jorj7

Bill and I arrived in Ely, Nevada last night to run the 25th Anniversary of the Silver State Classic Challenge. Nice 9 hour trip on Highway 50, with one mishap, 30 miles out of Austin, the external fuel pump (044) stopped working. Luckily the internal fuel pump (parallel 044) was ok, so I was able to drive the rest of the way without incident. This morning we went out to check it, and it was running ok. I think the heat got to in (97 degrees outside).

We went out this morning and did some Sharktuning up at altitude. Bill made a few adjustments, but things look pretty good. We did lose the wide-band sensor after a couple of runs, so we had to stop. When we got back to the motel we swapped it with an extra one I brought along. The LM-1 had been give sensor errors since last May's ORR, so I was prepared for this. We will probably go out tomorrow and check to see if the new O2 sensor gives us any different readings.

The car parked at the motel:



Joe and Jim arrived this afternoon in Joe's 93 GTS. They will run in the 125 class, and see if they can repeat there 1st place finish from the May event.



Tonight is the Welcome Reception, tomorrow is the Car Show, and the race will be held on Sunday. The weather looks like it'll be nice, so I hope we can get a good run in.

Mark Anderson

good luck guys
I look forwad to hearing more about it.

jheis

Good luck George. And thanks again for the PS2 "take offs".

Take good care of Bill, I need him next weekend .

James

jorj7

Thanks Mark and James. I'll post more as it happens.

James,

Bill won't be in the navigator seat this time. I'll be running solo again.

AO

Good luck. Be safe. Can't wait to read the story.

andy-gts

best of luck, hope nothing else pops up causing trouble.....wish I was there!

FredR

Jorg,

Will be thinking of you chaps- just keep it between the hedges!

Regards

Fred

AirtekHVAC

Way too cool. Have fun!

jorj7

We started the morning by going out and checking the new wide-band sensor and making sure the tune was were we wanted it. It looked good, so we went through Tech Inspection. Meet Joe and Jim in the tech line.



Afterwards we went to the motel and finished the race prep.



Tomorrow we'll leave for the starting line around 8:45 AM. Weather still looks good, hopefully we'll get to leave the starting line early (10:30-11), before the heat builds up and the winds come in.

jorj7

Thanks Andrew, Fred, Andy, and Ron. I hope things go well, and I finish the race.

So do I, on both counts. I'm going to try 170 mph average class this time. I don't expect to zero out, but I'll see how the car feels at that speed.

andy-gts

I hope everything went well. any troubles????

jorj7

Yea, lot's of problems . But luckily they were after we left the race. Had a lovely 13 hour adventure getting home, which we did at 3:30 AM with the car still running . I can't say the same for my computer , so video will be delayed but I'll post a few photos from my "car laptop".

jorj7

Since we didn't go to the awards banquet and just drove home to the Bay Area after they opened the road again I missed out on getting the results when everyone else did. Luckily Joe was kind enough to texted me the results.


Bill and I at the start line.

There were only three cars in the 170 mph class, which was largest field in Super Sport division. My 928, a 69 Ford GT40, and an 01 Monte Carlo "Cup Car". Since it was my first attempt at 170, I was going to take it easy, see what the car felt like, not get DQ'ed and hopefully finish within 5 mph of the target. I had entered in a 4+ mph average speed increase in my spreadsheet for the turns and would need to sustain an 180+ cruising speed needed to make up time lost in the corners. This would get me to around an 167 mph average. The car ran really well. I was able to maintain the 180+ cruising speed and was able to take the corners at 4-15 mph faster then before. This is because some of the turns I ran at 160-165 before, were at or above the target speed for the 160 class. With the higher speed class, I needed to take then a little faster not to lose much time overall. As it turns out, the car (and I) can take many of these turns at 175-180 mph. Pretty cool.


The 170 Class.

I also wanted to make another run at 200+. This time I would start the run at a higher speed, so I felt I would have a better chance then last time. Well I was only able to hit 195 mph when I past the radar trap. I continued accelerating, and managed to get up to 201 mph about a mile down the road. I was a little disappointed not to hit 200+ before the radar, but it's still great to be able to get it done on the course. When talking to the other Sport Sport drivers at the finish, I was informed that there was a 10 mph head wind at the trap zone, and it seemed to affect them all...


Photo of my car at the Finish Pit area.

At the last race, I had eased off too much at the end to try and hit the 160 average, and came in too slow. This time I wanted to maintain more "time in the bank" until the finish. So I was still at an 171 mph average before the last series of turns (145, 145, and 150 mph). As I exited the last turn I was at 170 mph avg on the gps. Instead of just cruising in at 170, I kept the speed above 171 mph, just so I would not finish too slow. This seemed to work and thanks to Joe, I know I finished with an 170.2354 mph average, good enough for a 2nd place finish behind the GT40. Again very exciting news.

Anyway, I want to thank Bill for all his help in this effort, not only for getting the car ready, working on the car while at the event, but especially for the time and effort getting the car home last night. Also thanks to all the others that help getting this car together and running so well.

I'll work on the video after I get my laptop restored and running again...

AO

Great write-up George! 2nd place is pretty damn good - but I'm curious what 1st and 3rd looked like? Sorry you missed out on the 200MPH club. Can't wait to see the video.

Bill Ball

As George noted, the car ran VERY well during the race. We are going to look at the AFR logs, but a few glances over at the wideband that George made during the race indicate we had a pretty good tune, which is really hard to do since we cannot completely mimic race conditions (altitude and super high speed) while tuning.

Other than the headwind slowing George through the speed trap area, George hit the major goal of a 170 MPH average speed. Again, further evidence we had the car dialed in.

Then, post-race, all hell broke loose. When I met George on the course to start the ride home, George reported the car had started popping on decel, then the fuel pumps began to complain and stutter, and the AFRs went lean. The fuel pressure was still good, so I initially suspected a MAF problem. Sharktuner showed it appeared to be working OK. Then we noticed the idle was very high, so unmetered air, probably from a hose popping off the throttle boot or a stuck wide open idle air controller valve. In a McDonald's parking lot in Ely we did about as much as we could to check out these possibilities and ended up changing to Sharktuner setting for the injector size so we could get more fuel to compensate for the unmetered air we could not eliminate. That worked well for the ride home. Cruising AFRs were not stoich, but they were pretty close in the low 15s.

A short ways down the road, George was "experimenting" with some WOT runs, when the mixture suddenly went super rich with black smoke pouring out of the pipes, and the car died. It took a couple of minutes for George to find that the MAF had popped out. We had not resecured it adequately when we removed it at McDonald's.

Then as George's tank got low, the intank 044 pump began to complain and fail. We had problems with fuel overheating and pumps vapor locking and failing before and took a lot of measures that we thought had fixed this. The basic problem is that the 044 is overkill for cruising, and a huge percentage of fuel is returned to the tank and just recirculates back and forth between the tank and engine compartment, getting hotter and hotter. And once the fuel level gets low, this can get extreme. And high altitude exacerbates vapor lock a lot. We poured in a couple of gallons of fuel that I carried in the support vehicle, cooling the gas and alleviating the heat problem for a while.

We had planned a gas stop 30 miles ahead but George ran out far sooner and managed to get into a station, filling his 22 gallon fuel cell. No big deal.

But within a few miles George fell back and found he was almost out of fuel. As he came up to me in a shopping center paking lot, I could see why. He was showering a deluge of fuel on the ground down by the external pump. He had lost 21 gallons in a few miles. We spotted what looked like a loose fitting in the custom return line, snugged it up, started the car and saw no leak and headed to the gas station. As George pulled up to the pump next to me, I could see he was still leaving a substantial gas trail after all. The guy at the station would not let us work on the problem there, so we headed back to the shopping center a few hundred yards away while I worried the car was going to go up in flames. It didn't. It was about 1 am. We had been trying to get home since 4PM and should have been home by now, and we hadn't eaten since breakfast.

We found a damaged fuel hose that had gotten out of position and was being crushed by a suspension member. I thought we were "hosed", still 200 miles from home. This is one time when George's habit of carrying almost every spare part and tool from his garage paid off. We cut the bad section and put in a couple of spare AN fittings from George's huge collection to join the hose, secured it away from the suspension members and made the final 200 miles uneventfully. I made it home from George's place at 4:30am.

What a night(mare).

But congrats to George for a successful 170 MPH average drive down the course. As everyone should know, I'm done with being in the car during these runs, but I do enjoy prepping and tuning and even troubleshooting, although preferably in daylight.