As I promised in the last Blog entry here is the long writeup.
While the last one had the facts, this one is filled with all kinds of details no one cares about, but it will have pictures. People like Pictures so I guess you can ignore the words and look at the pretty pictures(thanks to Barb Noverini.)
So on to the boring word part.
Well after last years race most of the comments about our car referred to it as the Slow Purple Olds. No one really wants to be known as the Slow Purple Olds so we decided to fix that the only way we could think of. We repainted it.
Now we don't want to take credit for the design to much since its an homage to this car.
Which was originally built by the Chief Perp 10 years ago for the Double 500. Figured a little homage to Jay couldn't hurt.
With a spiffy new paint job we headed up to Road America on Sunday (it was a Monday/Tuesday Race so we weren't going really really late). While stopping for gas we had two people ask about the Cutlass, the first asked if it was for LeMons, and how they always wanted to do a LeMons Race. The next just wanted to know what we used it for.
We got to Road America after noon, to find out the staging was pushed back til 2, but we found a place to sit and start cooking dinner and do a little repair work on the exhaust that got disconnected while loading it on the trailer.
About the time we were ready to eat the paddock opened up to let people find spots. We decided to eat instead of move so we got a spot a bit back but really didn't matter since they let us use the hot pits for the race.
By the time we finished eating and got ready to go to tech it started to rain.
I asked for an umbrella girl but I never seemed to get one. In fact if I didn't bring an umbrella with me I'm pretty sure they would have let me get soaked.
Well tech went pretty painlessly and it seemed Jay got a big kick out of the new paint scheme. So much so that with the line waiting for BS and the shortened time for tech Jay signed us off with a class c 0 laps. Of course this meant we didn't get to go through BS. If we had to do it again we would have just gone through to hand out the bribes and stuff in order and not bother to have Phil sign anything. Either way we did give them bribes anyway and after getting everything else we headed back to the Paddock to setup camp.
Of course once I no longer needed to sit in a car without front windows it stopped raining.
Monday morning came and we sent Pete out for the first stint.
The car seemed to be running well, and the first hour went off without any problems whatsoever, well at least for us.
Next went out Albert. Pretty sure early on he got the fastest lap for us over the weekend which was nice but sometime during his stint the tailpipe got disconnected again.
We didn't know this until we saw him coming down through the hot pits. It would be OK most of the time except for left turns where it would drag on the ground. Unfortunately the hot pits were after pit out so after putting gas in the car I jumped in and did a lap so we could get in and fix it.
After a little time wrenching, hammering and other things. We were back out on the track. The Olds seemed a lot more stable than before in the turns. So I had some fun running around until I looked down at the fuel gauge mid stint and realize I was down to an 1/8th of a tank. I guess we forgot how to properly use the cans and did it with the vent down causing it not to work right so we probably only put in half of the can in. Well I called in the fuel situation, and all I got was a nonchalant you got 20 minutes left. Since no one else seem to care about the car running out of gas I had to go into fuel conservation for the rest of my stint. It did show me something odd about our car though. I've heard nothing but bad things about GM Fuel tanks but it took until we were on E before I started getting fuel starvation in corners which puts our little A-Body as possibly the only GM that had a properly designed fuel tank of that era.
Once we put some gas in the tank and got Duffy strapped into the car I went and looked at our standings. For the most part C class was pretty tightly grouped. We were a couple laps down from most the pack except the Red Shirts that were 5 laps up on us.
So now with a fixed exhaust we had to chase down the Canadians.
That was how the rest of the day went. Trying to catch the Canadians. For the last stint of the day we put in enough gas in to finish off the day, stuck Albert in the Ciera and sent him on his way. I walked over to see the standings as the new ones were being posted. I guess somehow in our chasing of the Red Shirts Nissan Pulsar we missed the fact that it had been sitting in the paddock with a busted engine. All our chasing did was get a us a bit of lead on the other C Class cars. We decided to keep this fact from Albert during his stint so we ended the day with a 5 lap lead in class c in 26th overall barely in the bottom half of the 51 car field.
Of course now that we were in 1st place we actually had to work on the car to make sure it would be ready for the next day
The next day I was the first driver.
Since we had a bit of lead, and we put on old used brake pads I thought I would take it easy to conserve the car. This I did for most of my stint, well up till the point that the Lotus Elite popped up in my review mirror. The Conserve plan was replaced with the racing the Lotus plan. Also it seemed that the plan to let the faster cars by also got put on the back burner.
Eventually I got passed by the Lotus while I was stuck behind the Squareback and a line of A and B class cars boxed in while they passed us. But it was fun while it lasted, in fact was the most fun I had during the weekend.
Shortly after that my stint ended and I handed it back over the Duffy.
Shortly after my stint ended the Lotus came in the paddock. It seems we may have had a bit more fun than the old Lotus was capable of having anymore. They were hoping they just overheated, but the laps left on that engine were pretty limited.
As for us the Olds kept going round and round. The only problem we had was trying to explain to people that it wasn't a new car. It seems everyone assumed it was a different car. The Slow Purple Olds was not only no longer Purple but somehow not quite the Rolling Chicane it was at Autobahn last year. While the faster teams could still pass us I guess it was a bit more of an effort than it used to be.
Whether they believed it was the same car or not the Cutlass Ciera kept going and continued to slowly pull away from the MGB-GT.
That pretty much sums up day 2 for us. We kept going and somehow ended up crossing the line 1st in C class, and 19th overall.
The Lotus on the other hand crossed the line a bit more dramatic than us.
Well with that done we could finally live up to our name and get a big pile of nickels. Well not quite. For whatever reason we once again denied Nickels and instead got a check for $500
Well at least we got another shiny trophy and by my calculations our $200 car has earned us $2001 in prize money which is over 1000% profit, if you ignore all the other costs it takes to race which of course still puts us quite a ways in the red.
The End?
5% Discount Code: