Loudon October 2003

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Photos coming soon

For me, this weekend held some of the worst and some of the best of racing: mchanical failure, frustration, expense, aggravation, flaring tempers - but on the other hand, some loving support ... and a major triumph!

Power Steering Rack Goes Out to Lunch

The last event went very well, but when I got home my Cobra had a little surprise waiting for me. I left the car in the garage for a few days while I rested to recover from the weekend's exertion. When I went out to the garage at the end of the week, there were two big pools of power steering fluid under the car.

Darn!

The donor car's power steering rack had failed. Apparently its seals didn't like being left dry for a couple of years while we ran the manual Flaming River rack, because they suddenly let go only a couple of months after I'd reinstalled the power rack in July.

I didn't want to just buy another stock rack, because the rack designed for a big, nose-heavy Mustang doesn't work well on my car. The boost is too high and the ratio is too fast for the lightweight, short wheelbase Cobra.

However, I recalled that someone had mentioned that a company called AGR made a racing power steering rack to fit the Mustang. The price seemed reasonable, at $250 about twice the cost of a rebuilt stock rack.

I called AGR and talked to them about the options. They make a racing rack developed for Trans Am cars, with a 15:1 ratio and relatively little boost ("firm" valving, they call it), and a 20:1 ratio with somewhat more boost ("moderate" valving). What I really needed was 20:1 with firm valving, but they said they couldn't make that.

Because I disliked the fast 15:1 ratio of the stock rack so much - and had loved the 20:1 ratio of the manual Flaming River rack - the tech support rep recommended the 20:1 rack, so that's what I ordered. He also said that the effort with the 15:1 rack was really pretty high, and he didn't think I'd like it.

It took a few days to arrive, and a few more days for me to perform the swap. With only three weeks between the September and October events - and having lost the first week because I hadn't seen the leaking - time was tight, but I got it done.

On the road, I immediately loved the ratio, and hated the effort and lack of feel. The effort was barely higher than the stock rack had been. Maybe it's "moderate" with a 3300 lb Mustang with 65% of its weight on the front wheels, but in a 2300 lb Cobra with 45% of its weight on the front wheels, it's super-light. The only time it's stiff is when the engine is idling and the under-drive pulleys allow the revs to drop so far that you lose boost.

I was hoping to get rid of the Heidts valve (see the section on the power steering install), which creates some strange behaviors, but now it was clear that I couldn't.

Still, I headed off to Loudon in a reasonably confident frame of mind. I now had a new and more robust steering rack, with a slower ratio that would make it easier to be precise on turn-in, and my new front control arms had worked well at the last event. I'd gone to a softer rear anti-roll bar to get rid of the oversteer that the new front control arms had induced and bring the car back into balance.

Last month with the new arms I'd knocked over 2 seconds off my best time on the South Oval configuration. Now I was eager to see what I could do on my favorite, the chicane-chicane configuration.

The Pressure is On

To my dismay, the club announced that we'd be running the North Oval configuration for the second and third day of the event (this would be COM's only three-day event of the year). At least I'd have one day, Friday, to try the car on the chicane-chicane configuration.

I was feeling some pressure, because the SPA championship at stake. I had a 15 point lead over Gregg Metzger and his Mustang. With a maximum of 11 points available from each of the two remaining events, all I needed to do was score within 4 points of Gregg and I'd tie up the championship. I've never won a championship in cars before, so I was really hoping to do well in this event.

Rocking and Reeling

In August on the chicane-chicane configuration we'd gotten only one dry day. In the first session I'd done a series of 1:21's, with two laps in the 1:20's. In the second and third sessions I'd dipped into the high 19's, and in the time trial I'd ripped off three 1:19's, ending with my best-ever time, a 1:19.04.

Could I beat that this weekend? The fastest an FFR Cobra had ever gone on street tires was Jack Rosen's 1:18.287, done in October 2001 - with somewhere in the vicinity of 350 hp. In August I'd been less than a second away. Could I get into the 18's? Was it possible that Jack's time was actually within reach?

In my first session I managed a 1:20.45, but in the second session before I ran into traffic I cracked off five 1:19's in a row, including a 1:19.19! This was in only my second session! Surely with a little more track time I would go even faster!

But no! Having lost four laps to traffic, I finally got clear and did another 1:19, winding up to go for it. Then, coming out of turn 2, the transmission popped out of 3rd gear. I put it back in, but the moment I did, the transmission started making horrible grinding and crunching noises. I tried various other gears, but they all made terrible noises.

I crept back to the pits, arm out the window. I was devastated!

Transmission Blues

I had borrowed that transmission from my friend Gary Cheney when my original donor car's transmission blew in August. Now, there were no more spares around to borrow, so I was up against the wall. If I wanted to finish the weekend - and try to wrap up the championship - I had to buy a new transmission.

Fortunately, it was Friday afternoon, and Forte's Parts Connection was open. A quick phone call confirmed that they had a Ford Motorsport "heavy-duty" Z-series T-5 in stock. This would bolt right into the car in place of the busted T-5.

It's a 90 minute drive from Loudon to Mike's shop in Burlington, Massachusetts. It was mid-afternoon, with less than two hours till Forte's closed, so I hopped in the van and headed south. I made it with time to spare.

On the way down, as I thought about things, I realized that buying the T-5 was a dead end. The Z series is more robust than any stock T-5; it's rated for 330 ft-lb, vs 310 for the best stock T-5 and 280 for the earlier ones. That would be good enough for my stock 302, but any serious mods would put the engine's output above the T-5's torque rating.

I asked Mike's assistant (Mike wasn't there, unfortunately) if he had any Tremecs, but he said they were out of stock of the 3550, the model I needed. In the back room, as I was picking up the T-5, I saw rows of boxes labeled "Tremec 3550". "What's that?" I asked.

"That's a TKO," he said. The TKO has different splines and won't fit my car. I looked at a long row of boxes labeled 3550, but apparently none of them were right for my car. Later, I would wish that I'd pressed him a little harder!

We had another confusing miscommunication. The assistant said that the T-5 I was buying had the "short" 5th gear, which pleased me, because I've always hated the extremely tall .68 ratio 5th gear in the original donor car T-5. A shorter (numerically higher) ratio would suit me much better.

It wasn't until Monday that I found out that when he said "short" he meant numerically lower; the T-5 had the dreaded .68 ratio in it after all!

Also on Monday I discovered that among all the transmissions there on the shelves at Forte's were at least four 3550-2's, which was precisely the transmission I needed! The 3550-2 has the .83 5th gear I wanted.

What they were out of stock on (as was everyone else in the country at the time, apparently) was the standard 3550, which has the same ghastly .68 5th gear as the T-5. Ick.

So on Friday I was standing two feet away from the perfect transmission for my needs, but due to a silly miscommunication, I walked out the door with the T-5 - the wrong transmission!

Although adequate for my current engine, the new T-5 left no room for future engine upgrades. (See my Tremec page for more on this issue.)

Why Do I Keep Blowing Up Transmissions?

Our original donor car transmission was from a V-8, but after it failed I had it dismantled, and learned that it had at some point been rebuilt with a counter shaft (aka cluster gear) from a 4 cylinder T-5. This fit, but since the gear tooth counts and diameters were different, the teeth didn't mesh properly. The critical 3rd gear - the gear we use most on road courses - had the worst mismatch.

Sooner or later, this transmission was going to fail. In fact, it's rather remarkable that we got three years of hard road race use out of it before it broke.

The transmission I borrowed from Gary clearly had very different ratios, and after doing some rough ratio estimates (from road speed @ RPM in each gear) I suspected that it was originally from a 4 cylinder car.

Since installing it in the car in August, I'd learned a lot more about T-5's in the Mustang application. The moment I saw it out of the car on Friday night at the October event, I knew for sure Gary's T-5 was from a 4 cylinder car: it had a small-diameter pilot shaft on the nose of the input shaft. V-8 T-5's all have a larger diameter pilot shaft.

Since this particular 4 cylinder transmission (an '88) is rated for 240 ft-lb, and my engine has 300 ft-lb of torque, this transmission, too, was always going to fail.

Speedy Nate!

When I'd walked out of the garage on Friday afternoon, headed to Burlington to pick up the T-5, I'd tossed a request over my shoulder to my brother Nate, as he was tinkering with his Miata in the garage. "If you get a chance, Nate, could you start working on pulling the transmission out of the Cobra while I'm gone?"

"Sure!" He smiled.

When I got back with the new T-5 (after a few brutal hours in Boston-area rush hour traffic) the Cobra was up on jack stands and the dead T-5 was sitting on the floor.

"Wow!" I said, shocked and delighted. "Thank you! How long did it take you to get it out?"

"About 45 minutes," he said, modestly.

"All by yourself?" I was even more shocked! In August, it had taken a large crew five hours to do the swap.

"John helped," said Nate, referring to his Miata co-driver, John Spain.

John, standing nearby, laughed. "All I did was help lift it out. Nate did all the rest."

I looked at Nate, and he just shrugged. What a guy! Am I lucky to have him for a brother, or what?

As it turned out, it took Nate and I only another 45 minutes to put the new T-5 in!

To be fair, I should point out that in August we'd had to remove both seats and cut the carpet, and then drill out about 30 rivets to get the top of the transmission tunnel off. Since we screwed the transmission tunnel back on with the seats in place, it was much easier to remove it the second time around.

Also, this time, since everything had been dismantled recently, there weren't any stuck bolts, and everything came apart and went together smoothly.

Still, I consider Nate's work remarkable, and I'm very grateful. It meant I was able to get a good night's sleep, and the car was ready to go in the morning. I missed only two track sessions - although unfortunately those were COM's last of the year on my beloved chicane-chicane configuration!

Seeking Balance

After the suspension modifications I made in September, the front end was sticking so much better that the car was loose everywhere. I'd been running the heaviest of the three rear anti-roll bars in my inventory, on a middle setting, to balance the car (this had been necessary because the front end was giving up so much grip due to adverse camber under load).

After installing the new front control arms, I'd moved the rear anti-roll bar drop links to their softest setting. This dropped the ARB wheel rate from about 350 lb-in to about 260. This change helped, but the car was still a bit more "free" than I like.

Between events, I switched to my medium-rate bar, and put it on a middle setting, giving about 210 ft-lb at the wheel. I hoped this would put the balance about where I'd like it. If not, it would be a matter of minutes to move the drop links to a new setting.

Learning the North Oval

I felt very sad that I didn't get to run the chicane-chicane configuration again. The next two days were run on the North Oval configuration. In the driver's meeting on Saturday morning, I objected, pointing out that rain was forecast for Sunday afternoon.

If this forecast turned out to be correct, we'd all be running the time trials in the wet after having practiced on the North Oval only in the dry. I felt - and still feel - that this was a recipe for disaster. Professional drivers don't race on ovals in the rain for good reason: it's dangerous! Now we would not only be competing on the oval in the rain, but doing so without any practice on the oval in the rain!

Unfortunately, the North Oval enthusiasts prevailed. (See this thread on the COMSCC forum for more on this issue, including a more detailed statement of my reservations about running on the ovals.)

I'd never run the North Oval before, so this would be a learning experience. There is some debate as to whether the North Oval or chicane-chicane configuration is faster. I think it depends on the car, because using the oval at the beginning of the main straight effectively makes it longer, which offsets the fact that turn 10 is slower.

Low-powered cars can't take advantage of higher top speed on the longer straight, so they are likely to be a bit slower around the North Oval configuration, while high-powered cars will probably turn somewhat faster times than they would on the chicane-chicane because they'll reach a higher terminal velocity and run at it longer.

This works against me and my relatively low-powered Cobra, but I did manage to get into the 19's, with two 1:19.8's on Saturday. It was cooler on Sunday morning, and the best I could manage was a 1:20.35.

Some people dislike the very tight version of turn 10 that's used on the North Oval configuration, because it's so sharp and it has an off-camber exit, but I found I enjoyed it. It required a little more braking than the chicane-chicane version, but not that much, and the off-camber exit made it interesting.

By contrast, I was not at all comfortable on the oval itself. Despite there being only a very short straight from the slow turn 10 to the entrance to the north oval (NASCAR turn 3, where Adam Petty died in May 2000), the Cobra accelerates so quickly that it is right on the limit through the oval. I was only able to take it totally flat out on a couple of laps at the end of the day on Saturday.

The car's balance was good, especially on Saturday, when I was running very old (18 month old!) tires on the right side. For Sunday, I switched to my newer tires on the right. These were new in June. I kept the same tires, which were now a year old, on the left.

I figured the newer tires' greater grip should let me lap a little faster, but for whatever reason, I didn't. The car wasn't quite as well balanced, perhaps because the new tires' wear relative to front and rear were not equivalent to the old tires'. Also it was cooler, with a high around 60 compared to Saturday's high of 80, which reduced the grip.

Frustration Boils Over

This weekend an issue which had been growing at the back of my consciousness surfaced in a big way. One of the problems with running a car which corners very well but is relatively under-powered is that it's often very difficult to get past other cars which are more powerful but are lapping more slowly. My Cobra has only 225 hp; many cars in the club have twice that, or more, but almost no one laps as quickly as I do.

This means I rip through corners and close rapidly on other cars in the turns, only to have the faster ones blow away from me on the straights. If they aren't paying attention, they may not realize that they are actually holding me up. This happened big time when I was following a more powerful but slower-lapping big block Cobra in September, and I was left feeling very frustrated.

I've noticed that the situation seems to be worse when I'm running in the instructor group, which is where I run most of the time. On Saturday I ran a few laps with another instructor as a passenger, and we ran in a different group. I was amazed at how quickly all of the slower cars noticed me and moved out of the way, waving me by so efficiently that I was almost never held up at all, despite passing many cars within only eight laps. I actually went faster in this session than I'd gone on my own in the previous instructor session!

For this event, I was fortunate to be assigned two relatively experienced students, who both had fairly fast and good-handling cars (a Camaro with nearly 400 hp and handling tweaks, and a very fast BMW). Unfortunately, they, too were held up on most of their laps. Two or three other cars in particular were not waving anybody by, resulting in long trains of cars following a very slow student car.

Since each student car is occupied by both a student and an instructor, you would think that at least the instructors would be paying attention to what's going on behind them, but clearly some of them weren't doing any better job of watching behind their students than they were of watching their own mirrors in the instructor sessions!

Finally, late on Saturday, things came to a head. I did a few quick laps and was working my times down when I came upon a late model Corvette. Since this was in the instructor group, the 'Vette was apparently driven by another instructor - in this case, someone for whom I've always had a lot of respect.

I remember this instructor telling me, not long after I joined the club, to watch my mirrors, and if there's a car there, "God didn't put it there. He's faster than you, so wave him by." He also had pointed out that if you're leading with a powerful car but the other car is staying in your mirrors, chances are he's got less power but is lapping faster, so you've got to breathe out of the throttle a bit on the straight to let him by.

Now, I was sitting on this fellow's bumper through the corners, but he was blasting away from me on the straight. He was pulling me by perhaps 8 or 10 car lengths on the straight, but I was so much faster in the corners that by the apex of turn 1 - halfway through the corner - that I was having to back out of it to avoid running into him!

Lap after lap I camped on his bumper, hoping he'd notice me and follow his own advice, but he never did. He was holding me up by two or three seconds per lap.

Finally I peeled off into the pits to ask Control to give him a black flag, but it was too late: the session was over.

I came into the pits boiling mad. All the pressure and frustration of the weekend - championship at stake, blown transmission, lap after lap and session after session of being held up, both with my students and on my own, and now by this formerly revered instructor - I'd had it! I pulled up next to the 'Vette and got out. The driver was standing nearby chatting with some folks when I confronted him. I asked if I could talk to him, and we walked away from the others.

At first he jokingly denied that he'd been driving his own car, but when he realized how angry I was, the smiles and kidding went away. I told him what I was mad about, but he didn't want to hear it. "You made your point," he said. He wouldn't let me express anything else, and he never acknowledged being in the wrong. He even challenged the fact that he'd been holding me up: "well, if that's what you believe..."

I drove back to the garage, hoping he had gotten the message, but I was so furious that I couldn't stand still. I got in the van and drove to a deserted area on the back side of a hill behind the track. There I found some empty 55 gallon trash drums and kicked one around for a while, until some of my frustration had been vented. Then I dumped a pint of ice water down my back.

Finally I was calm enough to go back to the garage and finish out the day. As I told the story to a few sympathetic listeners in the garage, the common thread of response seemed to be that the above-mentioned instructor "will never admit that he was holding anyone up."

He did redeem himself a great deal in my eyes later, though. In the morning, he came to my garage and said, "Let's start today with a clean sheet."

I looked at him for a moment and then said, "Okay". There were a lot of other things I wanted to say, but I respected his effort to make amends, so I kept my mouth shut.

In the first session on the track, the 'Vette was about 4 or 5 cars ahead of me as we went out. I quickly worked my way through the traffic (for a change!) and soon was on his bumper. At the first opportunity, he pulled over and waved me by, and that was the last I saw of him.

In the Rain on the North Oval

Sadly, the weather forecast was correct, and after fine weather all weekend, it clouded up and began to rain on Sunday at lunch time. The entire time trial was run on a wet track, and no one had had any wet practice.

John Spain was the first of the three of us to run. He made an educated guess and went out in the Miata on Hankooks - dry tires which had a soft compound and reasonable tread. He did a reasonably good time - later we would realize it was better than reasonable - but felt the tires lacked grip.

Nate decided to use their Kumho Ecsta MX's, a high performance street tire with very aggressive tread, which he'd liked in the rain before. But he was several seconds slower than John, and wound up very frustrated, especially because he'd been blisteringly fast in the dry and felt he had a very good shot at being the fastest Miata of all - if only it hadn't rained!

I'd followed Nate's lead and switched my Cobra to MX's, but after Nate's disaster I switched back to my Kumhos Victoracers, hoping their softer compound would generate more grip. Unfortunately, they had considerably less tread than when I'd used them successfully in the wet earlier in the season.

I couldn't bring myself to push them in just three laps, to find their (probably low) limits. I'm the sort of person that needs at least some practice to get up to speed in different conditions. I need time and repetition to gain confidence, and I didn't have the opportunity to do this, since we hadn't had any practice in the rain.

My confidence was further compromised by my concern about crashing the Cobra, especially on the oval. I simply can't afford to repair the car if I crash it. No matter what was at stake, it wasn't worth risking the car.

Also, with the championship on the line, it made more sense to drive carefully and bring home some points, any points, rather than risk spinning and going home with nothing.

I drove three very conservative laps, ending with a 1:38.4. This was good enough for second in class, but the winner, Greg Read, borrowed some rain tires and took his hopped-up BMW M3 around in a 1:29.0!

Gary Cheney also had some excellent Toyo RA-1 rain tires for his FFR Spec Racer, and he too kicked my butt, with a 1:30.8. Jim Schenck, his FFR Spec Racer on worn Kumhos like mine, also blew me away, by over two seconds.

Afterward Nate concluded that the MX's are good only in very wet - downpour - conditions, when the limiting factor is aquaplaning, because their very open tread drains water very well. In moderately wet conditions, the softer-compound dry race tires have more grip, as long as they have at least some tread. But without tread...

I need some Toyos like Gary's if I'm going to be competitive in the rain.

Champion!

On the bright side, my second place was good enough to sew up the championship, especially since Gregg Metzger, my main rival, wasn't able to run. His Mustang had blown a clutch in the previous event, and he had not been able to get it fixed in time for this event.

So it was a weekend full of frustration interspersed with some high points, and it ended with a moment of real euphoria, as it sank in that I'd finally won my first ever championship!

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