You all have heard the story piecemeal, via intermittent posts. here
it is, as I've written it for another forum....
What is it about merely thinking "I want to enter this race" that
causes things to go wrong? There is no mystery why racing breaks
things. You are pushing things to their limits, not their design
limits, but their physical limits, on occasionally a little bit
beyond.
I cannot remember a time when I wasn't interested in cars. When I was
7 years old, I'd draw pictures of dragsters. When I was 9, I'd sit in
our Datsun 510 (bluebird) and pretend to race it, using the clutch and
everything. I think that it was in November of '86 that I went through
the Bondurant 4-day course. I remebmer that as I drove up to Sears
Point the night before classes, the song that was playing on my CD was
Clannad's "journey's at an end", I did not realize how truly prophetic
that would prove to be.
In February of '88, I went through the SCCA drivers school and got my
racing license. Over the next seven years I spent most of my money,
time and credit on racing. It possibly cost me at least one job, and
definitly cost me big chunks of both my love and social
live's. Unless, of course you consider spend most of your nights,
alone or with scruffy beer guzzling reprobates in a cold garage to be
a social life.
In '95, shortly after the start of my brief marriage, my racing pretty
much came to an end. Racing may not have cost me my marriage, but my
marriage pretty much cost me racing. Being a serious junkie, I didn't
totally give up the "habit". By teaching with a local car club at
their open track events (http://www.nasaproracing.com), I'd get free
tracktime. It's not racing, but it takes the edge off of my jones.
In 1998 I went up to Portland to drive a friend's car in a low-budget
stock car enduro the day after my birthday.. I wasn't feeling well. It
turns out that I had pnumonia, The companyt hat I worked for also went
out of business that weekend. It was not my best birthday ever.
In 2000, Team Continental from Portland held a race at Thunderhill
racetrack, about an hour north of Portland, over Labor Day weekend. In
short, the one club which my MG is legal to race with, drove 500 miles
to hold a race on one of my local tracks, the weekend before my 40th
birthday. On top of that, the car that usually wins the class that my
car is in is the same make and model as mine. Granted, that car is a
full time race car and mine is a "race legal" street car, but given a
home track advantage I could at least dream of giving them a run for
their money. In short, my driving sucked. Years of "playing nice" at
drivers school had taken the edge off of my driving. (*) On the other
hand, it was like giving a recovering alchoholic a shot of whiskey.
Over the past year I've been working on regaining my edge. Pushing the
car a little bit closer to the limits, paying attention to my lap
times. Taking the drivng just a little bit more seriously. As I had
hoped, TC once again will be having a race over Labor Day Weekend. A
couple months before the event I started preparing. I started shopping
for parts that needed replacing, or upgrading, to make the car race
reliable. I even repaired the fender that had gotten crunched last
year, and took my MGBGT to Earl Schieb for a 20/20 paint job(**).
The night that I got the bumpers, lights etc. back on the car after
painting it, I drove it to a dance in Oakland to show it off. On the
drive back I realized that my rod bearings were indeed histroy. The
engine only had 24,000 miles on it, but about 2,000 of those were on
ractracks (16-20 hours a year on racetracks, more than many racecars
get). I also had had the fitting to an oil line break which caused me
to basically dump all of my oil out on the freeway, not good for
bearing longevity.
Friday night, nearly a week later, I finally had the new bearings
in. The rod bearings, as expected, were trashed, the mains looked just
fine, so I kept the old ones. I hooked the fuel & ignition up. There
was water in the radiator, but no fanbelt, and the motormounts were
loosely in place. If things went wrong, I didn't want to have to undo
the last couple of hours of work to fix them. The car fired up, made
great oil pressure, and a really bad noise. It was an intermittent
hollow thunking from deep in the engine compartment.
I gave up for the night, got up early then next morning, pulled the
oil pan and rechecked all of the bearings that I could get
to. Everything looked just fine. Nothing seemed to be hitting in the
motor. The 7/16th" wrench that I had misplaces was NOT in the oil
pan. I did notice, however, that the downpipe for the exhaust was
actually touching the block. I hoped that the nasty noise was the
exhaust hitting the block because the motormounts had been loose,
buttoned everything back up and fired the motor up again.
The car fired right up, had her normal throaty exhaust note, and
didn't make any extra, expensive sounding noises. I finished putting
her back together and for a test drive, headed up to a friend's
birthday party about 50 miles away. She had good oil pressure, and
ran reasonably well. Power was up from what she had been the previous
week, but it still didn't seem quite right. She'd occasionally hiccup
when cruising down the freeway, and I had noticed some nasty buildup
on the plugs (granted they were likely over 5,000 miles old and I had
had a couple problems with a head gasket). When I got home, late that
night, I did a quick compression test: 110, 60, 130, 100. Not good,
but not too surprising either. Rather than a brakejob, Sunday would
be spent putting the low mileage ported head and a new headgasket on
the car. I bitched and moaned about how wantng to go racing seems to
be as effective at causing things to break as actually racing, but I
had expected to replace at least the gasket if not the head anyways.
After getting a much later start on the day than I meant, by late
afternoon I had pulled the head. There was some really weird buildup
around one of the exhaust valves, but I had a pretty fresh head ready
to go on anyways. I then noticed that the pistons did not look
good. OK, so there was a lot of coke buildup, but there were also
rectangular divots in said coke buildup on piston #4. There was also
little bits of piston missing around the edges, showing me more of the
piston rings than I really wanted to see.
A new set of Venolia pistons is only about $250. They also take
several weeks to make them up and ship them, too late for a race in
two weeks. Then there is the fact that my dad is having heart surgery
next week, and will need me to babysit him when he gets out of the
hospital. This is going to play hell with the aggresive deveopment
schedule at work, which is already stressed because a couple of the
developers on our team decided that it was time for them to go to grad
school, not that this will change the delivery due date. In short,
racing is just not in the cards for me this year.
As long as I have to replace the pistons, rather than putting in the
8.8:1 pistons, I can install 8.0:1 pistons. Why would I want to put
in lower performance parts in my track car? Because a company in
Australia, called hi-flow, sells a supercharger kit that bolts on to
an MGB in about 4 hours of work (as reported by someone on the mgs
mailing list). With the 8.0:1 pistons, this can be good for over 60%
more horsepower. Considering that last year the car was putting 75bhp
to the ground, this sort of infusion of power would bring her up to
the acceleration ability of a new honda civic. This would be a really
good power return on investment, except for the detail that if I had a
few thousand dollars to spend on Trick Racing Shit, I'd be that much
closer to paying off my debts so that I could afford to race on a
regular basis. The reason that I'm not racing is very simple, I'm
trying to get out of debt.
Besides, for what it would cost me to do all this cool stuff to the
MG, I could probably buy a used Miata, which out of the box would
probably turn a faster laptime than my MG would, even with the
supercharger. I'm fairly sure that if I were to sell the car, as is,
for the piddley amount that I could, and buy a used Miata, I'd be
further along towards faster laptimes, for less money than if I tried
to fix her up, that little bit more.
So, rather than having a racecar and an impending race in a couple of
weeks, I have a freshly painted, nearly complete, mostly assembled,
set of parts for something that loosely resembles a racecar, and a
major conflict between what I want, and what I should do.
(*) If you ask, I can send you the URL to the story of this lesson in
humilty.
(**) When it drives by at 20mph from 20 feet away, it looks great.
--
I can't go back and change time, but I can make up for lost time.
lrc@red4est.com http://www.red4est.com/lrc
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