Heat and humidity. Van troubles. Awesome handling. Timer malfunction. Rain. Blown transmission.
Club spirit and a miraculous transmission swap. Awesome handling, stunning lap times.
Bonehead move. Crash.
Repairs, three magical laps, a new personal best lap time. Another first place and a bigger lead in the championship.
This was the most eventful time trial I've had in a long time!
After the event at Watkins Glen, I stayed with my friend Steve Smith for a few days, and we had fun racing Papyrus NASCAR Racing 2003 Season on a simulated Watkins Glen and also playing various racing games with Steve's delightful daughter, Asia. I also slept a lot, which Asia didn't quite understand. "Daddy, Alison's been asleep all day!" "Hush, sweetheart."
Steve is good friends with Brock Yates of Car & Driver, and we had lunch at Brock's Cannonball Run Pub in bustling downtown Wyoming, NY. Brock wasn't there, but the food was good!
It was extremely interesting to race at the simulated Watkins Glen immediately after running there in real life. (By the way, the tire model in Papyrus' latest simulator is amazingly real. The tires actually feel rubbery and resilient like real tires!)
I found that the line I'd learned at the real track applied directly to the sim version. Although the Winston Cup cars modeled in the sim are heavier and more powerful than the Cobra, their slicks and some downforce give them more grip. Aside from having to be more careful with the throttle, and brake earlier because of arriving at the corners at a higher speed, the experience was pretty similar.
In particular, the technique I was using through the esses in the Cobra worked great in the Cup car. Steve has been running this sim a lot lately, so he was quicker than me in several of the corners. But I could make all that up and more just by using a more efficient approach to the esses, which gave me a higher entry speed onto the long back straight. The esses easy flat in the 225 hp Cobra, and they are nearly flat in an 800 hp Cup car!
Anyway, thanks to Steve and Asia for a great time, and for being patient with my physical limitations.
I suppose the troubles started right after I got home from New York. Right off the trailer, the Cobra was running terribly, coughing and misfiring and backfiring. It felt like someone had stolen my wonderful (ok, bone stock straight from the junkyard) motor and swapped in a, er, junker.
After recovering from a panic attack, I decided maybe it was a fuel pressure problem. The first thing I did was replace the main filter. No difference. Maybe the little screen in the fuel pump was clogged. This happened before, soon after we installed the fuel cell, and it's happened to everyone else I know who has put this particular brand of fuel cell into an FFR Cobra, usually more than once. There seems to be a fair amount of debris left over from the manufacturing process that's in the cell and which accumulates on the screen until the pump can't draw fuel through it any more.
Unfortunately I had just filled the fuel cell, and the pump is inside the fuel cell, which you have to remove to get at the pump. There's no easy way to drain the fuel cell. I'd tried before; I'd even tried taking the output from the fuel pump and running it into a gas can, but the fuel pump won't keep running if the engine is off. After some thought, I disconnected the return line from the engine and ran it into a gas can, started the engine, and ran it for about 10 minutes. (Don't try this at home! I had fire extinguishers standing by all over the place and my hair was standing on end the whole time.)
With all the fuel out it was a simple matter of a couple hours' work to drop the tank, clean the screen, and put it back in. Sure enough, the screen was full of tiny grits of what looked like metallic sand. I left the screen out when I put it all back together, figuring I'd rely on the main fuel filter to keep that stuff out of the injectors.
Unfortunately, the engine still ran exactly the same as before, coughing and spitting and backfiring. Augh!
Must be an ignition problem. I popped the distributor and sure enough, the rotor and all the little metal studs inside the distributor cap were totally encrusted with corrosion!
The engine had been running great at the Glen, but it sat on the trailer in Steve's driveway for a few days, and during that time it rained. The car was on an incline, nose up, so rain water most likely ran into the scoop and down onto the distributor. Most likely corrosion had already been forming on the rotor and distributor (they were new in the summer of 2000 when we built the car) and the moisture while at Steve's pushed the corrosion past the point where the coil could overcome it.
I popped on new cap, rotor, wires, and plugs and the engine ran perfectly.
A few months ago I made a deal with a Cobra enthusiast who is also a bathroom remodeler. In exchange for some work on my bathroom, he would borrow the Cobra for a few weekends. It seemed like a win-win situation: a dream come true for him, and a much-needed savings for me.
He and his wife took the Cobra for a weekend in mid July. Unfortunately, due to a mistake on my part (a fuse I thought was unused and removed from the fuse box turned out to be for the radiator fan) and some misunderstandings on his part, the Cobra overheated and was driven for some 45 minutes while it was down about a gallon of coolant. It got so hot that some wiring loom running along a valve cover melted!
A thorough inspection showed that there were no signs of leaks - no oil in the cooling system, no coolant in the oil. But I still worried that perhaps a valve had been burned or a cylinder wall got scored, which would lose compression and cost power.
To test the engine's performance I took the car over to New England Dragway. I'd done a 13.7 at 99 mph a year or two ago. This time on my second run did a 13.8 at 99 mph. I figured that proved the engine was still ok.
It was very interesting to see how many people were at the dragway. It was street night - you could run just about any car, right off the street, as long as you had a helmet - and the place was mobbed. There were hundreds of cars of all kinds, from 60's muscle cars to modern hot-rodded imports. It felt really nice being in the middle of so many cool cars and car people.
Lots of people asked me about my car. Maybe half of them had heard of Loudon (because of NASCAR, I suppose) but nobody knew anything about a road course there, and everyone seemed baffled as to why I would want to make a perfectly good Cobra go around corners when I could drive it down the dragstrip any Wednesday or Friday night any time I wanted.
I, in turn, was delighted to find that my car was just as fast down the strip as before, but hadn't the slightest inclination to come back and do it again. I don't know what it's like to drive a top fuel or funny car - I'm sure it's quite an exciting, if brief, experience - but in a 13-second car, a dragstrip is a pretty tame place.
The only part that takes any skill is the first two tenths of a second or so, when you are reacting to the lights and trying to get the optimum revs and tire slip. Once it's hooked up, there's nothing to do but shift.
At the finish line I was doing 99 mph. By contrast, at Loudon I'm doing maybe 115 mph when I go into turn 1 - and that's when it gets interesting! And it's equally interesting, lap after lap after lap.
One of the problems I'd encountered at Mosport and the Glen was the fact that I couldn't see over the windshield wiper when entering downhill right-hand turns. The new Kirkey seat put me about 2 inches lower in the cockpit than the old Cobra Clubman Sprint. So I decided to try to fix this problem.
Thanks to the folks at the forum at FFCobra, I found some wipers that had an adjustable blade angle so I could set them up to lay flat along the bottom of the glass, but the new wipers had more arch to their arms and still blocked my view. So I had to raise the Kirkey seat, and while I was at it, I swapped out the hated Cobra New Clubman from the passenger side and substituted the superb Clubman Sprint that had been on the driver's side before the Kirkey came along.
At the end of this job, pleased as punch with myself, I was in hurry-up mode while taking the car off the jack stands and I made a mistake. I dropped the car onto the stands, and one of them crushed the fuel lines, which run along the bottom of the car just outside the frame. I had to make two new fuel lines, which are each about 8 feet long and have a series of complicated bends. Nate had made the originals, so I had to teach myself how to do this.
Also, when Nate did it, there was no body on the car and it was easy to reach inside the footwell to hold a wrench on some bolt heads while turning the nut on the outside of the footwell. Since I was working alone, I had to figure out a way to have two hands, one inside the car and the other outside and underneath. Since my arms were about three feet too short, I wound up taping a wrench to the inside of the footwell in just the right position to hold the bolt head while I turned the nut from below the car!
I was real careful about how I took the car off the jack stands afterwards.
All this drama ate up about three days, and I barely got it all back together in time to make it to New England Dragway (see above).
Two days before it was time to load for Loudon, I fired up the Big Gray Van to take my shiny new Kumho Ecsta MX rain/street tires down to Paul at Sullivan Tire to get them mounted, and the air conditioning compressor seized. Doh!
Then I noticed a more throaty exhaust note than usual. Apparently all the rain and humidity we've had lately had rusted a nice new hole in the exhaust and maybe rusted the compressor too.
To top it off the "Service Engine Soon" light keeps coming on.
Well, it got me and the Cobra to Loudon and back, if in somewhat less comfort than usual.
The forecast was for thunderstorms, and the weather delivered. The first session was dry, the second pouring rain, and the third dry again.
My student, Jeremy Gay, had a nice 35th anniversary edition Camaro, with adjustable Konis and lowering springs and other mods (including about 360 hp), and he kindly let me drive it. It was great to drive, with really docile, neutral handling, great traction (it came with a Torsen diff stock!) and plenty of power, but the brakes were totally inadequate for the track. I brought it in after 5 or 6 laps and smoke was pouring off the calipers. Jeremy drove very well but decided not to run the time trial because by then the brakes were gone.
Also, I gave a ride to Eugene, a friend of Nate's who had bought a ride at Loudon in the Cobra last year as part of a charity auction. Eugene had never been on a race track but loves cars, and he loved the experience, although he did admit that his stomach was feeling a little queasy afterwards!
This was the first time for me at Loudon with the power steering in the Cobra, and at first I found it very annoying. The boost kept going away when I needed it most (mainly in turn 6, where turn-in was fine and then suddenly the wheel would feel like it was set in concrete). For the second day I cranked the Heidts valve in one turn to reduce the amount of bypass, and then it started to behave properly. It's still somewhat lighter than I'd like, but I'm getting used to the faster ratio so I'm not so twitchy on turn-in.
One benefit of the faster ratio is that it's really easy to catch slides. The car is very neutral now; on cold tires, it's actually pretty loose. The tail steps out at the slightest provocation, which is pretty easy to give it because the steering is so light and quick. But when the tail does step out, it's very easy to just bring it back with a quick flick of the wheel.
I've never been so comfortable with an oversteering car as I was with the Cobra at this event. I'd charge into a corner, flick the wheel, the car would turn in, the tail would step out, I'd flick in a touch of opposite lock, the slide would stop, my foot would go down, and we'd be gone. It was great!
Once the tires got warm, the oversteer went away and I'd begin to get mild understeer in a couple of corners (mainly 2B and 11), and I'd have to be patient with the throttle, making sure the front was hooked up before I laid into it. But a little more energetic flicking on entry could pretty much neutralize this push.
It was amazing how much less effort it took to drive the car than before. With the Kirkey seat holding me in place, and the power steering doing all the work, it was a lot more like driving a racing simulation. Before, it felt like I was tensing almost every muscle in my body as I fought to keep myself in place in the seat and at the same time fought to keep the wheel pointed where I wanted it, but now it's almost like sitting back in an armchair and relaxing.
Unfortunately the lap timer wasn't triggering, so I didn't get any lap times in that session.
It rained in the next session, so my friends in the garage helped me put on the rain tires. Actually, they did the whole thing! Thanks, Nate, Joe Pinzur (my sister Juanita's son, visiting from Tennessee), and John Spain! Meanwhile, I erected the convertible top, to keep me somewhat less wet than I would have gotten otherwise.
First impressions of the new Kumho Ecsta MX's were mixed. They seemed to have somewhat less grip than the Kumho Victoracers that I used in the wet here in May, but they didn't aquaplane at all except in one giant puddle in turn 10. Also they were very progressive in the way they let go, making them very forgiving and easy to drive. Nate has the same kind of tires for his Miata, and he loved them. He said he could brake extremely hard without sliding them at all.
The timer was working now, and I did a couple of 1:40's. Gary did some 1:34's in the same session, using his new Bridgestone rain tires, which are supposed to be the best rain tires for the class. This compares to the 1:35.5 I did in the wet in May on my full-tread Victoracers.
But I didn't do enough laps to really get comfortable with the tires and the wet track. After about four laps I brought it back in. Something in the transmission was making a horrible rapping noise. At first I thought it was a broken exhaust, then maybe a rapping engine bearing. But when I shifted down to second the noise went away. It only made the noise in third gear, so it had to be the transmission, probably a broken tooth.
I figured my weekend was over, and probably my season. A new Tremec would cost $1500, or closer to $2000 with proper steel bell housing and driveshaft mods. But the club members in the paddock rallied around me. It was amazing!
Brad Pelletier got the whole thing going. "Let's do it!" Gary Cheney called a friend, Peter Walton, who lives in Ipswich, and asked Peter to bring up a spare transmission that Gary had sitting in a shop in Ipswich. Brad, his brother Bruce, John Spain, Joe, and a bunch of us tore into the car. By the time Peter arrived with the transmission, we had the seats out and the top of the transmission tunnel off the car, and Bruce was removing the driveshaft. (Nate helped out some as well but an injured rib from a karting accident the week before had him in considerable pain, which made it difficult for him to work on the car. Extra thanks for your efforts, Nate!)
Jim Schenck, FFR engineer extraordinaire, appeared just as it was time to pull the old transmission and drop in the new one. Sweat dripping off his face (it was unbelievably hot and humid!), Jim whipped the old tranny out and slapped in the new one. We were really fortunate to have him, because he knew some crucial details, such as the fact that you have to step on the clutch pedal to release the input shaft when you're removing and inserting the transmission. If we hadn't known that, we might have really struggled.
Also before we started, Jim advised us that, while it's possible to take the transmission out from below, it's actually much easier to take off the top of the transmission tunnel, even if, as in my case, you have to remove both seats, cut the carpet, and drill out a bunch of rivets. I'm planning to rework my tunnel so the top will come off with just a few screws.
By dinner time all that was left was buttoning up: torquing a few bolts, slapping the tunnel top back on, reinstalling the seats, and bolting on the gear lever. Gary's transmission had come with a lever, and I put that one on at first, but it had a different angle than my old one. I prefer the more laid-down angle of the old one, so I swapped them. I drove it and it felt fine, with no funny noises. Aside from a slit in the carpet, my car was back to normal!
The whole job took 5 hours from start to finish, not counting dinner and some riveting and other minor stuff that I did in the morning. People kept popping in and lending a hand; there were more offers of help than we could use. It was amazing!
Thanks, guys!
In the first session in the morning, the car rocked! With the timer now working, I found I was easily down in the 1:20 range, ending the session with a 1:20.0.
As I mentioned above, before going out, I had turned in the Heidts valve one turn to reduce the bypass, hoping to eliminate the erratic power steering boost, and this worked. I now had fairly consistent power steering effort everywhere. It's still too light and numb - I would say it's far inferior to the power steering in my '94 Probe GT street car, and equally inferior to the power steering in Jeremy Gay's Camaro - but I can live with it. The reduced effort means that my speed through turn 6 is no longer limited by my physical strength. Also driving is much less demanding on my body, and I don't get as tired after a few laps.
Another intersting thing is that Gary's T5 has a much shorter 3rd gear than my own (now broken) T5. Where before I was shifting to 4th at about the start/finish line, with Gary's transmission I had to shift up to 4th at the apex of turn 12, by the start of the pit wall! This meant that I had to shift to 4th exiting turn 2 or else wind the engine to 6000+ rpm, and then shift back down to 3rd for turn 2. The same thing going up the hill over turn 5: shift to 4th, then down again to 3rd for 6. And I was pulling an awful lot of revs over the hill at turn 8.
On the good side, Gary's 3rd gear was perfect for turn 3, where with my transmission I'd had to go down to 2nd and then back up to 3rd before the track out point in turn 4, so I think I was getting through turns 3 and 4 faster than before.
In the second session, I got to chase Paul Formenak's big block ERA Cobra. Chasing more powerful Cobras is always motivating, and while catching Paul I broke into the 1:19's for the first time in a year, with a 1:19.8. I was delighted!
However, as the session went on, the car's light oversteer changed to mild understeer, and I couldn't go any faster.
I was wondering whether the problem was mental or if I just needed more practice, or if the understeer was the problem, so I decided to go out in a brief open session they had after lunch, just before the time trials began.
On my second lap I did another 1:19.8, so I was delighted! But then I caught a train of slower cars. Each time I worked past one train I'd catch another, which was frustrating because it was difficult to get a clear lap. (Paul Tracy & co., I can relate!)
Finally I was almost to the head of the train. All that remained were two Miatas, the green and white number 47 belonging to my brother and John Spain just ahead of me, and another ahead of it. The lead Miata waved us by, and the 47 car blew past him, with me right behind. Going into turn 1, I figured to outbrake the 47 car and go by on the inside.
Alongside the 47 at the end of the straight, I braked at the 2 marker, which is later than anyone else I'd run with all day ... but the 47 car kept going! It didn't brake until after the 1 marker!
The instant I saw that the 47 car didn't brake when I expected, I knew I was in trouble. I was threshold braking for all I was worth! The driver never saw me, and took his normal line, which is two feet from the right of the tires lining the outside of the pit wall on the left. My car is more than two feet wide, but I did my best to squeeze it down there.
I actually brushed the tire wall on the left with my side pipe and rear fender - I could feel them hitting me as I went by - and an instant later my right front tire contacted the Miata's left rear fender. Bam!
The Miata instantly snapped left into a half spin, and the front of my car hit the driver's side door. Since we were going at almost exactly the same speed and direction, the actual impact was very light, but it sounded pretty loud. As we both slid to a stop, all I could imagine was expensively busted fiberglass all around the front and both sides of my Cobra. I could see the dents on the door and the front and rear fenders of the Miata.
Back in the garage (we were sharing a bay, so the two battered cars sat side by side), I discovered that my brother Nate had been driving the Miata. (For some reason I had assumed it was John Spain in the car.) Fortunately Nate was fine, except that his arm was sore, probably from having the steering wheel wrenched out of his hands when I hit him.
I was amazed and relieved to find that the damage to my car was confined to a smashed headlight and parking light, a bent front bumper, a small area of ripped fiberglass in the vicinity of the bent bumper, some scrapes in the paint on the left rear fender, and some big black rubber deposits on my right front wheel and the nose. The suspension looked fine, and the camber hadn't changed.
But I felt like a total fool. The accident was entirely my fault; Nate had never waved me by, so I should never have been attempting a pass that would have been optimistic even in a legitimate wheel-to-wheel racing situation - and COMSCC doesn't allow wheel-to-wheel racing. In every driver's meeting they stress that you must not pass unless you have been waved by.
I had let my frustration get the better of my judgement, and I had broken one of COMSCC's cardinal rules, damaged my own and my brother's cars, and injured my brother.
I'd made history, too. Club members informed me that this was the first time in COMSCC's 40 years of existence that there had been car to car contact!
Doh! I don't mind making history, but I'd like to do it for something other than being an idiot!
While I was using black duct tape to tape up the empty hole where my headlight had been, John Spain suggested that I run a line of black tape across the top of it to make it look like a pirate's eye patch. I thought this was a good idea, but I didn't have any black masking tape, and I didn't want to wreck the paint by putting duct tape on it, so I just made a snake eyeball out of white tape on top of the black tape.
I don't know if the accident made me more focused and determined to redeem myself, but in the time trial I cracked off my three fastest laps of the event: 1:19.6, 1:19.3, and 1:19.0!
The last was my fastest lap ever at Loudon, beating my previous best by two tenths. It won the Street Prepared A class, beat all the other Cobras, and in fact beat everybody there except two formula cars and a 911 Turbo running in SPB!
Like the wonderful 2:17.9 lap I did at Watkins Glen, those three laps felt magical.
Sitting here the morning after, with the Cobra still on the trailer in the driveway, I can't help feeling both happy and sad about this event. The club camaraderie was amazing; I would never have been able to complete the event if not for the help of so many people in getting a replacement transmission and swapping it in. Thanks again to everyone who helped!
Also I got an amazing amount of positive feedback, both about my driving and about my ingenuity. A former Trans Am driver, Dave Smith, and his wife were at the track observing the action. Dave is considering building an FFR Cobra. He was highly complimentary of both my driving and my knowledge of suspensions. He said that my Cobra was visibly faster through turn 3 than any other Cobra. A number of other people commented on this too.
I felt good about my driving too, aside from my colossal blunder in crashing into my poor brother. I got faster through the weekend, and set a new personal best.
In those final three laps in the time trial, I felt that I was using more of the car's capabilities than before, being precise and aggressive, but not stepping over the limits of the car. When the tail stepped out on cold tires, catching it seemed almost effortless.
Those laps had that wonderful rhythm that comes when you are really "in the groove", and the feeling of elation they produced persisted for some time after I got out of the car.
Also, many people made many positive comments about a new gadget that I invented, the Tool Dragon (more on this later). No one had ever seen anything like it, and its usefulness is instantly obvious to anyone who's ever worked under a car on jack stands.
At the same time, I committed an extremely stupid blunder, broke an important club rule, and put myself and my brother and our cars at risk. I also suffered a failure of a major component (a transmission) and came home with a long list of work items that need to be addressed before the next event.
I have to recognize that the effort of running the Cobra in the COM championship is stretching me, both financially and physically. I wasn't able to complete some front suspension upgrades I'd planned in July (new lower control arms that will allow more caster), largely because the three COMSCC events in June and early July had taxed my body to the point that I simply didn't have the energy. I was exhausted and pretty sick through much of the month of July.
I do feel I'm improving; my body held up well through the first day of this event, including the transmission swap, but I needed a long nap before lunch time the second day. There are positive signs, but progess still seems very slow, and I know that in the coming weeks I'll logging a lot of "rack time" recovering from the past two days' effort.
Financially I'm feeling overwhelmed as well. I've got to either rebuild my own transmission and give it to Gary to replace his, or find another one. I've got to fix the damage from the crash, I need to replace some worn rod ends in the rear suspension, and I want to complete the front control arm mods I started last month. The van needs work, too.
On the plus side, the Cobra's engine is running well, and the tires and brake pads I have should see me through the season.