Unfortunately yes, oil fire. But let me back up a second...
Friday morning I started the day with some power steering troubles. Specifically I was having low-speed problems with low-assist. As everyone was setting up, I saw Kyle Tucker over near his car, so I walked over to see if he had any suggestions (I have one of their pumps on my car). He suggested we look over the car and see if he could see any issues. We did and didn't find anything. He said to drive it one run and see how it felt, and he would check in with me.
So I ran my first run, and the assist felt "notchy". By that I mean, it would kick in and out mid-turn. Quite disconcerting! True to his word, Kyle checked in with me after the run, and I told him what I experienced. He asked if he could drive it to see what it was doing, so he did. He agreed something was wrong. He recommended I drive it one more run and then replace the flow control valve if it was still happening. It was, so he went and got one for me, pulled out his tools and helped me replace it. The one we pulled out was smaller than the one we replaced it with, meaning we increased the flow. Sure enough, it was much better! It's awesome how someone like Kyle would jump in and help me as he did, otherwise it would have been a much different weekend.
So next up, my third run. With a functional PS again, I made a much better pass, clocking a 56.218 second run. That left me with a full second buffer over the rest of the SM class. But when I returned to my pit, I had smoke billowing out from under the hood. When we opened it, I had oil on the frame and smoking off the headers. Not good... Once things cooled down, I could see the problem:
If you look under the valve covers, you can see I have 1" spacers. Those spacers have a stock style o-ring on the bottom which is in a groove. It seems that the driver's side spacer wasn't positioned well. What you can't see is that there is a lip of metal behind the o-ring which determines how much 'crush' you get on the gasket. I worked with it to try and reposition the spacer as well as I could, tightened everything back up and ran the motor. I didn't see any more leaks. Apparently I didn't try hard enough to make one.
On the next run, Chris rode with me. When we finished the run (not a good one), the GG tech guy told me I was smoking badly and he didn't want me using the course as a testbed. I totall don't blame him and told him I wouldn't run again if I couldn't fix it. When I got back to my pit, someone walked up and said he saw flames under the hood. I jumped out and grabbed my extinguisher, popped the hood, and sure enough: flames! I hit it once with the extinguisher, gave it a minute, they popped back up and I hit it again and put them out...
When I built TOW, I installed a clamp and a Halon extinguisher right behind my driver's seat. I'm really, REALLY glad I did! If you don't carry one in your car, go spend the $150. Now! (I'm thinking about installing a second one on the other side of the roll bar as a secondary if I ever needed it)
With the fire out, I waited for things to cool off while I tried to collect myself as well. I had quite the crowd at this point around the car. A lot of thoughts went through my head, and I realized I was pretty lucky that I didn't have a much bigger problem on my hands. I had rushed my fix in an effort to get back on course. Really bad call...
I pulled the valve cover and spacer back off. Steve and I looked it over, and he convinced me to walk over to the vendor area of the show and see if someone had anything we could grind the lip down with. I was skeptical, but I didn't have any better ideas. We found a Makita dealer who happened to have a grinder stand setup. We asked the guy if we could use it, and he begrudgingly agreed. I held it, Steve ground it. We took a good bit off to allow it to compress the gasket better. We also picked up a fine file from another vendor to clean up the grind.
After lunch, we reinstalled the spacer and cover. We spent a lot of time making sure it was centered as well as it could be and the gasket was crushing correctly. After a few tries, we were satisfied it was as good as it was going to get. I ran it for a while, and all looked ok. I drove out of the track and found a parking lot to drive in for a while. Some high speed turns, left and right, high engine speed, and everything still looked ok. I decided it was good.
I went back in and found the tech guy and discussed it with him, He came over and I walked him through what we did, and the testing I did, and he was satisfied. He did comment that he would have his own extinguisher on hand, just in case.
I only missed 1 round while doing all of this, and I managed to get 4 more runs during the rest of the day. Honestly, my head wasn't really focused on getting good runs, I just wanted to make sure the car was ok. It did fine for the rest of the day, although I never improved my time. But my 56.2 managed to keep my at the top, if only by 0.014 second at the end of the day (56.218 vs 56.232).
Thankfully, Saturday was much less eventful, at least mechanically. I had a total of 8 runs I think, maybe 9. On the 4th run, I was in line and the second place car managed to run a 56.1 second run. I was 2 cars behind him, so I was pretty amped up to beat it. I did, with a 56.086. I really wanted that first 55 second run, but just missed it.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to keep up the pace in the next run though. The other car ran a 55.5 while I didn't improve. Then he hit a 55.2, and again, I didn't improve. Then Mr. Sutton arrived on the scene. After discussing what was going on, we decided I needed some more rear grip, so we settled on a small shock change and a roll center change. When I crawled under the car to adjust the shocks, I discovered that they were not set where I thought that they were. Hmm, that wasn't helping me any for sure! I'm still scratching my head how that happened, but it didn't matter. I set them to where they should be, and off I went.
Next run, I got my 55. It was only a 55.9, but it was an improvement and the car felt better. Ron and I discussed it some more, and we decided to put my adjustable Watt's Pivot to work. I crawled under the car again and dropped the pivot about 1/4". We were almost at the end of the day, so we weren't sure if we were going to get another run or not. Turns out we did, but it was getting hot and a bit slick. Yet I managed to set my best time of the weekend: 55.56. It wasn't quite enough to get me into 1st, but I could tell a difference in how the car felt.
Ron's recommendations really helped me out! In addition to the suspension suggestions, he gave some great advice to several of us on adjusting our lines through the course. There is a lot going on during a run as I'm sure most of you know, so it's hard to apply it all at once, but some of his tips really helped. I have work to do to improve myself as a driver, but I have a car that felt really good under me at the end of the day. Specifically, I need to be more aggressive getting onto the throttle coming off the turns. I'm losing time there...
As I drove home today and processed a lot of what happened this weekend, I realize that I'm going to have to 'relearn' the car to some extent. When we had the high-rate rear springs in the car, it would get really loose on exit sometimes. That definitely has me a little gun shy when it comes to corner exit. I need to get over that. I also need to get better at modulating my brakes. When I go over the limit, I don't generally recover very well and it usually causes me to end up off course. Threshold braking is on my list to focus on...
My drive home went perfectly today. It was a gorgeous day, cool, sunny, and low traffic. I have a lot of work to do to better tune the engine after the changes. I'll work on that in the coming weeks.
I'm on the hunt for a better solution to get rid of the valve cover spacers. I don't want to relocate the coils, so I'm trying to decide which of the covers that allow coils to be mounted I'll go with. Between the brake booster and the shaker base, there's not a lot of room on the driver's side. I'll find something though...
Quite an experience, the thrash and trip and runs and trip home. I was so close to that win, I could smell it and wanted it pretty badly. In my head I know it was an awesome performance with a car that had so many changes. And being 'in the hunt' was a lot of fun at the end! It just makes me look forward to the next event even more...
Phew, sorry for the ramble post, but a lot happened in the last few days!
Brian Hobaugh SCCA National Tour June 2014
First Hemi 'Cuda Convertible Ever Built
Short clips: Goodguys Pleasanton autocross and pit videos
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