a loose connection and my defrost is going again. There is massive spray everywhere and visibility is terrible, but the Ridge has relatively new pavement, and is much better than PIR to drive in the rain. I start in 36th place and start making my way forward in the field. The high horsepower cars are really struggling to put power down, so we really have just enough power for these conditions. I make it up to 11th place, then pit for my dad's turn with a best lap of 2:23. My dad is out there and gets tagged in the back at the bottom of the hill. He manages to steer out of it without too much issue and continues on. By the time he pits, it's still wet and he has gotten us up to 6th place. Since it's just the two of us at this race, I get back in the car and there is something wrong with the power. The car really seems to struggle to accelerate on the top end and is just not its usual self. I think it may be something with the knock sensor and the ecu pulling timing. The best lap I can muster is 5 seconds slower than my first sesssion! Luckily with all the rain this is less of a hit than it would normally be, so we manage to pull home a 4th place finish. Drying up.. (8/30/2014) - 4.5 hours - Ridge Motorsports Park: The ECU was showing a knock sensor code, so I dummy out the knock sensor with a resistor in hopes of fixing the power. I set out in the car for our second race, and it's starting to dry up. With the track drying up, I am reminded that the Ridge is definitely a "horsepower track". There are many long acceleration zones, and the 1/2 mile long front straight is preceded by a very slow corner.. so it's really a drag race. The car is still down on power and I am getting killed on the straight stretch. I manage a 2:17, but this is not going to cut it with the leaders having ran a 2:04. I'm in 8th but since we have a few more races coming up, I decide to pull in the pits and we do a quick swap of the ECU. Success! We are back down to 36th place but the car now pulls like it used to, and I immediately knock 6 seconds off my lap time getting down to a 2:11. This is still not enough to win a race, but with our 7 minute pit stop to swap the ECU we are out of the running for a podium anyway. At least the car is working, we still have more races. The car works great for the rest of my stint. Temps are holding perfectly and power is OK. I'm still left wishing for power every time I'm near one of the V8 Mustangs, or the BMWs, or V6 anything.. I pull into the pits, we top off with oil (like we do on every pit stop), and my dad gets in. The track now dries up completely, and we are getting dusted by every car with more power than us. Which is most cars. When my dad pulls into the pits, he says that the power just doesn't quite seem as good as it used to, and that it doesn't pull past 5500 as hard as it used to. While I am exiting the pits, multiple tents get blasted over the pit wall and into the hot pits! The wind is really gusting, although it is dry out. A few laps into my driving stint, I see the temperature start climbing. I radio in that I'm getting to 200F, where the temperature had been sitting rock solid at 180F. Just a few corners later the temperature starts to rocket up and I cruise it into the cold pits for the car to cool down. We discuss thermostat and other possibilites, then I loop around the pits slowly and the temps drop. I decide to take it back out on the track to see what happens. Just like at Portland.. I start pushing on the car again and temps are still right at 180F.. how strange, and frustrating. That pit stop dropped me from 20th to 29th. I get back to 25th with a fastest lap of a 2:08 before the car decides to randomly overheat and I pull into the pits to end our race for the day. We swap in a known good fuel rail (complete with good injectors) as it seems like our fuel mileage is a little too good. Please don't overheat.. (8/31/2014) - 9 hours - Ridge Motorsports Park: My dad heads out on course for the first stint and sets a 2:07 lap time! He says the car is working good and feels great. My dad is still out on course and after about an hour we radio my dad to ask him how much fuel he has left and he says he has 3/4 tank. What?? That cannot be right.. fuel gauge must have quit working.. The temps are holding rock solid and the car is working good. My dad pulls into the pits in 9th place on lap 44. We can't even get two fuel jugs into the car... how is this fuel mileage possible? I head out in the car and within two laps.. the car has decided it's time to overheat. I pull into the cold pits and let the engine start cooling down. At this point we have realized that our issues are serious enough that the easy fixes have not helped, and we likely have an issue with the headgasket. That's not something we are going to fix in the pits at a race track (I know many of you have done that, but we are not prepared and motivated enough to do that). We figure we will run as hard as we can while we can, then if it overheats, let it cool down, and try for more later. This was really a turning point for our weekend. We had started getting really focused on trying to get onto the podium, and to some degree seemed like fun was equal to doing well in the race. Having problems meant frustration. However once we knew there was no hope for a podium and we would just learn and have some fun runs here and there it changed everything. We were now hanging out with family and friends at a race track, with a car that would at least last for a few laps, so if one of us felt like going out, we could. If we felt like hanging out in the pits, we could. We pulled the spark plugs, and they are WHITE! This confirms that we were running super lean with the other fuel rail, so that comes right back out and the original one goes in. This is super strange, as this was a known working spare.. I head out on track.. and the car overheats on me within a few laps and I pull in. More time to hang out with family and friends! I start chatting with Paul Newman's Revenge, who also drive a 240SX, and they are wondering if I would drive their car to see how it feels compared to our car. Their car has a full 300ZX brake system with custom dual master cylinder and significantly stiffer springs than our factory cut springs. Hey, this is cool, normally I would be too focused on our own race to jump in other people's cars. I get in their car during the next pit stop, but I sit for an extra long stop as their rear pads were worn out and they had to swap them. What they forgot to mention, is that they had Autozone pads in the back before, and were now switching to Hawk Blues. The bias adjuster doesn't work anymore, because the system requires so much leg pressure to work that the balance bar is bent. The Kirkey seat feels like it is straight up, and is definitely an awkward position for me. I head out of the pits, and immediately notice the clutch pedal has a lot of movement side-to-side. As I shift from 1st to 2nd, I accidentally slip the clutch a bit. Oof, I never have this issue in our car, the engagement point seems way too high. Luckily it's yellow when I head out onto the track, but when I step on the brake pedal it just feels like a rock.. and I'm not really slowing down. I start standing on the pedal for all I am worth.. and the car starts slowing down some. Ouch, this is going to be a lot of getting used to! I start to get a little bit of a feel for it, and start pushing the car a little harder, then putting the 150+ lbs of leg force into the pedal for the braking zones. Their engine feels pretty strong (same KA24DE but with a bigger exhaust), but the shocks are terrible. The springs are extremely stiff but paired with stock shocks, so it's as if they don't exist. The car skips and hops in corners that our car has no issue with at all. My dad had decided to jump in Blue Bayou and try to chase me down. As he was closing down on me, I see our old rival Son of Andre come on track and I decide to see how well I can hang with them. Despite the bouncy suspension and brakes that require way too much leg force I am hanging on behind Son of Andre, and my dad is catching me from behind. I head into the sharp left-hander turn 13, and brake hard. As I crest the hill I am trail braking and there is a slight bump and the back end snaps out. I had been drifting at this track in my personal car a few months prior, no big deal, just spin the wheel to catch the slide... except with no shocks and rock hard springs... the back end just won't grip up. I am at full lock and end up in the world's slowest rotation going nose first into the gravel off to the left. And I'm stuck. I have never been stuck on the side of the track before during a race, and now I did it in someone else's car. How embarassing! The only small consolation was.. most people don't know it was me. After getting pulled out of the gravel I pull into the pits ashamed and give my report on how the car felt. Thanks for the opportunity to drive it though! Tech Tip #11: If a car works OK from the factory, make small tweaks, don't start from scratch! Our 240SX with lengthened control arms (for more camber) and cut springs is SO much easier to drive than the one with custom steering column, custom race car brakes, custom suspension setup, etc. We end up 38th in this forgettable race. Ok, we know you are going to overheat.. (9/1/2014) - 4 hours - Ridge Motorsports Park: I head out first and run a bunch of 2:04s, setting our fastest lap at the Ridge! I get up into 6th place before on lap 17 the car decides it's time for me to hang out with friends in the pits. We have a blast catching up with other teams and treating the day more like a track day. We finish a forgettable 28th place but have lots of fun in the process. Tech Tip #13: Don't take things so seriously that you forget to have fun regardless of the outcome! Now for our fuel issue.. this was a bit of a head scratcher. We ordered new fuel injectors.. and those also came up as super lean. We finally figured out that the injectors that came with our mystery engine were actually bigger than factory injectors, and our fuel pump was starting to fail. Since the fuel pump had started failing at the same time the bigger injectors went in... it actually balanced out and we won a race with that setup! With a new fuel pump and new injectors, everything was good. We also bought an Air/Fuel ratio gauge so we could catch these kinds of issues in the future. We also found corrosion on the ECU pins for the knock sensor and believe that is why it was triggering for phantom knock even with the dummy resistor. I believe our ECU was mounted too low in the car and water was able to splash up there. Video overview of the weekend: __________________ Blue Bayou Youtube Channel Facebook Last edited by knate; 04-18-2021 at 01:29 AM..

01-06-2021, 08:07 PM	#11
knate Leaky Injector Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Washington Posts: 117 Trader Rating: (0) Feedback Score: 0 reviews	With an overheating engine, it was time to go through the head and put in a new headgasket. With the head off I put a little work into porting: We were also getting much too familiar with changing brake pads after every single race. We were using Hawk Blues and stock brakes with ducting, but we needed more mass. However going with bigger brakes, meant bigger wheels, bigger tires, which would all keep adding more weight to the car. Not to mention when we had spares of everything, it's an expensive changeover. So we keep changing brakes... We had an S14 subframe (95-98), but with ChumpCar rules we would have to take points for installing it. Cutting/welding the S13 subframe to match the geometry however was free. The S14 subframe has less antisquat, which gives a little better grip under power. Here you can see my very scientific measuring.. Here you can see how raised the front of the control arm is on the S13: Compared to the mostly flat LCA on the S14: This was my solution: When putting the engine together we tried to use an S14 front cover.. and discovered that it causes an oil leak.. We had some room in points, so we put on a header that had come with an engine: Then fit the factory heatshield over it: We had seat sliders, but they were stiff to adjust and we never moved them. So in order to drop the seat a little more, I made some custom seat mounts: We also used an Airbake cookie sheet where the exhaust goes near our heel. This worked fantastically! I kept melting the glue on the heel of my shoe previously.. and it would get quite toasty and uncomfortable. We also installed some more lights for our next race which would have some night running: With the engine together and running and car cleaned up, we were ready for the next race! __________________ Blue Bayou Youtube Channel Facebook Last edited by knate; 04-18-2021 at 01:29 AM..

01-06-2021, 10:57 PM	#12
knate Leaky Injector Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Washington Posts: 117 Trader Rating: (0) Feedback Score: 0 reviews	Ugly Rain (10/24/2014) - 5 hours - Portland International Raceway: With a typical Northwest weather day facing us, we put our wet weather good luck charm on our antenna: We also got a sneak peak at the trophies for the weekend, and there is an AT-AT, I want it! Dave starts in the car on a mostly dry track in 44th place. He still has a bad habit of holding the steering wheel at the top, but is getting much better overall. He runs a 1:35.9 and is in 14th place, but if it wasn't for the penalty laps (for winning a previous race) we would be in 2nd! Nathan Feigion takes the second stint and it has started to rain. His drifting experience really shines here as the car sliding a bit here and there does not spook him and get him to slow way down like some of the other racers. Portland gets extremely slick in the rain, but from geese laying their unpredictable marks on the track and rubber worn into the groove. Coupled with no elevation change on the track, it just gets really slippery. As Nathan's stint goes on the traction gets worse and worse, but he gets up into 8th place. I get in the car next, and while the amount of hydroplaning is definitely very disconcerting, I also have experience drifting on this track with my V8 car. There is a fine line between brave and stupid, and I try to keep from toeing too far over the stupid line and let the front-wheel drive cars go when I am hydroplaning too much and try to keep it on the track. At one point I am coming up to the chicane, a very slow right-hander. I am on the brakes and slowing to turn in a little late when suddenly out of the corner of my eye I catch a yellow CRX that is flying into the braking zone. I turn the wheel to the left, and the CRX goes flying past my nose, missing by inches! Whew, this is nearly the same as what took out our Hawaii 2-4-Oh car! Towards the end of the race I am in 4th, right behind 3rd (Celica Supra) and 2nd (Jetta?). 1st place is our full two laps of penalty ahead of us. With thoughts of an AT-AT on my mind.. I push forward trying to get by the two cars to try snag 2nd place. After the VW blows the braking zone into the chicane, I'm now just behind the Celica Supra which I manage to be patient enough to get by when he also outbrakes himself into the chicane on a later lap. Both cars are just behind me, but as they battle it out behind me they collide allowing me to take home 2nd place. I got my AT-AT! Still one of my favorite trophies ever, as it is the only 'mechanical' one. With the MOV penalty laps, it would have been really close with 1st place. Rain, With A Healthy Dose of Wind (10/25/2014) - 13 hours - Portland International Raceway: The next day we have our longest race yet ahead of us, 13 hours long. Nathan Feigion starts this one off on a wet track in 43rd place. It is slippery, but starting to dry some. Nathan is putting his drifting skills on display as he slip-slides his way to the front of the pack, although with a longer race we now had 3 "Margin of Victory" penalty laps. Dave gets in the car on a mostly dry track, which still has the treacherous damp areas at the edges and wet soggy grass all around it. While he is nervous over the radio, he keeps it together and brings the car back in one piece. Nathan Feigion gets in the car next, and the rain is back. While he is out there, some severe wind picks up, and starts destroying pop-up tents! We manage to get multiple ratchet straps across ours to keep it from folding and falling apart, but some tents decide to jump the wall and make a run through the hot pits while others just decide to fold in half and give up life where they are. Again Nathan slithers through traffic and keeps us in great position. I get in the car next, and it has started to dry out. Nathan Feigion gets his chance to drive the Paul Newman's Revenge 240SX. He has very similar feedback to them as I gave, much too stiff without enough damping and way too much pedal force for the brakes. The wind is still really kicking around, which in most cases is not affecting the race much. However at one point I get to the back straight where I see some leaves swirling around in a little dust devil. As the car hits it, I get tossed around a bit and have to correct. Definitely not what I expected to see out on track! Dave goes out next for a dusk drive, which is one of the most difficult times. He forgot to put masking tape on his visor, so he didn't have the option of using that to block the mirror. Having lights shining in your mirror and constantly changing lighting conditions is always difficult. I go out next and it is now fully dark. I have my masking tape on my visor, so I am able to help block out the really aggravating bright lights in the mirror. Compared to the last time we drove at night though, we have now switched to a convex mirror instead of the multi-panel 'wink' mirror. This makes it much better! Now two white dots means there is a car, rather than making many different reflections in the wink mirror. Dave goes out for our last stint, and while we complete 395 laps compared to the winner's 393, we finish the race in 3rd place due to the 3 MOV laps. We were behind the #10 Martini Racers VW Golf and Dog and Pony Show Mahre Brothers, both fantastic competitors and great people to hang out with. Luckily it rained most of the day, so that is the only reason our brakes made it that far! We swapped the brakes in the evening again and get ready for a third race of the weekend. Still Burning Oil (10/26/2014) - 6 hours - Portland International Raceway: I get the honor of starting our last race of the weekend in 9th place. This race our MOV penalty has finally dropped off, so no penalty laps! It is wet and quite slippery out (even more so when some fuel is spilled on the track), and I am struggling to keep up with the front-wheel drive cars on the slick track. The back straight is nearly a game of chicken as there is a partially dry line on the right, and a wide sweeping off camber turn (back straight is really a misnomer). I turn over the car at the end of my stint at 8th place. I haven't lost anything, but didn't make up a lot of ground. Dave goes out next, fairly quickly having to dive off track to avoid a spinning Miata. It's still slick out there, but just barely raining. PIR is like driving on an ice rink in places with our car able to easily spin the tires in 3rd and 4th gear. During Dave's stint he is braking for the chicane, and locks up the brakes. He manages to avoid a car and use the runoff into the chicane, but it's a close one! The sun is out and Dave pits the car in 5th place, having made up three places! The rain starts to fall again as Nathan Feigion hits the track. Later Nathan tells me that he "had a moment" in the car on the back stretch. I say, "Oh yeah, me too" but don't think too much of it. His moment was quite a bit different than mine.. While going into turn 8 he shifts into 4th gear and the back end starts moving to the right. No big deal, Nathan countersteers with it to the right and gets it under control. The next turn, turn 9, is known as the back straight, but as I said earlier, it's not a straight. It's a long sweeping right hander with a cement wall on the right, and then grass and cement wall on the left. If you touch the wall on the right, you are bouncing off of there and then through the grass and hitting the outside wall. I've seen it multiple times, often times it totals the car. This is where Nathan has his "moment". At close to 100mph he is steering right, on the drying line next to the wall, and the back end starts moving out on him. He keeps his foot in it, just calmly countersteering, now starting to look at the wall towards his right. As the back tires get into the more wet pavement the car continues to rotate and he has to give it another big helping of countersteer, now looking right at the wall. Easing out of the gas he manages to get it back in line without it tank-slapping into the wall, which is now just inches off the right side of the car as he continues down the back straight. He shifts into 5th, shakes his head a bit, and continues on. Nathan takes the car home into 3rd place, with the Mahre Brother's Dog and Pony show in 1st place. On this engine even though the head was nicely rebuilt, we are still burning oil and having to add oil at every pit stop. Our next race is at Laguna Seca, so we decide to build an entirely new engine and bring our current one as a spare. It's three days of racing in California, and we don't want a possibility of not being able to race all three days. At the end of the day our lucky duck helped us to bring home three different trophies. The now all-too-familiar for us impound. Look at those tiny brakes! Also look how filthy the car was.. those are silver wheels. During impound we have to jack the car up and let people look at the car for 30 minutes. Most people were pretty uninterested or baffled when they looked at our little 4-cylinder engine and super tiny stock brakes. After impound we would then put the wheels back on, bring it back to the pits, jack it up and then swap the brake pads out, bleed the brakes, and then typically leave when it's dark and we longing for a nice warm bed. Now off to go build a new engine and a way to store it.. __________________ Blue Bayou Youtube Channel Facebook Last edited by knate; 04-18-2021 at 01:29 AM..

01-06-2021, 11:00 PM	#13
knate Leaky Injector Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Washington Posts: 117 Trader Rating: (0) Feedback Score: 0 reviews	Every engine we have had so far has burned oil. Enough oil that we are checking the oil at every pit stop, adding a bit, and heading out again. We are jealous of other cars that roll into the pits and don't even pop the hood. Since this engine burns oil after a fresh head, we know that it's bottom end, so we yank it out and keep it as a spare. Another thing I want to work on is getting more real-time feedback from our data in the car. It is very useful to look at the data later and see why one driver is faster than another, but sometimes I want to know if it's faster to take an earlier apex, but I won't know until I get on a laptop later. I have a Race Technology DL1 with the small display, but trying to read numbers on that in a corner is nearly impossible. I decide to see if I can make something that will be easier to see. This is my first proof of concept, just learning to drive some LEDs and an LCD display. Initially this is just based off of a potentiometer for input. The next evolution is to get it talking to the Race Technology through serial. For this first test I was using horizontal acceleration as the output since it's easy to see it change just by tipping the DL1. The further I tilt the DL1, the more the LEDs show. Next I got some multi-colored LEDs, a dimmable LED driver, a smaller Arduino, and fit it into an old stereo faceplate carrying case. The LEDs are Red/Orange/Yellow/Green/Blue as they go across. I also added water temp, water pressure, and oil pressure warning lights. With that project out of the way, we also wired up the car with wireless video. We chose to go with the setups used for RC airplanes mainly due to how expensive it was to use cell phone data for race car video. Being able to see what the car was doing live on the track seemed like it would be really handy with a monitor in the pits. This led to an interesting looking little blue antenna on the car. This transmitted back to our pit station exactly what the GoPro was seeing. We got our freshly rebuilt engine into the race car: So we then moved to making our transport setup for our spare engine. With a little hacking, chopping, and welding, we had a car that would roll into our race trailer. We added the shelves to help make use of space: At home in the trailer: Good use of space and neatly packed with our spares for Laguna Seca: __________________ Blue Bayou Youtube Channel Facebook Last edited by knate; 04-18-2021 at 01:28 AM..

01-21-2021, 06:40 PM	#20
Toxocara995 Join Date: Jan 2021 Location: Indiana Age: 25 Posts: 2 Trader Rating: (0) Feedback Score: 0 reviews	I've been reading this thread for the last 2 hours while getting tattooed and I am in love. So we'll written, it's like a novel. Ready for more! Sent from my HD1900 using Tapatalk

03-27-2021, 11:53 PM	#27
Zenki_Kouki.5 Zilvia Member Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: 671 Age: 32 Posts: 162 Trader Rating: (0) Feedback Score: 0 reviews	great stuff! It's nice to see people doing other types of racing with 240s.

03-28-2021, 09:27 PM	#28
Alex Mcknz Join Date: Aug 2020 Location: Florida Age: 30 Posts: 30 Trader Rating: (0) Feedback Score: 0 reviews	I had so much fun watching videos and seeing the progress of this build.

03-30-2021, 08:08 PM	#30
knate Leaky Injector Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Washington Posts: 117 Trader Rating: (0) Feedback Score: 0 reviews	PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/2/15) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway: This is our first race with the new brakes, and a new format for us. This week is a combination of endurance and sprint racing, and we had only done endurance races so far. We also had ChumpTrucks in two for this weekend! These are some pretty wild beasts and very entertaining. I take the car out for our first practice runs with the new setup. While the extra grip feels good, there is something unnerving about the way the car handles. When I push the car really hard and get a lot of lateral G's, the back end starts to get nervous. Pushing hard into turn 10 (very fast left hander), the car seems great.. then suddenly a snap of oversteer. We had been running both front/rear swaybars, but when I pull into the pits I decide to disconnect the rear sway bar to see if that helps the back end. As I'm laying on the ground unbolting it, someone swings by to tell me, "Dude, when you were going through turn 10 you were three-wheeling!" Well, that explains it.. and confirms that disconnecting the rear sway should help. I take the car out again, and confirm that the snappiness is gone and have my dad take the car out. For this first race, Dave starts in 19th place. This time around it was just my dad and myself racing. Dave gets us up into third, and it's now my turn. The extra grip feels great, although with cut factory springs there is a decent amount of body roll. The brakes squeal any time you touch the pedal, to the point where it becomes completely engrained into my brain and I can pretty much ignore it. I turn our fastest lap ever in the car at 1:33.7 and return the car in 3rd place. Dave is in the car again, and gets called for a black flag for passing under yellow. I reviewed the video later, and was not able to find it happen. The black flag knocks us back to 9th place. It's now getting dark, and an out of control Acura Integra hits both my dad and a Probe while dive-bombing into a corner. Luckily the damage to our car is minor, and Dave continues on and pits in 5th place. It's dark now so I get my stripes of tape on my visor and jump in the car. It's time to see if I can turn this into a podium position! The headlights are definitely not as bright as I would like.. but they are somewhat workable. I have to use very specific reference points on the track. Exiting Turn 6 becomes ".. roll in the throttle, aim left.. 1 second.. 2 seconds.. white paint stripe, turn right... Ok, there is the apex of 7.." In some ways I actually do slightly better at night, as it FORCES me to use my markers exactly. There's really no ability for my brain to try to get my throttle foot to lift coming to a corner early.. because I can't see it. I turn a 1:33.4, our fastest ever PIR time before it starts to lightly rain and throw some more variables into the mix. Since most people slow down at night, I was able to work my way back up to 3rd place again. Another trophy! This time it was a very cool looking dragon. And the best part? We did not touch the brakes at the end of the evening! Video Overview: PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/3/15) - Sprint #1 - Portland International Raceway: The sprint race addition to the event is an absolute blast! When we have a long race, you never want to venture too far away in case you are needed. But for the sprint race, if there is an issue the race is over anyway, so there is no problem going to the stands and watching. This is also one of the only times we've had that many competitors up in the stands together. It was a great atmosphere and a lot of fun. Dave takes the Sprint #1 and finishes 9th overall, 3rd place in B class. Classes were done by engine size, and we were in the 2-3 liter class with our KA24DE. PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/3/15) - Sprint #2 - Portland International Raceway: I get in for Sprint #2, and start of in 7th place. I get a good jump at the green flag, with two Mustangs and a Porsche 924 turbo in front of me. A pesky Miata keeps making his way into the fight, but eventually falls out of it. I slowly pick off one car after another, until the Porsche and I are battling it out. I pass him, he passes me back. He can't shake me but I can't stay ahead of him. Finally as we keep pushing each other further and further, he spins while braking into the chicane. I win the race by 36 seconds, which means we ge a "Margin of Victory" penalty of 36 seconds applied to our next couple races. This isn't exactly fair to my dad, who was out next. Sprint Race #2 Video: PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/3/15) - Sprint #3 - Portland International Raceway: Dave goes out for Sprint #3, and he finishes in 12th overall, 4th place in B class. PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/3/15) - 6 Hours - Portland International Raceway: The next race is a six hour endurance race. The car has been working great, and the brakes are still working nice and strong. I start the race in 19th place in the late afternoon. I have the top of my visor taped up in preparation to act as a sun visor. I am battling it out with various E36s, including #177 Finally Racing. They drive clean and are fast, and are difficult to pass. I finally manage to sneak by them, then it's on to our friendly rivalry with the Dog and Pony Show Mustang. I pit in 3rd place with a fastest lap of 1:34.5. Dave is in the car next, and the sun is really killer at this point. On the front straight it's directly in your eyes. Dave also employs the taped visor trick and starts putting in some solid laps. The sun sets, and eventually it's completely dark and Dave is still circling the track. He sets a lap time just a second off of my pace at 1:35.5 and pits in 2nd place! I get in the car and things are going well. The car feels good and I am creeping my way closer to the Lexus SC300 that is in 1st place. One problem however, is my headset never got plugged in so I have no communication with the pits. The Lexus is factory rated at 70 more horsepower and is also a great handling chassis. It's heavier than our car, but this is a bit of David and Goliath. In the dark my headlights finally pick up the black Lexus in front of me. I pressure my way past the Lexus, but then get caught up on lapped traffic and the Lexus disappears into the distance. I can catch them in the corners, but they have the horsepower advantage. I manage to get by them and keep them behind me by the time the race ends, only to find out that I was actually a lap up, and I fought that hard just to give us an extra lap of Margin of Victory penalty. Oops! 6 Hour Endurance Race Video: PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/4/15) - Sprint #4 - Portland International Raceway: It's a new day and Dave goes out for Sprint #4, and he does great! With the MOV penalty of 26 seconds for winning a spring + another 30 seconds for winning the endurance race, he runs a personal best 1:33.9 and finishes 4th overall and 2nd in B class, which would be a 1st place overall with no time penalties! PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/4/15) - Sprint #5 - Portland International Raceway: I take Sprint #5, and with the 56 second penalty I effectively need to lap the entire field, in 30 minutes. I am very focused, and in the Zone. The first lap I get past all the cars except for the two MK3 turbo Supras. The second lap I make it by them. My brain is calm and my senses are heightened. I am noticing things that I have not felt before. I can feel precisely how much grip I am giving up when I am not smooth enough on the brakes exiting the last corner. I can see the path I want to take through traffic ahead of me as if the other cars are just cones in an autocross course. Well.. moving ones that don't want me to pass them, but you get the point. I feel like I have hit the next level in my driving, and I am extracting that extra little bit out of the car I couldn't feel before. During this session with 18 laps, I turn 10 laps faster than my previous fastest lap! In those 18 laps I manage to lap every single car... except one. And while I don't get a trophy for this race, I came off the track feeling like I had really won something. I had just found the next level in my own driving and ran a 1:31.984, less than a second off of the fastest lap of the weekend in our little 4-cylinder! Sprint Race #5 Video: PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/4/15) - Sprint #6 - Portland International Raceway: Dave gets in the car for Sprint Race #6. We are now down to just a 20 second handicap for me having won a sprint race. Dave finishes in 4th place, 1st in B class. PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/4/15) - Sprint #7 - Portland International Raceway: Well it sure was fun being in the Zone in the previous sprint race.. but I'm not quite there this time. Things are going well, but I don't have Super Feeling or even Spidey sense. I get hung up trying to get past one of the Toyota Supras, and while I can get a good run at him, I just can't get a pass to stick before he walks by me on the straight. I also have a 20 second time penalty, so I need to also put more than a 20 second gap on him and that's just not happening. I finish the race in 2nd overall, 1st in B class. Sprint Race #7 Video: We got a super cool Batman trophy for our 1st place in addition to a little Predator for my sprint race and the dragon for 3rd place the first day. A very successful weekend! And here is the best part.. I measured the brake pads after the race. We used up only 3 millimeters of front pad, and essentially none off the rears. That is with 13 hours of endurance races, 3.5 hours of sprint races, and another hour of practice! Finally some brakes that are not a maintenance nightmare, this is the best upgrade we have ever done for the car! You can see the rears were hot and working.. but no measurable loss of pad thickness. Here's a view of the dust shield turned brake duct. You can also see our camber spacers, currently set to 'MAX' (the other side says 'POOP'). A new series called Lucky Dog started by Cathy McCause popped up, but with their first race happening in the same month as our Chump Car race, we were not planning on doing it. I was contacted by Mark Scholz, who's rental driver had caused our crash at Laguna Seca. He said his car was not going to be fixed in time for the race, and he wanted to give us his spot. Wow, not going to turn that down. Thanks Mark! It was originally planned to be my dad and myself again. Then disaster struck and my dad had a heart attack and needed a triple bypass. While the surgery was successful and he was going to be OK, there was no way he could race. One of our friendly rivals #177 Finally Racing put together a Get Well card and signed it with their whole team, forever cementing them as an awesome team and great friends. Now with a new series and a free entry, I asked Nathan Feigion if he would sub in, and he was up for it. So next up will be a late October race at PIR with Lucky Dog! __________________ Blue Bayou Youtube Channel Facebook Last edited by knate; 04-18-2021 at 01:19 AM..

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