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Daily Blog |
May 9 - Day 7 - BeaveRun Motorsports Complex: Wampum, Pennsylvania
Things that go bump in the night.
About five miles away from the BeaveRun Exit off of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, while driving in the rain, something popped when we hit an expansion joint.
"What was that," I asked my dad, alarmed by what sounded like a potato chip bag being popped in the cockpit.
"I didn't hear anything," he responded.
Something was wrong though, as the car started steering funny. I thought maybe a blown tire, but it didn't feel that bad, so I suspected a blown trailer tire.
"Look for sparks in the mirror," I said. "I think it might be a blown trailer tire."
There were no sparks, and I drove the five miles to the hotel. In the rain, at night, while exhausted, a quick check of the tires didn't reveal any issues.. so we checked in and went to bed.
When we came out in the morning, we found the scene above.
It seems as though the top of the shock, complete with adjuster, was sticking out through the bodywork, something hidden by the wet car the night before. The rideheight was also low.. but it was parked in an uneven parking lot, so that was also hard to tell in the dark.
With the track only one mile away, I opted to drive it there before taking a look at what was wrong. The drive was harsh, with the car bottoming a good bit.
When we got in, and wrangled the bodywork off the front of the car, what we found was shocking. The aluminum monocoque had torn away around the shock mount. Don't think this event is harsh? Think again.
Two years ago when the Radical SR3 ran and made it, Brock Yates Jr. told me, "If I see those cars showing up and win, I will make the route so hard it breaks them." I told him that this time, he probably found the route.
At this point, things looked bleak. This repair would need a morning tig weld, probably not something easily found. Luckily, a shop down the road called, "The Race Place" was just what we needed.
The race place preps and runs all kinds of racecars, and there was a Formula Ford, a vintage Super Vee and two GT1 cars in the shop. Bret, who did the repairs with some help from a couple of shop guys and me with his arm in a cast, did the best welding job I have ever seen a one-armed welder do.
With the repair done, and the rest of the tub inspected the best we could for cracks, we went back to the track for my first run. I was late and woul dtake a 10-second penalty, but at least I would get a finish - something my teammate Danny Popp wasn't able to do when he spun off and couldn't get his car restarted. Overall, it was a rough day for the Mongoose boys.
My second run was going better, and I was running down Joel Lipperini - a feat not accomplished by many - when the transmission did a delayed downshift and locked up the rear wheels on corner entry, sending me into a spin - the fifth of the week. While going around, I remembered thinking about my first spin of the week at Mid America, and how it was my first spin on One Lap - I hope this one is my last.
Event 3: Autocross
The autocross wasn't what anyone wanted - not even Brocker. The cones were small, the course was hard to see and the workers were not experienced autocrossers. Chaos insued. Ian Stewart, current SCCA Super Stock national champion, avoided being tarred and feathered by me by taking top honors, and after hearing about lots of DNF's I played it safe and just finished. Of course, "just finishing" is about all I could do being that I had to do donut-type wheel-spinning turns to even get the car through part of the course as the turning radius wasn't tight enough to make it. (And it wasn't a Mongoose thing, it was a too-tight thing.)
I don't even know where I ended up, at this point I was trying to just finish the event.
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