Hey there Guest!
Hey - did you know if you click on the title of a thread it will take you to the first unread post since you last visited that thread?
but were afraid to ask: 
STOP!! Never post your email address in open forums. Bots can "harvest" your email! If you must share your email use a Private Message or use the 
smilie in place of the real @
Pretty Please - add it to our Events forum(s) and add to the calendar! >> 
aeronca65t
Great Pumpkin
Offline
The October 23 Watkins Glen worked out great for our little British car, but not without a few glitches.
Three EMRA Sprites at Watkins Glen-Oct 23 trying very hard not to hit those nasty blue walls. (I'm #11)
Our club offered a 3-day event with sprint races on Friday and Saturday, a 3-hour enduro on Saturday and a Time Trials on Sunday.
I got second in class (ST-5) in the 3-hour enduro and won an added trophy ("The Hard Charger Award") basically, because I drove the entire race without a co-driver and persevered with several problems.
Despite the glitches, the car ran like a freight train for the entire 3 hours of actual racing. All told, including about 30 minutes of "sitting around"; time (while they cleaned up crashes and oil spills), I spent about 3 hours and 45 minutes in the seat of the car (other than one quick get-out for re-fueling). Yes, I had a sore fanny afterwards!
Glitches:
~My throttle cable snapped while lining up for the practice grid. As a result, I never got any practice time and didn't get a grid spot either...that's OK, I always start at the back anyway. At any rate, I got the cable fixed...just as well that it broke when it did.
~Brakes that required some serious pumping before every application. The pedal never actually went to the floor, but they were pretty well faded after about an hour of running. I'll put in new brakes this week
~In our first event this year, I'd had the carb come loose (creating a huge vacuum leak). The car would run, but only over about 2500 RPM. Over the Winter I intend to do a better fix of this problem, but I did a "quick fix" for this year and it's worked up to now. When I came in for a fuel stop after 90 minutes, the car wouldn't idle and I recognized the problem. Although I couldn't hear it (ear plugs), the vacuum leak was also causing the car to make a weird whistling sound at speed (some folks called it "the whistling bomb"). I only have a few days before our next 1-hour at Lime Rock;..I'll probably do another quick fix for now.
~And my right front tire was corded by the end of the event.
I have never actually ran this car for 90 minutes of racing before: I wasn't sure if the 8-gallon fuel cell would be sufficient. As it turned out, the car needed 7.5 gallons to be refilled.....close, but fine actually. (this was 5 gallons per hour or about 13.5 mpg at the speeds I was averaging). I'm wondering if the vacuum leak helped my fuel mileage. My pal Mike told me his RX7 got around 6 mpg at the event. At least we can both get by with ordinary unleaded pump gas....the NASCAR trucks that ran our event were getting around 4 mpg on race gas ($7 USD per gallon). That's around $500 USD just for gas to run the event!
An early Spitfire with a 1297 engine led our class until he fried a head gasket. Not that I would have complained, but the other cars in our class run strictly stock engine internals and this Spitty sure seemed fast for a stocker (we have kind of an honor system for verifying engine mods). Anyway, my pal Ken won our class in a bone-stock CRX; a well-deserved win, too.
We ate in the Seneca Lodge (a fav of the F1 crowd in the 60s). We also saw the Falls (in Montour Falls) and ran the van around the old "street track".
Leaves were pretty too.
View from the MINI pace car during restart (I'm at the end of this line
More pix:
https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v170/aeronca65t/Cars/belts_on.jpg
https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v170/aeronca65t/Cars/restart_enduro.jpg
Three EMRA Sprites at Watkins Glen-Oct 23 trying very hard not to hit those nasty blue walls. (I'm #11)
Our club offered a 3-day event with sprint races on Friday and Saturday, a 3-hour enduro on Saturday and a Time Trials on Sunday.
I got second in class (ST-5) in the 3-hour enduro and won an added trophy ("The Hard Charger Award") basically, because I drove the entire race without a co-driver and persevered with several problems.
Despite the glitches, the car ran like a freight train for the entire 3 hours of actual racing. All told, including about 30 minutes of "sitting around"; time (while they cleaned up crashes and oil spills), I spent about 3 hours and 45 minutes in the seat of the car (other than one quick get-out for re-fueling). Yes, I had a sore fanny afterwards!
Glitches:
~My throttle cable snapped while lining up for the practice grid. As a result, I never got any practice time and didn't get a grid spot either...that's OK, I always start at the back anyway. At any rate, I got the cable fixed...just as well that it broke when it did.
~Brakes that required some serious pumping before every application. The pedal never actually went to the floor, but they were pretty well faded after about an hour of running. I'll put in new brakes this week
~In our first event this year, I'd had the carb come loose (creating a huge vacuum leak). The car would run, but only over about 2500 RPM. Over the Winter I intend to do a better fix of this problem, but I did a "quick fix" for this year and it's worked up to now. When I came in for a fuel stop after 90 minutes, the car wouldn't idle and I recognized the problem. Although I couldn't hear it (ear plugs), the vacuum leak was also causing the car to make a weird whistling sound at speed (some folks called it "the whistling bomb"). I only have a few days before our next 1-hour at Lime Rock;..I'll probably do another quick fix for now.
~And my right front tire was corded by the end of the event.
I have never actually ran this car for 90 minutes of racing before: I wasn't sure if the 8-gallon fuel cell would be sufficient. As it turned out, the car needed 7.5 gallons to be refilled.....close, but fine actually. (this was 5 gallons per hour or about 13.5 mpg at the speeds I was averaging). I'm wondering if the vacuum leak helped my fuel mileage. My pal Mike told me his RX7 got around 6 mpg at the event. At least we can both get by with ordinary unleaded pump gas....the NASCAR trucks that ran our event were getting around 4 mpg on race gas ($7 USD per gallon). That's around $500 USD just for gas to run the event!
An early Spitfire with a 1297 engine led our class until he fried a head gasket. Not that I would have complained, but the other cars in our class run strictly stock engine internals and this Spitty sure seemed fast for a stocker (we have kind of an honor system for verifying engine mods). Anyway, my pal Ken won our class in a bone-stock CRX; a well-deserved win, too.
We ate in the Seneca Lodge (a fav of the F1 crowd in the 60s). We also saw the Falls (in Montour Falls) and ran the van around the old "street track".
Leaves were pretty too.
View from the MINI pace car during restart (I'm at the end of this line
More pix:
https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v170/aeronca65t/Cars/belts_on.jpg
https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v170/aeronca65t/Cars/restart_enduro.jpg
A friendly reminder - be careful what links you click on here. If a link is posted by someone you don't know, or the URL looks fishy, DON'T CLICK. Spammers sometimes post links that lead to sites that can infect your computer, so be mindful what you click.