Down but not out...

Leon did not make it all the way through the race but we are not done... No way. I think the team, seen in the photo below, would all agree that this was a blast. This was a great time. I, for one, cannot wait to do it again. If we did not need to rebuild the engine just to race again, we might be driving to Omaha for the next race.
Before I forget, we have to thank our supporters and fans. Thanks to all our fans who came to the race. That was really cool to have all of you out there. Thanks to the Family Miller for making all those runs to the local Napa. Thanks to Team Maikish for picking up the welding tab.
And thanks to the rest of you who put up with us nutballs talking about nothing but cars, firesuits and racing for 3 months.
We learned a lot from this race. We are going to spend the winter putting Leon back together, part by part. I have no idea how to rebuild an engine but I am going to learn. Anyone know a good book on the subject? The goal is to be ready for the Pueblo race in March.

A few words on Porsches and cheaters

OK, if you brought an F'ing Porsche to a $500 car race, you are cheating. That is really all there is too it... you are cheating and that makes you a cheater.
Want to know what a cheater looks like? Check out this loser. He is in the penalty box for... drum roll please... CHEATING.

Here is a great shot... One car is a real lemon. The other is a cheater. Can you tell which is which?Clearly there are different levels of folks in this race. One of the other Porsche teams travels in this Mac truck rig with the professional trailer shown below. What is in that trailer, you ask? Good question. Tools.. lots of tools. And wrenches and stuff too. These tools had a generator, it ran their air compressor and welder. They also had a pallet jack to move their tire mounting/balancing machine. WTF??? Oh, and the F'ing Porsche fits in the trailer as well. Why is that Porsche up on jack stands you ask? It threw a rod... right through the oil pan. See the picture below. It does make me feel somewhat better that all 3 Porsches (yes, there was more than one cheater...or these things are much cheaper than I thought) did not manage to finish the race. Actually, team Leon managed to beat out 2 of the 3 teams in total laps. Let me give you some sense of scale. I could put a can of beer in that hole... the long way. The rod came down with such force, it blew that chunk of the oil pan out. Crazy!!!
The last of the cheaters to stop running was the db that I pictured first. Here they are getting pushed off the track. Apparently the car stalled if the RPMs got below 4000. So they spent all of Sunday in second gear. Up until the engine blew. Come on man! On top of cheating in a car race for junkers, you are going to trash a perfectly good Porsche? That is no way to treat a Porsche. Where are your manners?

Not the only ones...

We were not the only ones to get blown out of the race. Blown engines and thrown rods seemed to be the most common problem. The Saab that led the race all day Saturday threw a rod. Superman's car blew its engine. The yellow Prelude blew it engine, spend Saturday night putting a new used engine in, and blew the new engine less than an hour into sunday.
Below the two XR4Ti that were in the race. Both were blown out before we were.

Leon Races!!

How did we do you ask?
Well, lets just say that we had reasonable expectations and we succeeded in our number 1 goal. Everyone on the team got to drive...
Here I am getting into the car. That suit is so damn hot. It was unbelievable. Yes, I am climbing in through the passenger side window. Believe it or not, that was much easier. The gap between the wheel, the seat and the roll bar is small that I cannot get my fat thighs in or out. Next year, we are going to make a removeable steering wheel...

Here is the tow truck pushing our car off the track and back to our pit. Unfortunately, this was not a rare occurance. We would stand by the big hairpin corner, not far from our pit. You can tell by the other cars on the track roughly when to expect your own. Car should be here any time... oh, there it is. And repeat. Until you start thinking, it really ought to be here now.... it REALLY ought to be here now! And then the tow truck comes racing by, out of pit row and out on to the track. D'oh!!!

Here I am under the car fixing the alternator. That was one of the simpler problems.. We probably got pushed off the track 3 or 4 times.

The final incident had our last driver behind the wheel. He heard a number of pops, like fire crackers. That is NOT good at all. I checked the temp on the car after he was pushed back to us, it was still overheated and in the red. That is not good either. Certainly not his fault though. The guages ended up in a position where the temp guage could not really be seen.

We could not get it to restart. But we had had that problem all afternoon between alternator and battery problems. So we pulled a plug and tried to start the car. Everyone within 10 feet got wet... the car was shooting water out of the engine block. That is pretty well dead... the general opinion of the assembled crowd was that we had blown our head gasket. Joe and I (and a random collection of drunks who stopped to "help") worked on the car until close to 10pm. We wanted to strip it all the way down to the head gasket to see if that was the problem. Instead, we bent the hell out of our engine pulley. Whoops. Oh well, time to give up... Below you can see Joe and one of the volunteers trying to get that pulley off.

A word about the rules.

There are rules... if your team breaks the rules, you get black flagged. Lose control of your car and spin out, black flag. Put any tires on the dirt and off the pavement, black flag. Lose parts of your car during racing, black flag. Speeding in the pits, black flag. Ferral children, black flag.
If you get black flagged, you head over the judges area for punishment. Pictures of punishments below.
Here is Ross doing the walk of shame. He passed while under a yellow flag for caution... he was black flagged, pulled from the track and forced to mime his crime as punishment.
This vixen is bound to the post in clear plastic.
The Swiss Cheese car was put in the penalty box for a while and then forced to drive with that flag. I am not sure what they did, but if I had to guess it would be tires on dirt. They really had trouble with those S turns. These folks got what was known as the Bart Simpson penalty repeatedly... They were required to do what Bart does during each episode. They wrote what they would not do again 100 times.

I will not go 4 wheels off 1

I will not go 4 wheels off 2

and so on.

They had listed a requirement to go to driving school before coming back to a lemons race.

They were not going to pass under a yellow caution flag again.

As you can see, the whole car was covered with writing

I am not sure what crime this vixon committed either. But she was forced to dance on the roof of her car waving this flag.

Now that is a nice car!

If you are a car junkie, what better place to show off your ride than a car race?

This is one seriously pimped viper.

Real Cobra or a kit? I have no idea how to tell... probably a kit.

How about this one? What a bummer it must be to own a car like this and show up only to find another at the same race.

Yes, that is a 4 door Porsche... It looks like a 4 door 911. Very cool car, I had never seen one outside of a magazine. There is some serious money in automotives here.

The Neighbors

The poor folks next to us failed tech and spent the next 24 hours trying to pass. By the time their car passed tech it was 4pm on Saturday. They were 7 hours behind the rest of the field... not that they finished even close to last. They had a banner day on Sunday.

Lets take a closer look at that car. I love the old, faded pain job and all the chrome. Pretty damn bad ass. What is it you ask? Well it was a 50s Renault they said.. but "was" is the key word in that sentence. Look inside...

That is the engine about where the back seat ought to be. You can also see that they welded on a little extra metal to make their wheel wells wider. Check out the picture below and you can also see that they moved the steering wheel and seat to the middle of the car. I am impressed... though I would have been more impressed if they had passed tech before the racing started.