This wasn’t the normal LeMons race, no, this was run on a 1/2 mile oval with a faux road course in the middle.
75 cars.
1/2 mile of track.
First session, Pete, everything fine like 4th spot 1 lap down, next Jon until the race was black flagged for a 30 minute 4" rainfall. I got in to restart in 5th, nice and easy on a wet track, thought I’d be smart and drive through an apex that was buried under 10" of water.
That shorted something out so I lost power above 5500 rpm, dried out in 10 minutes and all was well. 1 hour in someone didn’t like me passing them, had a solid car length on a clean pass and they tapped me, just enough to get loose. That meant any contact gets a black flag, I gave him a 1 finger salute, took the black flag and waited for the hammer of justice to fall. Judges made us buy 5 ice cream cones. The guy that hit me… got his wristband taken away. Did a few more laps then Ken went out. 30 minutes he came in on a wrecker, sheared off some wheel studs.
We blamed it on cheap wheels and a bad bump in the track but the reality was we had 3-4 opportunities to double check the torque and never took it. 40 minute fix and back on track, then Ken went 4 off on track, “we should know better” 100x penalty. Then Pete back out for another clean session. Jon last session under the lights…
, something, something Grand-Am and he went four off. So with our third black of the day we were parked the last 1/2 hour of the Saturday session.
I started Sunday, took some light taps here and there but no black flags. Jon was next and took a few hard hits, 1 from the old T-bird, he took another hard hit that punted him four off. Ken was last out, with 1/2 hour to go he went four off. The rest of us were too lazy to put our driving gear back on so we left the car parked. Ended up 21st out of 77.
Cliffs:
Saturday: 3 black flags total, broke wheel studs, lost ~80 minutes of driving
Sunday: 2 black flags lost ~30 minutes of driving
Car: 2" shorter in the back, 1" skinnier, and a lot more character
Team: 21st out of 77
One other small note: Fastest lap of the race was set by Pete, our renter who has never done any auto racing, auto-X, just some bike track days:
http://www.mylaps.com/results/showrun.jsp?id=1606452
yes, it was crowded
A bunch of awesome pictures here:
http://www.murileemartin.com/LNE10/LeMons_NewEngland_2010.html