Daily Journal - Sunday, May 16, 1999

Pictures from Sunday, May 16, 1999

So much for getting off to a good start! Everything was going well with the Seven (well, minus my first lap where I got quite sideways 2 turns in a row - I was still driving the car a bit like the GSX since that's the car I last raced two weeks ago, and got a put heavyfooted. Oh well, won't happen again now that I'll be racing only this car for the rest of the week :) Anyhow, the problem occurred halfway through the banking on my first lap, the car just lost power all of a sudden. Took my foot off, then got back on it, went for about a second, then cut out again. Repeat one more time. I tap the 'alt' button on the EVC IV to drop the boost back down to cruise mode (.6bar, 9psi), and putt down the straight okay, no more problems. Once I get back into the infield off of the banking I tapped the 'alt' button again and brought it back up to 1.1bar. Got back on the banking again at high boost for the last stretch of that session, and all was well. Hopefully this problem won't manifest itself again - perhaps bad gas? We'll look into it some more.

Unfortunately, the Eclipse had a huge issue during the recon lap! The upper intercooler pipe decided to blow off the RRE pipe I put on the car a few months back. UGGGH. Guy ran the whole timed laps with *0* boost, and was barely hitting 100mph in the banking. Fortunately it was only 2 laps without the turbo (and air filter, for that matter!), so chances are everything's going to be just fine. I now torqued the *hell* out of the clamp there, and that thing is never going to move again now. Obviously this set us back significantly, but we're going to try our best to run super well at the rest of the events to make up for it. We have footage to review before each of the tracks for all of them except for Pikes Peak and Memphis, so that will be a huge advantage for us.

Let's just hope that these two setbacks (although quite significant!) are the only ones during the week. We're suspecting we lost about 4 or 5 seconds in the Seven from it cutting out on the banking, and who knows how much for the non-turbo Eclipse! Probably a 50-something finish then, but as long as we finish in the top 20 the rest of the events, we should hopefully be able to get a top 20 finish still. Fortunately a LOT more happens during the event, and a lot of cars will have problems, and/or drop out of the event. In fact, some of the "already dead" list include one of the top running Porsches in the Classic Imported class (#7), an 80s BMW, and that's about all I saw today (of course, there were still about 60 cars to run when we left).

We're now on our way down to Heartland Park (it's about an 800 mile drive), so hopefully we'll get some sleep on the way.. til tomorrow!

- Emmanuel