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Team WTF?! is a loose association of a handful of Washington, D.C. area
autocrossers. The name was hatched when two of the founding
members were doing a course walk in the rain at the DC ProSolo in June
2004.
The Answer is the question.
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Team WTF?! SRF racing Season to Date |
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Written by Pinecone
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Monday, 02 July 2007 |
Few ups, more downs, some way downs, some OKs, but turning out to be a very expensive year.
The Team WTF?! SRF racing season started the year on a no note basis. Due to scheduling screwups the normal March VIR regional with endures ended up on the wrong weekend and conflicted with another group’s booking of the track. SO the event was a week early and at Rockingham, so no Team WTF?! presence. Work interfered with the Summit Point National.
So the first even was the MARRS 1 at the end of April. It was sort of ho hum, I was there event. The car was still having idle problems (too high) and overall car and driver survived the race, with most of the race being a drive around the track with no one nearby to race with.
On to VIR for MARRS 2 and 3. Hagerman Race Engineering did some work on the car, including replacing the wiring harness (old wiring tends to fall apart) and the car was running great on the test day. This year was different in that each weekend day would have qualifying in the morning and a race in the afternoon. Qualifying went very well with Team WTF?! nailing down a 14th out of 37 cars. High hopes for the afternoon race. The start went well until on the exit of turn 10 (South Bend) a car spun. The car immediately in front of me checked up and I spun trying to not nail them. The spin started to the left side of the track, then hooked back across the track to the infield. Probably 6 – 7 cars spun in the incident. Amazingly no contact and everyone got back on track. Of course near the end of the field. So thus started a dash to climb as high in the standings as possible. Unfortunately on trying a pass entering the uphill esses (note to self, DON’T try to pass there any more) the other car chopped to the apex. Off road, no big deal. Oops, VIR in its infinite wisdom has erected a new fence in the big field off to the left of the uphill esses, so no more virtually unlimited runoff. A nice half-turn spin and whack, into the tire barrier at a very high rate of speed. I haven’t looked at the data to see how fast, but the hit was enough to seriously ring my chimes and to damage one of the DL-1 accelerometers (or at least I assume it is a problem when I am accelerating in speed, but at negative longitudinal G). MAJOR damage to the tail, airbox, one corner, etc. Car was up and running for Sunday, but on advice of the medical personnel (X-rays were taken no broken neck, and yes the hit was THAT hard to worry) the driver wasn’t. Pretty miserable weekend. And it got worse, as the invoice showed up for the damage plus the wiring harness replacement. OUCH.
Missed MARRS 4 due to work travel.
On to MARRS 5 and 6 at Nelson Ledges, OH. A new track for Team WTF?!, so Friday was used to learn the track and build speed, which went quite well. Track is interesting, same length as Summit Point (2 miles) but lap times are about 10 seconds quicker. LOTS of speed, lots of high speed corners. Several places where not having cojones can cost a second or more PER TURN.
A big turnout of SRF cars for Nelson Ledges at 20 cars. Same format at VIR with qualifying in the morning and race in the afternoon. First qualifying went OK, with a 13th out of 20. The problem here is only the serious people showed up with most of the slower people not willing to make the trip. The race went very well. Start was good with picking up at least one place. A couple of fast people qualified very poorly, so lost 2 places in the race. Car seemed down on power on the long straight, so got caught by a group behind (helped by a car that spun and rejoined at slow speed, on the line in a bad place). Up to that point was having a nice race with the guy I passed on the start. The group caught at passed that guy (seemingly due to some error I did not see). But I was able to hold them off to the end of the race. With some help from racing carnage, final result was a finish of 10th out of 20 starters.
Sunday dawned cool and things were looking up. Examination of the track in the left-hander at the end of the long straight revealed significant banking, thus illuminating the reason that faster cars were much faster there. Put that to use in the qualifying, knocking 0.8 seconds off the previous days time and got more consistent with several laps in the same tenth second. This moved me up past two other cars, but since the two guys who blew qualifying the day before, actually did what they should have done, the starting position stayed the same. A great start saw the TeamWTF?! entry pick up at least 2 – 3 positions on the first lap. Hooking up with a couple of slightly faster cars, it looked to be a great day. After about 4 – 5 laps, started loosing touch with the group due to falling back on the long straight. Not good. Then got passed on that same straight. Worse. Then pushing to stay ahead of two other cars, got loose in turn 1, spun, but managed to reel it in and not hit anything so continued. Now it was a lapping day. Nobody close in front or behind, so just stay on track and finish. Provisional finish was 15th out of 20 starters, but that may change as apparently the guys in the front started playing nasty and a BUNCH of people were called to the tower. So there might be some DQs.
The really bad news is, as the race went on the car was blowing lots of oil smoke. Turns out it lost ¾ quart in the 15-minute morning qualifying. So the good news is it wasn’t poor driving that caused the poor race performance. The bad news is, engine rebuild time. Seems the rings are not sealing. On top of the earlier crash damage and wiring harness replacement, this is turning out to be a VERY expensive year for racing.
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