Well, everything (almost) went to crap...
Thursday - fired new engine, had a rod noise, well windage tray noise.. fixed by 2:00am Friday morning, after pulling engine back out of car... *Lesson* You can't remove a rear sump pan while the engine is in the car...
Friday morning - had header welded after I noticed it was broke on two of four primary tubes (Ron - that's what killed my power at Savannah, well that and a melted primary coil pack) Didn't notice until I was under car looking at how to get afforementioned oil pan out, the cracks were hard to see.
Saturday - running good, seemed slow on the top end. Had lots of torque at the bottom.... weird... so,
Saturday evening - changed front pads - normal maintenance as I knew the porterfields were getting thin - found that the inner pad was too large for the rotor, it was made incorrectly with too much material vertically! It was dragging inside the rotor... Grabbed the box of backup PF pads I carry, they are V8 pads! Yikes... off to Autozone, who now carries nothing, and of course, they have no PF pads in stock, so I take Duralast pads, how bad could they be?
Bad... but on the plus side, first lap of qualifying Sunday netted a 4~500RPM increase on the front straight, so we're going in the right direction by fixing the dragging front brakes. On the downside, I am so afraid of these crappy pads that I'm braking at around the 200 instead of the 100 where I normally give them a jab.
Qualified like 15 spots ahead of Saturday which is good, then rain starts just before the race Sunday. Primary sponsor, who has not been to any race in 5 years is there, with his wife, and guests from Chicago... all are getting wet, my wife is scrambling to get umbrellas from the garage. Of course we're all on dry tires, but with my overweight pig, the first couple of laps I'm picking off cars because when you weigh as much as a Mack truck, a little water doesn't hurt your traction...
Race is going good.... 5-6 laps in we're well into the top ten, not breaking any lap records but putting on a good show. Track is drying, RX-7 loses it in the dogleg, and cuts back across track at 90 degrees to normal direction. I think I'm clear when *whack* I'm spinning towards the wall... two feet in, I get it collected and miss the wall, get moving again. Next lap, black flag for me.... well Flag me.
Go into the pits, pit marshall says I'm dragging my *muffler* ? I said, my muffler? It's on the passenger side... I got hit on the driver's side! Other pit guy comes to the passenger window, holding my *bumper*, says I'm good to go.
Off I go, but lost a bunch of spots. Still not sure where we finished, since some moron stole the results from tech, so they had to post them at T/S where they could watch them...
Anyway, I had a lot of fun, and the car is definitely on it's way back to being competitive, but now in addition to all the normal crap I have to section in a quarter panel and get a new bumper... oh fun.
Ron, Mike, you're both doing well. Let's see what Superchips can do for my monster now. They have her for the whole week to try and tune the POS. When I'm done and back together, we'll have to play again
