Thunder Chicken Racing

S0, last night was a pretty late night for the 2 amigos…   this morning was pretty miserable; but, we did make it to the test day by 0830ish and were on track by 0930. It was just me and Ted until about 1:30, when RJ got to the track.  David didn’t make it until about 3:30.

The first set of tires we tried were not exactly confidence inspiring but it was immediately evident that we had cured our snap (understatement of the year) oversteer problem.  The car was pretty neutral handling. I can’t even begin to describe the world of difference since the car was last on the track.

However as I’m sure some of you know, Ted and I will always find a way to tear up the landscape and had both had at least one 4 wheel off excursion before lunch with Ted’s mini adventure ending with him stuck in a sand trap on the outside of turn 7.  He was actually trying to let faster traffic pass but the cold tires just couldn’t contend with the adjusted racing line he chose.

My agricultural racing event was just as exciting. I was going through turn 4 and carrying on a conversation with Ted on the radio when I should have been paying attention to my line when I realized the car was in a 4 wheel drift and headed for the outside of the track. At some point i realized the surface i was racing on was no longer asphalt but a very fine sand.  For those of you who haven’t experienced this, it is not a good feeling.  However the racing gods smiled upon me and i managed to keep the car relatively parallel to the track and rejoin the racing surface without further incident.  The best part was I forgot to let go of the PTT ( push to talk) button throughout the whole experience. Ted got a pretty amusing earful… after that we switched to the toyos and saw a marked improvement over the skinnier hankooks.  The lap times continued to tumble.  all of us improved our lap times by 5-8 seconds.

Even RJ had one slightly less dramatic event, paralleling the track between turn 2 and 3.  We all like to keep an open mind and try to find new and inventive lines around this track but that one was quickly discounted as not likely to be beneficial… lol

David finally made it to the track around 3:30 and we immediately put him in the car to get used to the new setup. In the rush to get him on the track we forgot to have him get the proper wristband and he rolled down pit lane just a bit faster than I could run. Thanks to Kaye at Roebling Road we had the problem fixed in no time and David out on track turning some great and very consistent hot laps.

We had been narrowing tire pressures all day and were pretty happy with where they were at that point.  After the last session David pulled the car back to the paddock and we checked the pressures one more time.  Some how we had gotten a leak in the right rear tire and it was only holding about 20 psi.  we soaped the tire very thoroughly and still couldn’t find the leak… The low tire didn’t seem to affect Davids driving at all though because his lap times never varied more that 3/4 of a second.  Glad we brought 3 sets of tires with us.

Finally made it to Tech Inspection around 6:30 and amazingly were only given 5 penalty laps for our various necessary minor budget infractions. This surprised me because the tech inspector docked his own brother 20 laps for a cat that he helped build!!

I think we have a good chance of placing well in the races tomorrow and Sunday if we can just keep the laps consistent and unplanned pit stops to a minimum.  But not if I don’t get some sleep… Stay tuned, I will try to mobile update during the race tomorrow as much as I can.

AJ