2007 racing season

First race of the year for the 2007 race season.
I usually race earlier in the season but this was the first Conference (ICSCC) race at Pacific Raceways this year. Races at Portland usually begin as early as March or early April, but I haven't been able to get to any races there yet this year.

During the winter I retrofitted new Corvette Z06 front brakes to my car to improve the braking and compensate for the extra horsepower & speed from the engine I installed last year. I was eager to get my car on the track to evaluate the performance and to see what effect that would have on my lap times. Saturday morning Kyle and I towed the racecar to the track, registered, got our pits all set up and got the car through tech. Lisa, Melissa, Alex and Skyler got there around lunch time. The weather was cloudy and it was threatening rain. The Saturday morning practice session was on a damp track and I had to spend most of that session bedding my brake pads and heat cycling my tires. After lunch the track dried out just in time for my group's first qualifying session. I went out and tried to get some decent lap times. I could definitely feel the improvement of my new brakes. After a couple warm-up laps I strung together four hot laps that all felt like they were pretty quick. The car felt good as I really pushed it for this first time this year. After my qualifying session I was anxious to see the lap time results. When they were posted it showed that my best lap time was 1:34.038 qualifying me to start 4th on the grid. That is a little more than 1 whole second faster than my best lap time from last year. I was pretty happy with that but I felt like there was probably at least another second or so that I could shave off that time.

Sunday morning it was raining pretty hard. The track was really wet, so I knew my second qualifying session would not show any improvement from my Saturdays qualifying session. So when out group's time came to go out on track, I just took it easy and practiced my lines. We were the second group to race after lunch. The weather was still bad with rain and water on the track. I didn't have any rain tires so this looked like it was going to be a wet and slow race and I wasn't going to be very competitive. As we gridded up I just resigned myself to the fact that I would have to just let everyone behind me pass right on by because I wouldn't be able to have any traction with my slick race tires on the wet track. Sunday morning a Viper had qualified ahead of me and bumped me from 4th to 5th on the starting grid. When race time came and I reported to grid, I noticed that 4 of the first 5 cars on the grid all had their slicks on! I was really surprised because with a wet track, they wouldn't be able to have any better traction that me.

We left the pre-grid and began to follow the pace car around the track for the start of the race, all of us trying in vain to get a little heat in our tires so we might have a little traction for the first turn. As we came around onto the front straight we all bunched up waiting for the starter to drop the green flag. At the last possible second before reaching start finish, the starter threw the green flag and we were all off! The water on the track threw up such a spray from everyone’s tires that it made for near zero visibility. I just let everyone behind me that wanted to pass right on by rather that defend my position and risk crashing. I figured that I would simply strive to finish the race in one piece and collect a few points rather than force things and risk crashing or injury.

I was passed by about 16 cars on the first few laps of the race. On about the second lap I began to notice that my engine had a miss and an exhaust leak at the header. I figured that maybe the header leak had burned through a spark plug wire or something. I considered just bagging this race and calling it a weekend, but for some stubborn reason I decided to stay in the race since my car was still drivable. After about the sixth or seventh lap the rain stopped. The track began to slowly dry out in places. This allowed me to pick up my pace and I quickly began to pass the cars that had been passing me and soon I was almost up to my normal race pace. Pretty soon I had worked my way all the way up to 3rd place overall! I maintained that position for the rest of the race and at the checkered flag managed to finish 2nd in my ITE class and 3rd overall, being beat by the ITE Viper and a GT2 Mazda RX7. Not too bad considering my engine was only running on 7 cylinders and I had let almost the entire field pass me at the beginning of the race. Most of the cars in my group had rain tires on and when the track started drying out they could not keep up the pace without overheating and destroying their expensive rain tires.

I limped my car back to the paddock and it was pretty clear that my car was done for the day. It was running really rough and the exhaust leak made it sound pretty bad. I’d have to spend some time later on troubleshooting the problem. I was hoping for something simple like a burned spark plug wire, but my gut was telling me it might be a bad head gasket or something worse. All in all it was a successful race weekend and we all had a good although a little wet time at the track. I have uploaded a video of my fast qualifying lap for your viewing pleasure. This is my fastest lap time to date on this track. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ct-Jgnk0qCQ