High Plains, July 4-5th

After all his trials and tribulations, Kevin made it to HPR on Friday evening. Little Bill had to work a night shift from 7pm Friday to 7am Saturday. Not sure how he does it!

We had practice and I was shaking stuff down and suddenly started losing oil pressure so I shut the car off and got towed in. Investigation pointed to an oil pump issue. I initially thought it was terminal for the weekend, but in talking to Jesse and others realized that it is likely a pressure relief valve internal to the stock Miata pump. Not unheard of. The car seemed to keep up to 40psi of oil pressure but no more. Not awe inspiring but probably okay. I decided to try to get out for qualifying, but then the starter chose that moment to quit. I was laying under the car changing it while I heard our group on track for the 15min qual session. Kind of reminded me of a recurring nightmare I have -- car's on jack stands, don't have my suit on, group is on track... some of you are familiar with this. Anyway, I rush to get changed and had some friends change tires. I got on track with just under 5min. I was hoping for 1 lap so I wouldn't have to start last, but luckily got by the starter just before they threw the checker so I got one more lap and nipped Kevin for the pole. We both ran 2:03s. Bill ran a 2:05 before he got a flat.

I figured I'd keep one eye on the track and one on the pressure gauge and start the race. Pressure held consistent 35-42psi for the rest of the weekend. I got the jump on the F field and Bill had a quick off and on in the final corner which gave me a good gap on lap two. From there I was able to slowly pull away. We were all battling high temps. Kevin was on Bill for a while but had to back off because his car was getting too hot. Jensen was 4th, Wagner 5th and Curtis broke a rod end in his shift linkage. Blust was very sportsmanlike in letting the F cars go at the beginning when he could have probably gotten by some, if not all, of us. Much appreciated.

Sunday's grid was the same and went pretty similar in the race. I made some improvements to the handling on my car for Sunday and was able to edge away throughout the race. Bill was out of tires. Kevin was out of voltage and fell back.

Matt won both days in EP going away. Alex Burnett's HP car was there, but I never saw him except at a distance on Friday evening. Not sure what happened there.

I need to pull the motor to fix the pump before Pueblo.

Results and interviews: http://www.scca.com/events/1967588-high-plains-majors
 
Was looking forward to a knock out drag out fight this weekend, it ended up like a heavy weight taking on a couple of fly weights. I might of had something for Eric on Saturday but a sleep deprived early turn in had me chasing grass hoppers and prairie dogs when I should have been motoring down the front straight on Eric's tail. Kevin was right there but the heat got to his Honda just as Eric reported. Looked like Eric had a little speed on us on Saturday and made it look easy.

Sunday Eric flexed his muscle and showed his suspension tuning skills as well. I need to work on between race adjustments, probably wouldn't have changed the results much as my tires were done early in the race. Kevin was there for a couple of laps, but as Eric reported, low voltage sabotaged any chance he had of fighting for the top step. I feel lucky to have come away with a couple of 2nds as Kevin's problems gift wrapped the 2nd step for me on Sunday.

It was nice to see Curtis and Randy make the trip to High Plains, hope to see them at Pueblo as well. Paul Jensen gets the Lucky guy award this weekend, finding a failing sidewall on the inside left front during nut and bolt prior to the race on Sunday. Looking forward to Pueblo, need a start to get qualified, we will see if I have anything for the rest of the FP field. Hopefully it will be a closer contest than the one at High Plains, may need to find a way to bolt 100# on Eric's car :whistle:
 
I'm still tired as hell this morning from this past weekend. What was supposed to be a ~15 hour drive to the track ended up taking ~53 hours, but after some time at a Freightliner service center and a night at a KOA campground in Abilene (which was actually pretty nice!), we made it around 9:15pm Friday night. Although I know I privately griped about there being practice sessions on Saturday morning, for once I was very thankful for it, since I obviously hadn't seen the track yet. That went ok, I got a good idea of the layout and flow of the track, which I actually really enjoyed especially with all the elevation change, but yeah wow, really wish they would've opened up two or three of those slower corners, because some of them are just painful. For qualifying I put on some new scrubbed tires and was able to set my fastest lap of the weekend, on my 8th lap of the weekend, only about half a second off Eric's "one lap dash" to the pole. My car felt good on the new tires, but I could tell that I was relying on the rubber touching the ground to turn my car way too much. Already knew this probably didn't bode well for me, especially since my bigger rear sway bar is in Ohio. The last time I ever felt the need to have that thing was 2010....

Started the race that afternoon, as the sun was blazing down and surface temps were stupid high. Was the meat in the middle of a three wide sandwich into Turn 1. No thanks, ya'll have fun. Bill swept around the outside, and was clear into Turn 2. Him and I ran real close for several laps until by about lap four my warning lights were flashing for high water temp. I'm pretty sure that's the first time that's ever happened since I installed my current dash/data system five years ago. Look down, yup, water is 225. Now start purposely running out of Bill's draft, which helped bring it down under my 220 warning light trigger. By about lap 6 or 7 the front tires were already giving it up pretty badly though, so the engine heat didn't really matter a whole lot as I highly doubt I would've had anything for Eric or Bill anyways.

Saturday evening while prepping the car for Sunday, I put my big battery charger on the car and did my other routine maintenance and checks. The charger was acting kind of funny, and in retrospect probably wasn't doing anything. It's been kind of a POS for a while now, and my own fault for continuing to trust it. When I removed it before heading to bed that night, the readings it was giving me still didn't make sense, so in the morning I stuck my little backup 6-amp charger on it, and sure enough the battery was taking about as much from it as it could. I unhooked it before heading to grid and hoped for the best. Saturday's race had also tortured my front tires, but again with the heat and issues I was having, I went into it not expecting to give Eric or Bill much of a serious run for finishing position, so I chose to save my other pair of new-scrubbed front tires for another day, and just swapped left-to-right the set I ran on Saturday. Oh, and also big thanks to Curtis for giving me a bottle of Water Wetter and a gallon of distilled water for Sunday! The car ran quite a bit cooler, despite the ambient and surface temps being even higher, only about 205-210 or so. However, yes, I was unable to get the battery up to a good state of charge and drove to grid with only about 11.3 volts. By lap 4 of 18, when I was still racing close with Bill, I started getting low voltage warnings (under 11.0). After that the race just became an effort to finish. Everything that didn't need to be on to keep the car running was shut off, short shifted, coasted into braking zones, etc. Honestly, I'm not sure how much it was really limiting me anyways, since my front tires had also turned to complete and total s**t by about lap 6. In the end though, it made it to the checker flag, which I'm still amazed by. It actually died going down the back-straight on the cool down lap while having the clutch pushed in, but luckily re-fired after popping the clutch. It died again pulling up to the scales, and that was it for it.

That was easily the most I've fought the handling of my car since 2009. High altitude, high ambient and surface temps, equipment problems, and not having the right parts in my trailer - a butt whooping was received. Ok, enough excuses. Overall though I had fun. I did enjoy the track, the event seemed very well ran, and even the drive there and back was nice for my wife and I as it was a lot of the country we had never seen before. Plus our new puppy got to come along to his first ever race weekend, and did an awesome job!

The rig is now sitting at a RV & Boat Storage place on the south-side of Colorado Springs, awaiting Pueblo. (I'll be the idiot at the track Friday morning doing all of his car prep in his paddock spot!) We left the RV at 7:15pm (mountain) in out rental car, and arrived home at 10:15am (central).....we drove for ten hours in just Texas! Ugh, still recovering from that one. My great-lakes/east-coast ass isn't use to this stuff. :lol:
 
Kevin, having driven through Texas a number of times to go to Phoenix and California for races I can tell you that Texas is 1/3 of the trip from Daytona to Fontana.

You can go on I-20 to I-10 or you can just take I-10 all the way, there is not much change in scenery.

I did enjoy going through Dallas, though. Visited the School book Depository one trip and visited the "conspiracy museum" on another trip.
 
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