Posted on Tuesday, 31st March 2009 by admin
We had a difficult weekend at Buttonwillow, ultimately resulting in a 12th place finish. No worries though – it was still a moral victory 
.
Anyway, where to start. On Thursday we were back at SP Engineering to finish the tuning on the STI. Things went pretty well and we were able to make a lot of power. We slowly increased the boost from 15psi to 25psi. However, while we were on the dyno I noticed a little bit of coolant bubbling out of the overflow. This was odd because our new cooling system was working fantastically – we never saw temps over 185F even after consecutive pulls. During our test session two days earlier, we never saw over 180F.
We packed the car and headed to Buttonwillow to get our race on. Friday was the first test day and we were excited to see how the car would perform at our favorite track. But on the very first lap our small bubbling problem turned into a big one and coolant started pumping out of coolant reservoir = headgasket!
We packed it up and drove back to Torrance arriving around 8PM. At 2AM, we fired the car back up after removing the motor and replacing the headgaskets. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty impressed Adan could replace two headgaskets in 6 hours!
We finished cleaning the shop and packing everything up at 2AM and took a 3 hour nap before heading back to Buttonwillow. We arrived at the track at 8AM and got the car ready. Unfortunately on the first session we had the EXACT same problem! We decided to wrap it up for the day and save whatever was left for Sunday.
Sunday finally arrived and we were all really nervous about the car. We crossed our finger and lowered the boost to wastegate pressure (15psi) hoping for the best. We sent the car out for the first qualifier, but we were able to get only 1 lap before the car started blowing coolant again. Amazingly, JC managed a 1:54 – the only hot lap we had all weekend. This secured the pole, but unfortunately was all our motor had left.
When the car came back into the pit, we could see the problem had gotten really bad. However, we decided we worked to hard and too long not to at least try, so we sent the car out on the 1st Timeattack session to record a time. We told JC to keep the car out of boost and under 50mph. With some luck, JC was able to get his lap in, a blazing 2:33, but a lap none-the-less. This now brings us to 3 years without a DNF – and while that’s not as good as a podium – at least it’s something.
In the end this was a very challenging event for us, but we are happy we got the car done on time and we’ve confirmed that we have a very fast car on our hands. The winning car had a time of 1:55, so we were certainly in the ball-park.
The motor is already out of the car and being fully torn down and inspected. Hopefully we’ll have everything back together and bulletproof by next week. Well anyway, that’s racing!
For times and more information about the time-attack, check out http://www.redlinetimeattack.com.
Tags: Buttonwillow, redline, SP Engineering, TimeAttack
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