OK, here's the rundown: Mike Brent Best Lap - 2:26.857 Aaron Ellis 2:26.872 David Cox 2:27.613 Rusty Cook 2:28.549 Bob Berman 2:29.422 Tom Hastings Andrew Brenkus Tom Shaughnessy Thomas Bartz Jack Walbran Rick Eskola Daniel Bowser Thomas Donovan Ken Holzer Phil Green William Cobb Mike Sheehy Jef Jorgenson Herb Noble Steve Jondal Peter Zak Charlie Schlismann Jim Elder Clinton McMahan Darrel Greening DNS Bob Giesen DNS
My weekend started off pretty well. Running on some fairly old tires, I was able to cut over 5 seconds off my best time from 2004. This was to be my first race since the June Sprints of 2004. (took last year off to become a Dad!). I qualified 16, knowing I had more speed to find. I broke down and got a new set of tires for the race. They felt GREAT for the first couple laps. Then the straightaway speed that I seemed to have all weekend started to evaporate. EGTs were only like 1100. Next lap 1050, then continuing to go lower. I found myself following a 4-car battle. Going into Canada Corner (T12), I'm following Charlie fairly closely into the braking zone. His car was right on the edge of the pavement, and when he touched the brakes, it seemed to pull him into the dirt causing a wild looking spin. He was still mid-spin when I went through turn 12. Power continued to drop, as did EGTs. By the end of the race, I was running (if you call it that) only about 950 degrees. Cars are blowing by me and I can't do anything. I feel like a Vee... FINALLY the checker comes out... On the cooldown lap coming out of the kink, the clutch side cylinder drops out, as my EGT goes to like 400, and have NO power. Continued to the paddock. With my foot to the floor, I could muster about 60 MPH. Stopped in the paddock spot and the engine dies.... First, I checked spark plug boots. I had one pop off during the second qualifying session with about 3-4 minutes left in the session. But that wasn't the case. They then announce there's a HUGE storm coming our way real soon. Look out to the east (I think it was east), and it was black skies. We scrambled to get the car and stuff in the trailer. The next morning was the first time I was even able to pull the body to see what happened. I quickly noticed two holes in my Aaen pipe where the frame mount used to be. Two holes about the size of a quarter each in the tail cone section really kills the power! Since I was so low on power, I was flat through T1, almost through T2, T6, and T14. Along with the ones you are supposed to be flat through. Well, with the engine running like this, I used more fuel than normal, and I ran out of gas during the cooldown lap in one tank, and in the paddock for the other! That explained the loss of one cylinder, then the other. This marks 3...THREE times at the Sprints that the car ran good all weekend until 1/2 way through the race. Guess I'm going to try to kill this monkey next year... Phil _______________________________________________ F500 mailing list - [email protected] To unsubscribe or change options please visit: http://f500.org/mailman/listinfo/f500 *** Please, DO NOT send unsubscribe requests to the mailing list! ***
