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Day 1:
Day one begins very, very early. Due to the oil line fiasco of yesterday Darren and I wake up at 5am to head into Vegas and meet with our hook-up. Unfortunately due to daylight savings time, we actually have to wake up at what to us is 4 in the morning. Sleep is highly overrated.
The Radical helicopterPahrump to Vegas is a pretty straight shot and we make it there and to American Racing by 6:30. So we get some coffee and wait for Pat to show up, and wait. At 7:30 she shows up and admits that she forgot about the whole daylight savings thing, but she made it. Pat unlocks the door and we head inside. American Racing is a haven for racers in the Vegas area. Redline, Royal Purple, seats, radiators, oil coolers, wheels, ducting; you name it they have it. Lucky for us, they also carry a full line of AN fittings and Stainless hose. The first problem we run into is replacing the fitting we have. It seems the great minds at Mazdatrix decided to use a metric to -AN adaptor than is only special order and no one carries. Makes installation easier but pretty much destroys the purpose of using -AN fittings in the first place. So, we go to option 2. If we can't get an adaptor to fit the stock oil cooler, we buy a new one. An hour later we leave the shop with 6 feet of stainless hose, a fluidyne oil cooler, and enough fittings to make everything work. We leave behind $500. Ouch... Back to Pahrump we go. Vegas to Pahrump is also uneventful, we stop by the track and drop off the stuff and make a list of things we need. To ACE hardware we go to buy bracket making materials. Finally with everything we need bought, we fab up mounts for the oil cooler, cut and fit the lines, fill the car with oil and start it up. No leaks, beautiful. Session 3 is coming up so we hop in the car real quick and head out to the track. Everything works well except for the tires, street tires suck. Anyways to make 20 minutes into a few sentences, we rattle off some times to put into a solid 3rd place and we are 1 second faster than last year even with way less grip. I guess power is good for something.
On TrackOur competition
Session four, Joel heads out by himself. He comes around about three times and then we don't see him anymore. Shit. At the end of the session he comes back under his own power. It seems the throttle linkage jammed open on him and he was forced to shut the car off and pull off track. We search the car and find the culprit, a throttle stop came loose and jammed the linkage. Easily fixed with a screw driver, at least the car survived the day. After packing everything up we leave to Vegas and day 2. Competition notes: Mike and Eddie with their Miata had a bad day, after blowing an oil line in an earlier session they blew a quarter sized hold in the side of their block the last session. Ouch. Either they are going to drop a new engine in the car or rent a car, but they will continue. The 330i and Miata with Foo driving managed to turn laps about 1-2 seconds faster than our one good session. We're pretty confident we can catch up if all goes well at LVMS... -Matt (8 am Monday)
