We got to the track at 7 am on Sunday so that we could prep the car for the 9 am start. The car was in reasonable shape and the main thing we wanted to was to replace the transmission mounts and the driveshaft with parts we had managed to scrounge up from various disreputable sources :). However just as we were about to jack up the car we realised that we had left them at home . Seeing that we had no way of further patching up drivetrain, we got to work fixing the front end bodywork which had taken a few hits on Saturday and was dangerously close to the radiator. Rob hooked a chain from the car to the trailer hitch and stood on it force the bodywork back into shape.
Guy once again started the day and gave a good account of himself. Midway through his stint there was some contact which ripped our front bumper out of the car and left the radiator unprotected. Though Guy was still continuing, we knew that it would be too risky to run for to long without a bumper. At this point we went around the pits to see if we could scrounge up any spare parts. In a typical display of Lemons (and racing) spirit one team gave us about 5 feet of hollow iron bar while another team lent us the use of their welder. Unfortunately I don’t remember the team names but major thanks to them for helping us out. We lost about 45 minutes as Rob welded the bar in as a replacement bumper and then Gabe went out for his first stint.
Unfortunately just a few minutes into his stint we has a run-in with some very heavy Detroit iron that felt that smaller cars should magically disappear from its path. Since we haven’t yet mastered the fine art of teleportation, there was some fairly hard contact which ended with the other car getting a flat tire and our car slicing its lower radiator hose. We pulled the radiator and got to work fixing the powersteering bracket which was bent out of shape. After another round of begging in the pits I got a spare hose from the Edge Motorworks team while Team Blue Goose donated a hose clamp. In all we lost about 20-30 minutes during the fix.
At this point we had lost some 3.5 hours due to repairs and we were way behind on laps. Gabe, Rob and Jyri did some great stints but we knew that our only chance of making up ground was to do long stints and pass people while they pitted. I got into the car with a full tank of fuel and went out to do a hour stint. The lack of a real front bumper meant that I to be extra cautious about traffic and sometimes had to step HARD on the brakes to avoid any front end contact (even got rear ended a few times as a result :(). After a few warmup laps I really got into the groove and was pulling of some pretty fun passes through the traffic. My laptimes were good enough that the team asked me to stay out there as long as possible. About 90 minutes into the stint, driver fatigue started becoming an issue. Interestingly the effect first started during the yellow flag laps - I started feeling a bit hot and uncomfortable. However the second the flag dropped adrenaline would start flowing and the fatigue would disappear and I would get back to race pace. After going through another 2-3 yellow flags I decided that enough was enough and ended up pitting after an hour and 45 minutes on track.
Jyri took on the next stint and was doing quite well until he was punted off the track. As you can see in the video, he recovers well from the first hit in the esses but a few seconds later he gets hit again while going through the right handed sweeper and goes into the tirewall. This ends up bending out left control arm and completely messes up our toe settings. Rob once again came to the rescue and eyeballed a toe adjustment to get us back on track. Gabe then took over for the final stint of the race and despite a couple of ‘moments’ he brought the car safely to the end.
We finished 44th out of 85 cars which is a pretty good for a group of Lemons newbies who were lying in 62nd on Saturday night. A big thanks to our sponsors - Dietsch Werks, Griffin Motorwerke, ChaseCam, Livermore Performance and Autopower - for helping us prep the car. All of us had a great time and we are already planning what we need to improve in time for the December race at Thunderhill
Our tactics for the race were to run 45 minute stints at a healthy pace and to avoid any unnecessary contact. Guy was our first driver and got to experience the Lemons start procedure. All the teams are asked to lineup in the pits and are slowly let out onto the track for yellow flag laps. Once the whole grid is on the track, race control randomly picks a team and throws the green flag the next time that team crosses the start/finish. At this point the race is on and its every man for himself. This is a short video of the start of the race - Guy enters the frame from the left at the 40 second mark.
We were keeping up an excellent pace and were among the faster cars out there. Our pitstops, while not spectacular, were decent enough and saw Rob and Jyri taking stints 2 and 3 respectively. About 2 hours into the race, Jyri pitted and I got into the car for stint #4.
I started out pretty tentatively, this was after all my very first race in a real car. On lap 2 I started to feel really brave and tried to pass a couple of cars around the outside of the banking. While I did end up going around the cars, I was unsighted going into the esses and found that someone had dragged quite bit of gravel right at my braking/turn-in point. This being Lemons there was no debris flag and I basically had two choices: a) squeeze the car on my left and attempt to avoid the gravel with the possibility of getting broadsided if it doesn’t work out and b) hit the freestanding tire barrier and hope for the best. Having seen other cars hit similar barriers without too much drama, I decided on option b and hit the brakes which locked the second I hit the gravel.
As you can see I hit the barrier with a glancing blow and knocked them over. You probably also saw that there was a third option available - turn right, avoid the barrier and skip the esses. Unfortunately I didn’t think of it at the time so that route really didn’t come into play. After the it the car seemed to be working fine and after slowing for a few corners I continued on my merry way. The following clip should give you a good idea of the action we encountered on track. Watch the grey Subaru wagon (Team Scooby) as it tries to pass me, it was one of the fastest cars on the track but I kept getting him stuck behind slower cars until he finally passes me two laps later
About 30 minutes into the session I came around the banking and was about to pass another car when the back end of the car suddenly let go and spun me around. Luckily the car missed the tire barriers and ended up facing the wrong way on the inside of the first S. I tried putting it in neutral to start the engine but the gearshift had sunk about 6 inches lowers and I could not change gears. I tried starting it with the clutch in but only got an loud banging noise from the transmission with no forward movement. I then sat around waiting for the tow truck and watched cars coming head-on towards me at race speed - I even had one guy blow the turn and drive across the front of my car. After a few minutes the race was yellow flagged and the tow truck pushed me into the pits with the transmission making loud banging noises all the way.
When I came into the pits, we got down to diagnosing what was wrong with the car - the transmission was obviously busted but we didn’t know how or why. When we opened the hood we saw a most interesting sight, the radiator was bent outwards rather than inwards. It appeared that when our car had any forward contact (such as the tire barrier I hit), the engine was actually flexing the engine mounts and moving far enough forward in the engine bay for the distributor to hit the back of the radiator. This motion kept pulling the transmission forward until the transmission mounts finally snapped. At this point the transmission stressed the driveshaft enough that the two piece driveshaft just separated at the joint. /the driveshaft snapping was most likely the cause of the spin - it was equivalent to lifting mid corner which produced lift-off oversteer with no drive to allow recovery. Our car was now officially dead and we did not have any spare parts to fix it.
Enter our in-team mechanic: Rob Dietsch of Dietsch Werks. Now Rob usually spends his days doing high quality repair work on his customers cars, this obviously was NOT the time for quality work so he settled for quick and dirty fixes (emphasis on quick :-)). He started out by removing the two pieces of the driveshaft and used a hacksaw to clean out the joint between the two pieces before mating them together once again. We did not have any spare transmission mounts so he fixed the transmission in place using straps and bolts passing through holes drilled in the car floor. The final piece was to anchor the engine in place using chains so that it would no longer move forward if there was any impact.
The repairs took about 2.5 hours and dropped us to 62 place in the standings. Rob took the car out first to see how it would hold up. He put in some good times before handing it over to Jyri for the final stint. By the end of the day the car had suffered only minor body damage and was still putting in some excellent times. We were just glad to be running at the end of the day despite having such potentially race ending damage to our drivetrain.
P.S.: If you have nothing better to do and want to kill a full 30 minutes you should watch this video of my entire stint.
I am finally getting down to writing my review of our Lemons experience - this first post will be about Saturday setup while following posts will be about things like on-track action, mechanical breakdowns, jury rigged repairs and other bits of lemons fun.
As I had mentioned before, we had some tire wear issues on during our Friday test session. The banked turns were enough lateral load (sustained 1.3 G) on the car that we were blistering the outer edge of our right front tire. While raising the tire pressures did help, there was no way that our tires would last an entire race with such uneven wear. The first thing we did was call pretty much every the tire shop in the Bay Area to find one that stocked Falken Azenis and was open early on Saturday. Eventually we found a place in Milpitas that opened at 8am and Gabe did an emergency tire run to pick up four tires.
The new tires would however only be a bandaid to the tire wear issues - we really needed a way add negative camber at the front in order to get even tire wear. In keeping with the Lemons philosophy of cheap and easy fixes, Rob brought out his trusty strut bender. The strut bender is a hydraulic tool that is bolted to the wheel hub and uses a combination of a positioning chain and a hydraulic ram to bend the strut and thereby adjust the camber on the wheel. Its quite an interesting device to look at and as you can see below, Rob had a large crowd of interested onlookers asking him what he was doing.
Once we had sorted out our suspension, we went to the tech inspection area. The inspection had two parts - first they inspected at the car and the drivers equipment to ensure that we passed the minimum safety requirements. Once that was done we went over to the judge to get our car costs accessed. The “Judge” (who wears judicial robes and a wig) inspects the car to see if it is worth $500 or less. Cars that are judged to be too expensive are accessed a BSF which calculated as follows:
To prevent cheating, all cars will be inspected by a panel appointed by the organizers. At that time, all teams will be given an opportunity to describe the car’s purchase and prep. If the panel believes the $500 limit has been exceeded, it will assign a Bullshit Factor (BSF) equal to one BSF per ten dollars above the limit. The entry will be docked one lap for each BSF assigned. (Ten dollars = one BSF = one lap.) Entrants are encouraged to bring all supporting evidence and make up plausible-sounding stories in advance. Appeal of BSF Panel Decisions: Get real. There’s no appealing this decision. You’re boned.
We did get a couple of questions regarding the cost of the car, especially since we had a new radiator and muffler (the lack of receipts and a bill of sale didn’t help either), but in the end they had to accept that an E30 BMW isn’t worth more than $500 no matter how many new parts you throw on it.
Once we were through tech we went through our final prep and double checked things like the lap transponder, fuel, chasecam setup, DL1, etc… At about 2pm, Jay Lamm (the organizer) called everyone over to the budget truck that served as his office and conducted a drivers meeting over a megaphone. After telling us several times to not to hit each other, he turned it over to the track marshal to explain the flagging situation. Unlike SCCA racing which have some 10 different kinds of flags, Lemons has just 3 flags:
Green: Race is on Yellow: Full course yellow - slow down, no passing allowed. Black: You’ve been a bad boy - come into the pits and roll the wheel of misfortune.
There are no debris flags or stationary yellows to warn of obstructions - racers will have figure out the best way around anything on the track. Additionally cars stalled on track will not be towed immediately, instead the marshals will wait until there is a car in an unsafe position on track before throwing a yellow flag and towing out a bunch of cars at the same time.
Once all the drivers meeting was done all the teams were sent back to the pits and told to line up to enter the track - the 24 Hours of Lemons “ARSE-FREEZE-APALOOZA” was about to begin.
The last video is Nithyas best run (46.5) of the day in the GTI. For someone who almost backed out of her first event, she is becoming very good at this. If you have never tried autocrossing you should come down to one of the GGLC events next season and give it a try - it is safe, fun and the best way to learn car control.
Question: Which Lemons team was using the same technology as Formula 1 teams?
Answer: Team SFF1 was using the same ChaseCam setup used by Formula 1 teams like Renault and Red Bull.
As I’ve said before, the ChaseCam PDR100 Racer Kit is my dream in-car video setup - a solid state video recorder with a lightweight, shockproof, weatherproof camera. When we decided to run the 24 Hours of Lemons I approached ChaseCam to see if they might be interested in lending us a video setup to record the race. I am glad to report that they were very interested in the race and sent us a two full recording setups (PDR 100, bulletcam and camera mount) so that we’d be able to record both forward and backward views.
We mounted the cameras to the rollcage and velcroed the PDR units to the area where the back seats used to be. To avoid having to change batteries every stint, we directly hard wired the units to a 12V line from the dashboard. Once the cameras were aimed all we had to do was pop in a couple of 8GB video cards and we were ready to go. We are still sifting through the recorded video but here is a quick teaser from our rear facing camera. Jyri was driving the car when he gets hit while going through the esses. He recovers well from the hit but a few seconds later he gets hit again while going through the right handed sweeper and goes into the tirewall. Incidentally the blue CRX that passes us in the beginning of the video is Team Blue Goose, a team of EliseTalkers from Texas who finished 8th.
At its highest quality setting, the PDR100 records MPEG-2 at the rate of 4GB an hour. This meant that at every pitstop we had to switch CF cards and download the card data onto a laptop. The only issue we ran into was that the maximum file size on the PDR is 4GB (irrespective of card size) which means that in high quality mode you can only record 1 hour of video. If you are going to be recording video of greater length I suggest you reduce the quality to “normal”. Now if you’ll excuse me I have some 50 GB of super high quality video to sift through.
P.S.: I am in the process of writing up our entry for the December race so it will probably be a week or so before I recap the race and post the video online.
Update from Randy Chase: “The largest single file size is 4gigs but it can record continuously using consecutive 4gig files. For example, a 16gig card will record 4 hours of the highest quality video, but in 4 files. A 32gig card will record 8 hours. The gap between files is less than 1/2 second.” The PDR100 is now officially perfect.
We finished 44th out of 85 cars (full results). Our pace was really good but we lost a lot of time (3+ hours) due to some mechanical issues. I’ll be writing up more detail of how the race went and our band-aid mechanical fixes over the next few days. In the meantime here is some video of the race start.
Yesterday we had a pretty good test day at Altamont. All of us did a few laps behind the wheel to get a feel for the car and the track. The car ran very fast and we all did 54 sec laps with Jyri doing a best of 52. We did have some tire wear issues with our right front tire due to the long banked turns - we will be doing some emergency camber adjustments to the front to fix that.
Here is a photo of me passing someone on the outside of the banking and a video of Jyri doing some quick laps under lights.
One of the most expensive parts of the Lemons car is the seat - a good fiberglass seat will run you at least $500 dollars and even an aluminium seat will cost > $300. Now if you are preping a regular race car thats not a problem, the seat will usually last the lifetime of the car. In our case the car will most probably last only 1 race and it did not make too much sense to spend more than the cost of the car on just one seat. Enter Terry Griffin and Griffin Motorwerke, the west coast Recaro distributor, who offered to lend us a Pole Position seat and the associated mounting hardware.
One of the biggest advantages of getting the Recaro hardware was the fact that it came with a set of sliders. Since our driver lineup has some significant height variation, a single fixed seat position really wouldnt have worked for us. By using a seat on sliders we’d be able to move the seat around as needed to fit the various drivers. I should add that it is possible to transporting a seat in the Elise.
When we got around to actually mounting the seat in the car we came across some interesting problems. Mounting points for the Recaro Seat rails are 16 inches apart while the factory mounting points are 17 inches apart. Since we couldn’t reuse the factory seat points we’d have to drill some holes in the floor except that with just an inch of clearance it wouldn’t be very safe to drill a hole next to the factory point. Also the floor on the E30 is not flat which meant that we couldn’t get a good fit between the rails and the floor. In the end we had to weld some C-channel to the floor and mount the seat rails to the channel. This method did lose us about half an inch in head-room but it was the only safe way of mounting the seat.
Once the seat was in place we came across another problem – the Pole Position seat was actually a bit too small for both Jyri and me. The shoulder harness slots were a too low and the tops of the slots were under our shoulder. In the case of an accident this would lead to spinal compression which really isn’t a very good idea. We got back in touch with Terry and he gave us a Profi SPG XL seat instead. This seat is quite a bit bigger and the shoulder holes are high enough to work quite well for all of us. Best of all since it’s a Recaro seat it just slots into the same brackets as the Pole Position and required no modifications to car. Our race seat was officially in place.
I’d like to give a huge thanks to Terry Griffin and Griffin Motorwerke for sponsoring our team in the Lemons race. I’ll let you into a little know fact about Terry- apart from running his massively successful business, he also lead a double life as a professional F1 photographer. He takes some incrediblephotographs and as a long time member of the F1 circus he knows a good number of players. The next time your at his shop just bring up the topic of F1 and expect to spend a good half hour discussing the sport with a true insider
One of the most important pieces of safety equipment for any racecar is the roll cage. Having seen one car flip in July event, we knew that this one part we we had to take very seriously. The official rules for the race only require a 4 point roll bar and a door bar, but we decided to go all the way and get a full roll cage instead. In fact, one of the reasons we went with the E30 was availability of several bolt-in roll cages for the spec E30 market. After looking around for a bit and contacting several companies, we decided that an Autopower roll cage was the way to go. Their cages are legal for both SCCA and NASA and they are universally regarded as one of the best cage builders in the business. Additionally since they are one of the largest manufacturers of bolt-in cages, we knew that they cage would be well designed and would bolt in with a minimum of fuss.
The next step was actually buy the cage, Autopower does not sell to directly to clients so we had to find a distributor. When I looked up the list I was happy to see that Livermore Performance was one of their distributors. I have been buying brake pads from Monty and Stephen ever since I moved to California, and its always been a pleasure to work with them. When I spoke to them about our Lemons team they were very interested and signed on to become a sponsor. At this point the race was just a month away, and the regular 4 week lead time for a cage would have been too slow, luckily Livermore Performance and Autopower worked some magic and were able to rush us a cage in just 10 days.
The cage arrived as a set of shaped and welded steel tubes which we painted and left to dry overnight. After that we put the car on the lift at Dietch Werks and got to work fitting in the cage. The back section with the actual roll hoop went in fairly smoothly as did the front windshield bars. The door bars did however cause some interesting issues due to the placement and width of the B-pillar post. The roll cage was designed to fit an E30 coupe since that is the car most commonly used in the Spec E30 class. On a 4 door E30 like ours, the b pillar post is about 8 inches further forward than in the coupe which meant that the main cage roll hoop would not line up with the B pillar. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue (you cant use the back door but that not really a concern in a race car), but since the door bars curve outwards from the roll hoop they were hitting the B-pillar and would not fit in place. The solution was to use a sledgehammer and bend the inner sheetmetal of B-pillar about half an inch outwards. This does affect the structural integrity of the pillar, but since we are doing it to put a full roll cage, the car is going to be considerably stronger than stock.
Once the full cage was in place, we drilled holes in the sheet metal and bolted the cage to the car with the included high grade bolts and mounting plates. The final step was to tie the various pieces of the cage using the supplied sleeves which would be bolted across the joints in the cage. This required us to drill a 3/8th inch holes through the sleeve and the cage so we could pass a bolt through. Now this may sound simple but it was actually by far the slowest job. The cage steel is so hard that it takes 10-15 minutes to drill just a single hole and we needed 16 holes in all which meant that it took us a full day just to fit the sleeves. On the plus side though I will feel extremely safe sitting in a car with such a strong cage
All in all the cage install was a fairly simple process and needed only the most basic tools. It may add weight to the car but in terms of improved safety and chassis rigidity it is one mod that was well worth time, money and effort. If you ever need a roll cage, I strongly recommend buying the Autopower cage from Livermore Performance.
Day three of car prep was all about getting the engine running. At this point we had had the car with us for several months but we hadn’t yet heard the damn thing run.
We started up by tightening up the head bolts and putting in a new timing belt. After that we adjusted the valve spacing (space between camshaft and valve stem) and began reconnecting that various fuel hoses and wires. We decided not to put the cooling system in until the engine was in running condition to give ourselves some work room in case we needed to replace any additional parts. After everything was connected back up we added some more oil to the engine and started it for the first time.
After sorting out some initial issues with some blown fuses, the car started on just the second attempt. The cloud of smoke on the side was a combination of an untightened exhaust manifold and some oil burning off. After this major success we decided to wrap up the day and were actually able to drive the car outside to park it. It still doesn’t have a cooling system so we havent run it for any length of time but the fact that it moves under its own power and doesn’t make any weird noises is a great sign.
. Seeing that we had no way of further patching up drivetrain, we got to work fixing the front end bodywork which had taken a few hits on Saturday and was dangerously close to the radiator. Rob hooked a chain from the car to the trailer hitch and stood on it force the bodywork back into shape.
and I basically had two choices: a) squeeze the car on my left and attempt to avoid the gravel with the possibility of getting broadsided if it doesn’t work out and b) hit the freestanding tire barrier and hope for the best. Having seen other cars hit similar barriers without too much drama, I decided on option b and hit the brakes which locked the second I hit the gravel. 
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