MSRH January 2017 - Vids / Photos / Stories

I'll get the little bit I have from R4 posted soon.

Anybody have the start of R3 from the balcony? Will probably be the best Orange start of the season. 1500-1700 rpm, drop the clutch on the twitch, launched... I don't think it bogged or slipped a tire at all.

Fun weekend with the new shocks. Think we know the next step to getting more speedier again - fresh tires. Flat spotted one front on Saturday trying to catch Pranav, or whoever that guy was in the 51. Fantastic to see the speed in the 51, tough I've never seen a torque arm torqued up like that.

Special thanks to the Mosty's for a seamless/painless annual process and for a loaner helmet. Realized Saturday that my shiny new helmet didn't have HANS anchors (which is worse than a couple laps of quali with the window net down) until we get ready for warm up. Right after warm up I run to the house to get the old helmet and the compressor and alignment tool from Sean's house. As I get close to the track I call and we realize I may well be late for quali. Park the truck, car is fluid checked/torqued/running with Marshall's helmet/HANS on the roof. Jump in and roll to grid (at 5mph) just as cars are going on.

And because we can't read a schedule, nearly did the same thing Sunday; thanks to Scott/Sean/Paul/Robert for Team OIF support.

Another shout-out to Hank for a smooth tech. Scales, while they "are what they are" seemed about 10lb heavier than recent events but certainly in the ballpark.

Did my best to not get passed too easily. Was good racing up and down the field and missing folks were certainly missed. I thought the PTX guys fit right in - maybe we need to adopt some for some track dinners. Had a good time racing with the respectful and improving AIX guys and the growing herd of Franken-Foxes. Looking forward to McCormick getting that thing sorted and running sessions at full song. Good to see an Fbody on a qualified pole and with a couple of wins.

Many may have missed it, and there might be some video but thanks to Tyler and the 55 for figuring out how to get between the "at the moment really off-speed" 39/29 sandwich.

Post 'em if you got 'em.

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.

So my 2016 off-season started off as a “well planned” affair. My idea was to have the front struts and rear shocks rebuilt as it had been four seasons since they had been on the car. Long story short on the shocks/struts was the rears were bent and we went back together with Penske SA’s. The fronts were rebuilt and re-valved. That was the end of my “planned” expenditures.

Now starts the story of the “unplanned” spending…

During an off-site work meeting (as I daydreamed instead of paying attention), I started thinking about how the Ford EEC-IV EFI system was “dumb” and had no clue what the A/F ratio was. The engine basically could cook itself and it would never know… I called the guy I use to tune the car (Travis at Gearheads in Arlington) and talked about what stand-alone EFI systems would work for my car that would “chase” an ideal A/F ratio (12.2) on the top end… I ended up finding a FAST XFI EFI system off a twin turbo Chevy V8 (with 16 injectors). Sounds crazy, but all their computers fire in the same sequence so I just had to re-wire/de-wire the injector harness and buy “Chevy” sensors (MAP, ACT, ECT, IAC)…

Once the EFI system was back in the car, it went off the Travis to tune since the best I could find was a 350 Chevy V8 tune available and I had no clue what the Ford tune was supposed to look like. After a few days of flogging on the dyno, I went to pick the car up the day before Christmas eve. On the last pull of the day, the crank snapped.. Now I have 4 weeks to get an entire shortblock back together.

I texted Richard Painter (old AI racer who still runs with Chump, WRL, etc) and we started to strategize on a way forward. On the dyno, the engine was over 400 RWHP unrestricted and Richard explained the 2-bolt stock block was a time bomb at that power level. Enter in the Ford Racing BOSS302 4-bolt block. The heads had 4 bent valves from contact with cylinder 4/8 pistons when the crank let go. After replacing those and starting a valve job on the rest of the valves, Richard felt they would be too thin so I ended up with all new intake valves and four exhaust valves. One of the valve locks were also cracked, so I got a new set of locks thrown in. The rotating assembly was dynamically balanced to a neutral balance and the flywheel and pressure plate were spun to ensure it was “close enough” (3 grams out and deemed “okay”). This block used ½” head bolts (stock is 7/16”), so I chose to run head studs this time around. After getting everything back from Richard, I realized the AFR165 heads were NOT provisioned for 1/2” head bolts/studs… crap. Heads were now drilled for the ½” studs.. Once that was all done, the motor went together without any drama… Until I started it up.

The XFI system was tuned prior to the engine blowing up, so it should have had no issues on start-up… Well, apparently my balancer (that was spin balanced) was really VERY out. It felt like the whole engine was going to come apart… After a half day of scrambling last Monday (4 days before the race weekend), I have two balancers coming 2-day air. Once Romac from the east coast and a second Ford Racing balance from of all places… Amazon (thanks Prime!!) I installed the balancer on Friday morning at 6am while Michael was getting the trailer ready to load the car… Ran like a sewing machine.

Time on track went overall well. Thanks to Josh and Richard for helping diagnose a grounded wire on Saturday night (coil wires plus headers don’t mix… they melt)… I’ve found that with functional shocks/struts, I have too much spring in the rear of the car. I’ll have a few options available for Cresson.

All the races went as well as they could. The new engine has more breath on the top end for some reason. It pulls clean to 6,200 on the dyno and we stretched that to 6,500 going down the back straight before Diamond’s Edge. The only hiccup other than the melted coil wire was during R4 the power steering “hose” that spaces my filler cap fell off and evacuated all the fluid. Made for an interesting rest of the race, especially getting thru keyhole and bus stop…

Congrats to Craig for performing one of the craziest transformations in such a short amount of time… Your creativity is truly one for the record books… Keep at it. I think it’s going to be a great combo at the end of the day.
See you guys at Cresson!

Learning opportunity: https://vimeo.com/201776104

After the race I had remembered the car placement dead on, but had the wrong corner in my mind. Based on this, one could consider the forward facing camera being located at the rear of the roof to be more ideal.

At TWS I need another model car lesson on position, especially on a straight.

Boy if we are going to use the 3/4 of a car rule?????? Almost every race weekend I have to get on top of a curb to keep from getting hit. Usually at tracks like MSRH, Hallett and MSRC. Almost never at TWS. I don't like the 3/4 car rule but how do you know once you are past a car how much room you left them? This was really close. Too close. At what point in the pass can the overtaking driver move wherever he wants to? Not until he clears the other car completely? Michael is really the only one that almost never drives down to the apex before his car is all the way past mine. I know most of the time once a car has gotten 2/3rds past my car they take the line away. I'm not saying that is wrong but maybe it is. You would think after all these years it would be clear. In Rattlesnake at Cresson this same deal happens every race and sometimes several times a race.


JJ

Overall was a good weekend for #34. I'm still struggling with the art of racecraft in terms of making aggressive yet still safe passes and proper car position to set stuff up. My Enduro days were a bad influence in that most cars didn't fight for position with you. Had a great time with Francis this weekend having him let me try something then shut the door and crush my dreams.

#34 dyno'd strong on Friday then proceeded to run like hammered ass until I discovered we'd left the spout connector unplugged after we re-verified timing following the 3 pulls...Got it plugged in for R2 and the car picked up some laptime and I was pretty excited to finally put it on the podium.

I REALLY appreciate everyone avoiding me in the carousel following the exhaust failure in R3, definitely the most brown suit moment of all my racing career. The exhaust broke behind the X-pipe and acted like a pogo stick of sorts and control was difficult. Unfortunately the fusible link popped trying to restart which left me a sitting duck center track. R4 was a podium repeater with a 3rd place and getting to follow Dan and Tyler around for some lessons in what 2s a lap faster looks like.

Finally, a HUGE thanks to John Martin and Jeff Tilton for the loaner shocks...Really was great with good shocks under the car!

See y'all at Cresson...#34 will be sporting a new side exhaust ��

Quote:

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Originally Posted by drecords

Overall was a good weekend for #34. I'm still struggling with the art of racecraft in terms of making aggressive yet still safe passes and proper car position to set stuff up. My Enduro days were a bad influence in that most cars didn't fight for position with you. Had a great time with Francis this weekend having him let me try something then shut the door and crush my dreams.

#34 dyno'd strong on Friday then proceeded to run like hammered ass until I discovered we'd left the spout connector unplugged after we re-verified timing following the 3 pulls...Got it plugged in for R2 and the car picked up some laptime and I was pretty excited to finally put it on the podium.

I REALLY appreciate everyone avoiding me in the carousel following the exhaust failure in R3, definitely the most brown suit moment of all my racing career. The exhaust broke behind the X-pipe and acted like a pogo stick of sorts and control was difficult. Unfortunately the fusible link popped trying to restart which left me a sitting duck center track. R4 was a podium repeater with a 3rd place and getting to follow Dan and Tyler around for some lessons in what 2s a lap faster looks like.

Finally, a HUGE thanks to John Martin and Jeff Tilton for the loaner shocks...Really was great with good shocks under the car!

See y'all at Cresson...#34 will be sporting a new side exhaust ��

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Nice job for sure!!!

Good weekend here, car felt better than it ever has from a handling standpoint. Had some issues with the struts moving around on the spindle and it turned out the threads were a little tore up on the M16 bolts. I also had some tire rub, time to put flares on it! Car also appeared to be down on power vs the competition, I might try and hit the dyno again before Cresson, I should have probably just done it at Houston. I was hoping to do a little drag race with Paul from a roll but we never had the chance. My $50 dashcam was fantastic with the exception of the fact that it takes 3 min clips, it was dead reliable and I didn't even have to think about it, now to figure out how to merge the small clips together. Weather was awesome, AI/CMC was awesome as usual, thanks to everyone for another great weekend.

Hey guys!

Great weekend! Thanks for putting on a great show as usual, playing nice with the PT cars, and only starting one fire. I was happy to see Paul's car back out on Sunday.

I don't know if you guys pay attention but we push a lot of event media to our NASA Texas Facebook page. The viewership was awesome. The Thunder Standing Start video was the single most viewed post on our page being seen by over 2600 people during the weekend. There's even some international viewership. How cool is that!??! I've got some plans for some more live video in the very near future and will be reaching out to a few of you for some help testing a beta platform before or during Cresson. More on that soon....

We have an opportunity to gain even more exposure for the group through NASA Speed News publication by doing race reports. If anybody wants to take the lead on typing up a weekend report up to 1500 words to get some more exposure in a big publication please shoot it my way via email. I've got the photos covered.

Thanks!

Will, just shot you an email

Got it! Looking forward to chatting!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by drecords

Had a great time with Francis this weekend having him let me try something then shut the door and crush my dreams.

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C'mon now...

I'm just a mid-pack slacker, living the dream.

So who's gonna start writing these things up? Be more than happy to review/comment/edit/opine. Guess I need to make my once a month Facebook visit - gotta see the R3 start from outside the car.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Fbody383

C'mon now...

I'm just a mid-pack slacker, living the dream.

So who's gonna start writing these things up? Be more than happy to review/comment/edit/opine. Guess I need to make my once a month Facebook visit - gotta see the R3 start from outside the car.

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It was kind a like the road runner coyote start ! Beep-Beep

Paul is going to write our first one for Speed News! Pretty excited for the first Speed News NASA Texas Race Report! It should be in the March issue. I'll be adding pictures from MohFLo, but if you guys have any great paddock/party shots, please shoot them my way via email.

Thanks folks!

Casey,
Do you have video of me tapping the wall during Qual on Sunday?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by marshall_mosty

Do you have video of me tapping the wall during Qual on Sunday?

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I thought technically it was the wing end-plate vs. braking marker. Sign killer.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by marshall_mosty

Casey,
Do you have video of me tapping the wall during Qual on Sunday?

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I do but it's not as good as I thought it would be. Kinda hard to make out the flying debris. I'll try to edit out that clip and post it tonight or over the weekend...