MSRH January 2017 - Vids / Photos / Stories

[Pranav]

The Car:
I missed one Friday session because the pinion nut on my newly rebuilt rear end started working loose; thanks to Dave and Casey I was able to figure it out and tighten it back up.

Saturday was great. Patterson mentioned my hood was bulging bad on the front straight so I taped it shut and didn't open it all day. That's how confident I was in the engine department.

Sunday morning I slept in for warmup, went out for qual and grabbed 1st instead of 3rd braking for diamonds' edge, spun the car and buckled the torque arm.

Replaced the torque arm and went out for R3, was doing OK until the rear end started hopping real bad under braking. Finished the race and saw that I missed the broken the shock mount bolt backer on the rear end from the qual incident. Some effort with a blowtorch, c clamp, and really big zip tie and I was good to go for R4.

R4 was going great for the first 1/2 until I suddenly started hearing a weird noise on accel out of corners. Francis and Jordan blew right past me, finished the race, pull in. Car was running rough and threw an injector harness code, one of the fuel injectors was unclipped

Out of 14 total, planned sessions this weekend, I missed one on Friday for the pinion nut issue, and aborted Sunday qual to my goof up.

Not bad for a completely re-done car. Much thanks again to Sean, Paul, Dave, and Casey for the help/guidance. Only spent a couple of hours max messing with the car all weekend.

Me:
Saturday, yeah, I blacked out, don't know what happened. Qualified in 3rd, finished in 5th for R1 and earned 3 digits in Toyo bucks. That hasn't happened in a while!

Sunday before the injector issue I was starting to approach my Saturday lap times.

For the first time in a very long time the conversation is shifting from "the car" to "the driver"

I have a couple of weekends of work/improvement to do to the car/setup, but hope to get another track day/weekend in before Cresson to continue to improve. Key things to work on are lap-by-lap consistency, better heel toe-ing, and making the tires last longer by not overdriving them.