First off, thank you everyone for a fantastic weekend! I am sure the entire team is suffering from sleep deprivation, especially after having to deal with the blizzard over Donner Pass!
Anyway, on to the fun stuff.
Overall
We finished 20th, our best finish in our four Lemons races! That included a 3 hour penalty hold for our third black flag (more on that later). We completed 387 laps on a demanding 2.6 mile, 20 turn (30 turns if you count each apex) course, for a total of 1,006 miles! Over 1,000 miles of racing and we did not have a single mechanical failure (well, the windshield wiper on the driver side did come loose).
The Magic Rabbit is tough and dependable. Our wheel bearings started yowling about 6 hours into the race, but never failed. Our transmission started grinding on down shifts, so we all went to double clutching. Then the tranny started grinding on up shifts, so we went to double clutching up or nice a easy “Granny Shift”( count to two). And everything held together to the end! Oh yes, the oil leak is GONE! The o-ring on the speedometer cable opening fixed it.
Now, the disappointing news is we got three black flags when the rain and then SNOW, then rain again, arrived a 4:15am Sunday morning. Brian spun first and then I spun twice as your back tires were running almost bald at that point. That gave us our third black flag in an 8 hour window, which in Lemon’s Rules means you must sit out for three hours! Damn! Before that we were in 4th place! Can you believe that, we were running in the top five from end of Hour 4 to end of Hour 21!
We were as high as third place overall at end of Hour 6 (oh by the way, Hour 6 was the end of my stint J). OK, we were third overall also at end of Hours 7,10,and 11. After Hour 11 the Eyesore Turbo Miata had worked is way back from being 45th at end of Hour 1 to push us down to 4th.
We proved the tortoise and the hare theory, we were the slowest of the top 10. Our fastest lap was 13 seconds slower than the winner, Eyesore Racing. But no mechanical issues, 2 to 2 ½ hour stints and quick clean pit stops put us there!
What If:
What if we had some fresh rubber for our back tires and Ted and Brian didn’t spin out. Assume conservative 3:00 laps for the three lost hours, that would give us 60 more laps finished for a total of 447 laps. That would have place us 4th Overall and just one lap behind our friend Tony and his Def Leppard Nissan Sentra. Be a little more aggressive for the last two hours, when Rye would have been out and the track was now dry. Say 2:50 laps, that would have put us on the same lap as Tony’s Def Leppard car. Could we have gotten ahead of them, SURE! So I will say we had a 3rd place run!! Amazing when you think back to our first race just 10 months ago.
DDR Hot Shoe Award
Remember, we tried to remind ourselves that this was a 24 ENDURANCE race, smooth, consistent, safe lap times….but wait, it’s a race! Gotta go fast! Our Goin’ for Broken DDR Hot Shoe Award goes to Tedders, lap time of 2:43.9 on lap 191. This was during his second stint, around 8pm, sun had just gone down, track had cooled (like it was every warm!), lighting was perfect, all the stars aligned. In racing this is known as the Happy Hour. 44 of Tedders 120 laps were under 2:50, great job. Even though we all know you ALMOST took out the race leader (at the time) Spin in Out at the top of “The Slide” corner! J Congrats Tedders.
Our invited driver, Brian Hamilton, was nipping at Tedders heals with a best time of 2:44.3 on lap 76, his first stint around 2pm Saturday. Very interesting on Brian’s times was his comment that he felt in “the zone” during is dead of night run at 4am, 6 of his top 25 times came in the 10 laps from 4am to about 4:30am when the rain/snow started.
Crew and Pit Stops
A big thanks to Peter and Kelly, they kept us on track and the pit stops show it. Our best was 3:56 and that included the time driving into and out of the pits! All but one pit stop was 4 to 6 minutes. Also, we took advantage of some all course yellows to pit. We also learned that the course workers changed out every 8 hours and the second time we planned it to do our pit stop and tire change during that 24 minute all course yellow!
OK, that is my first report. More reports and maybe some graphs in the coming days.
A very tired, but very pleased,
Mr. Unruly
Team Captain, Dirty Duck Racing
