Thunderhill 2011 Race Awards...

After getting the Lap Time data for Dirty Duck Racing Magic Rabbit, the Hot Shoe award for Thunderhill Arse-Sweat 2011 goes to Rye with a best lap of 2:27.6 on lap 183. Congratualations.

The Most Improved Driver award goes to Darrell, he went from a best of 2:51.3 last year to 2:35.5, almost 16 second improvement or 9%.

Here are the fastest laps for each driver and comparison to last year:


Not too surprising that all our fastest laps occurred on Sunday, after our new best friend, Jeremy, got our alignment back in shape Saturday evening. The good news is there is only a spread of 8 seconds or just 5% between all the drivers top times. This is what makes us contenders, no weak links (other than our head set connections, but we will fix that).

The Quickest Pit Stop award goes to the team of Ted and Tedders with a driver change and refueling time of 3:11.7 on Sunday. This time includes driving into and out of the pits. Second quickest pit stop was Tedders and Paul on Sunday at 3:15.8. So the common element is Tedders, youth and some quick feet!

And the Best Pit Crew award goes to Peter and Kelly.

And rounding out the Dirty Duck Racing awards:
-Best Brownies award goes to Nancy L
-Best Beans award goes to Nancy F
-Best Salad award goes to Kristin
-Best Track Dog award goes to Dixie Dog

And the DDR Saved our Bacon award goes to the Thunderhill Fork Lift Driver who picked up the front end of our broken car and lifted it onto the trailer. Otherwise, we would have stayed at the track overnight trying to figure a way load the Magic Rabbit.






It takes a fantastic team to race as well as DDR did this last weekend and I want to thank everyone for their efforts.

Mr. Unruly

Thunderhill What IF!!

We had a great weekend at Thunderhill and managed to finish 24th out of 112 starters. Here are the if only and what ifs!....

However, what if:

1.What if Tedders hadn’t gotten caught out by the oil and didn’t spin off the track at turn 9 and our suspension didn’t get bent and the lower A arm bushing bolt hadn’t come loose? First a stop after the spin for the penalty box and then our pit work to investigate the damage took 45 minutes.

2. what if we didn’t have to go into town, buy an “American” oversized bolt, have the human bench grinder of Tedders and Peter grind down the ½ inch bolt to 12mm so it would fit though the bushing and then force the big ass Amercan bolt threads to cross thread into the metric nut (nice track fix!) we would have saved 30 minutes

3. What if Darrells head set worked right away, would have saved 9 minutes.

4. And finally, what if the axle didn’t break with 20 minutes left in the race and I could have taken the checked flag.

Put that all together is a total of 104 minutes lost. Using 2:30 laps (of course we could do them all at 2:30) would give us 41 additional laps! We finished 299 laps, plus 41 would have been 340 laps. The winner completed 361. 340 laps would have put us in 7th overall!!! Just imagine 7th overall!

That would have put us ahead of Spin-n-Out, the B Class winner Porsche 944 “Eco Challenged”, the “B Team” Crown Vic, the Team Harlequin VW Golf Mk2, Caffenine Unlimited BMW, Chump Ganasse Targee (Target) Racing, E=MC Hammered V8 powered BMW, Big Sausage Pizza Delivery, and the Santa Cruz cops V8 powered Nissan Z Hit and Run Racing to name just a few.

We can be top 10 and we will be top 10 in October! A hotter cam, few more tips from Jeremy, keep Tedders on the black and we are there!

More details later, gotta go back to work.

Great race everyone.

Mr. Unruly

Ready for T-Hill

Paul and I worked on the Magic Rabbit this weekend, we have GO and we have STOP. Replaced both front bears, both front A arms and the right front “knuckle” which holds the bearing and the steering arm ties to (we think it was bent). So now we have about 2 degrees negative camber on both sides. Looks good.

Also changed the tranny and we now have all gears again, shifting smoothly. We went with close ratio gearing which should be great for most of the track/s but we may run out of gear at the long Thunderhill straightaways.

Oops forgot the gas cap!

The Dirty Duck Racing Team's Magic Rabbit at the 2011 24 Hours of Lemons Goin' for Broken true 24 hour race at the Reno-Fernley Raceway. The video is in hour 21 of the race, we are in 4th place overall. 6:30 am Mr. Unruly, aka Ted, gets in the race car after our visiting driver, Brian Hamilton, drove from 4am to 6:30 and had rain and snow on the race track.
The video shows my two spins which put us in the penalty box for 3 hours, basically to the end of the race. We finished 20th overall after the 3 hour delay.
Fantastic time, miserable weather, ready to do it again!

Dirty Duck Racing-Racing in the Rain-Fernley 2011 Lemons from Sreddet on Vimeo.

We have lots of colors!

This is a lap chart which plots the position at each hour of the top 10 finishers, plus Dirty Duck Racing #83 Magic Rabbit. Also added in the Model T GT since it lead the race for 12 hours before their transmission failure.

So we had 4th place pretty much nailed down at the end of 20 hours, the Geo Metro Ladybug pushed us to 5th place just before our third spin/black flag and three hour sit down. The Geo Metro then faded, so I am sure if I had just run a little slower turning the wet we could have finished 4th.

Jacked up the front of the car on Tuesday and the front bears seem OK, so it must be the rear wheel bearings that was making so much noise. Besides the transmission grinding issue, I also noticed that we have a prominent exhaust leak somewhere. Hope it is just a gasket and not a cracked header.

Mr. Unruly

Reno Fernley 1st report

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

Lemons Gets Its Cool Back

Been a long time since my last post....busy preparing for Sears Pointless and running the race. Had a blast even though Mother Nature had other ideas, lots of rain on Saturday, Sunday had a dry race track.

Here is a link to an article about Lemons and Racing Getting It's Cool Back. Our Magic Rabbit is shown in one of the pics listed at the end of the article. Picture is of us going through tech and the BS Review. Everyone liked our new addition, the rabbit in the hat!

Take a look:

http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2011/03/a-conspiracy-of-lemons-how-racing-got-its-cool-back/

I will post more pics later. That's it for now.