hellafunctional

Here’s a nice video of a Porsche GT3 cup car racing at pikes peak this past weekend. Not your typical environment for such a car.

This past weekend was the 4th round of Redline Time Attack, and took place on the Roval course at California Speedway in Fontana. We were there once again with the Robispec/RRE modified class EVO after a night of no sleep prepping and tuning the car at Road Race Engineering. We made a few changes for the event, which included a new straight pipe 3.5″ exhaust dumping out the passenger rear door, a rear diffuser, and some vents for the front fenders. Oh, and also a new Garret GT40R twin scroll turbo to replace the 35R.

Here you can see the exhaust dumping out the carbon door skin:

These guys look like they could use some sleep:

On the dyno:

Dyno Video:

By the time I had the bumper on and fixed a slight oil leak it was time to load up the car and head to fontana. Saturday didn’t go well as we kept blowing off intercooler pipes and I was exhausted. Here’s a picture Kyle Lewis of NWautoevents took of me working on the car:

Thanks to Scott Vanderheide of Fontana Nissan I procured a new silicone coupler that held together. The car was finally on track for the first afternoon session and seemed to be running well. However, when Nils came in to check tire pressures the coolant temp was off the charts and I got a slight feeling that we were in trouble. I sent him out for some cool down laps and had fans and water to dump on the front of the car in the garage. The car was sputtering in the last session and we left it with Scott and Mike of RRE to troubleshoot, and went to sleep.

The next morning the car was still sputtering and was running hot. My suspicions of a blown headgasket were confirmed when I had to add nearly a gallon of water to the radiator after two laps around the track. I torqued the headstuds down to 100lb-ft and hoped it would hold together for one timed lap. Unfortunately this was not the case and Nils had to limp the car back in after getting one solid pull around the banking to start what would have been a very fast lap.

So now we get to pull the motor out and apart. Before the next event we’ll have a better cooling package, o-rings in the head, a new ignition system, a fuel cell, and probably quite a bit more power.

For more coverage, check out the redline time attack website and owle.tv

The guys over at Factor X Motorsports in Las Vegas have made some big changes to the car for this season. I was out there at the last time attack and they were all very great to hang out with and incredibly hospitable, as they allowed us the use of their shop to fix out car, and fed me pretty much the entire weekend. Here’s the video they made at the event:

A super lap battle qualifyer is this weekend in vegas, so we’ll all be out there again and it should be a lot of fun.

you own me a 10 second car.

I mean 11 seconds.

Why yes, minivans are pretty hellafunctional.

I should really get off my ass and start posting on here a little more. I already did a write up on this for forums but now I have to spend all that time editing the image tags to make them work on here (which took about 2 minutes in notepad). Anyway, here we go:

Last weekend was round 3 of Redline Time Attack, and we were there with our mod class EVO. Here it is, fresh from Road Race Engineering, waiting to go on the trailer:

Towards the end of the last event, our car was making less boost than we expected. Even on the 25psi map, it wouldn’t go over 18 or so. It went to Road Race Engineering so they could put it on the dyno to see what was wrong, and on the first pull it made 14psi and about 340whp, which incredibly was enough for 3rd place at buttonwillow. Turns out we blew the welds on the intake manifold. After some welding and reinforcement, the car was making a nice 530whp at 23psi on E85 (all the injectors would do). We loaded up the car and hit the road for Vegas Friday morning, with the expectation of getting in some laps.

We arrived before noon and set up with the Factor X guys:

The other white and orange evo there belongs to Nils, the driver of our car (notice how our number is 00?).

Unfortunately the car wouldn’t run right at all Friday. The logs showed injector duty going all over the place and the car would sputter and jerk under throttle. Mike from RRE and I traced it down to an electrical problem and I started tearing into the wiring harness. By the end of the day I had the dash out and it was getting dark, so we loaded up the car and headed over to FXMD:

Yeah, that’s all there is to it- three guys splitting a unit to work on their own cars, including the unlimited class NSX.

By 4am I had replaced the alternator, fixed some shorts in the wiring harness, and seemingly had the car running properly. We loaded the car and I grabbed two hours of sleep. Without Factor X we would have had a pretty terrible weekend and I can’t thank them enough for the hospitality. Great guys, great shop, and great food! I hope we pit next to them at every event.

Saturday morning I put the dash back together and we had the car ready for the first session. Or so we thought. The wideband was cutting out and causing sputtering, even though according to Mike it should not have made a difference since the o2 feedback was turned off in the ECU. We unplugged the thing, and the car ran great. We went out for a couple of short sessions Saturday to fine tune the suspension and tire pressures, and I wandered around and took a couple of pictures.

NSX all put together:

Some evos:

Some Subarus:

Mazda:

Part of the pits:

At the end of the day we were a bit off the pace of the top Mod AWD cars, but we had a plan: Q16. The car is also tuned for it, and makes just over 600whp at 30psi on the stuff. We had 15 gallons with, which was enough for at least a practice and timed session Sunday. We were also all glad to get a full night of sleep that night.

Sunday is race day. There are two practice sessions in the morning, and two timed sessions in the afternoon. On the timed seesions cars go out in groups of 5-8 in order of speed. In the first practice we were over a second off the pace, so it was time to switch to Q16. Our boost control system has two manual controllers and a solenoid hooked to a switch on the dash. While I’m a fan of controlling boost with the ECU, those evo guys like manual controllers. I suppose it does simplify things a bit. To ensure we were making the proper boost, Mike and I went on a drive to log the car down Las Vegas blvd. In case anyone was wondering, 4th gear at 8500rpm works out to 136mph, and it doesn’t take long to get there.

the extra 100hp or so put us 2nd on the grid right behind JC Meynet in the AQ motorsports STi. This was looking to be a little more interesting than that forum wars crap.

In the first timed run we pulled to within 0.4s of JC, and were over a second ahead of everyone else. With the old R888s, that was all the car had in it. Ryan Gates had suffered an engine failure Saturday, and so was willing to sell us a set of brand new Nitto NT01s. We were all set for the last session when the drama started. Due to a large amount of gravel strewn all over the track, we were unable to get in a clean fast lap. The unlimited cars were so upset they refused to run until the track was cleaned, and marched up to the timing booth with a growing mob and camera crew. The organizers decided they weren’t going to bother cleaning the track, so the crews themselves went out on the track with brooms to clean it up. A few hours later it was swept, and we were allowed to run with the unlimited cars to try to get in a clean lap. Then, with a shot to win Mod AWD, something in our transmission broke. Time for a built Shep tranny I think.

Well, here are some other assorted pictures:

Mike Kojima of MotoIQ:

Cars ready to go out:

Some hellafunctional stickers:

Full gallery here:

RTA 2010 Vegas

WRC turkey took place this past weekend, and as usual Sebastien Loeb took the win. I’m really not a fan of Seb, but I am happy that Petter Solberg has been doing so well this season, with three straight podium finishes (2nd in Mexico, 3rd in Jordan, 2nd in Turkey), which puts him second in the driver’s championship. I can even get over the fact that he’s driving a citroen. So congrats Petter on a great start to the season. However, the real reason I made this post was for this video:

Notice how the wheel goes flying off shortly after he landed.

For more information about the WRC, check out WRC.com and the WRC youtube channel.

Here’s a new rally video I found on the internet.

Could use with more car sounds and less music, though. Like this one:

This past weekend was the first round of Redline Time Attack, which took place at Buttonwillow Raceway outside of Bakersfield California.

We were there with the white and orange robispec evo I’ve posted about previously. It’s looking really good:

Plus it’s reasonably fast. The unfortunate part of the weekend is that we experienced some electrical issues which were causing the car to sputter, stall, and not start. We actually had to be towed off the track at some point. Thankfully Mike at Road Race Engineering and I were able to trace it down to a short in the wiring to the MAP sensor, which caused the boost reading to the ECU to fluctuate randomly. By splicing another maps sensor directly into the ECU we had the car running great. We also had the catch can, which was tiny and vents to atmosphere, blowing oil all over the engine bay. After I installed a secondary catch can we finally had the car running reliably, although down on power. Logs showed we were only making 19psi on what we thought was our medium (25psi) boost setting. That put us down to less than 500whp, which for mod class isn’t quite enough. The winning Cobb GTR was making nearly 800whp, while the LIC/Takata STi that took 2nd by 0.5 seconds was making over 550. So, all and all a pretty good first race weekend for the car, especially since we didn’t break anything, like quite a few other cars this weekend.

Moving on from our car, there was lots of other cool stuff out there.

A very fast FWD convertible eclipse that unfortunately broke a transmission:

A very fast FWD scion:

Some minis:

A nice supercharged exige:

Widebody turbo S2000

Here are the fastest mod class cars lined up

And there were a few hellafunctional stickers out there:

My full gallery is located here

Results are on the redline time attack website

I heard a good story the other day. A guy in Illinois named Bill Caswell bought himself a $500 bmw. Then he dropped an M3 motor in it, and prepped it for rally.

Then he rented a van and trailer, found a codriver, and drove the car to Mexico.

Why Mexico? well, that’s the only WRC event in North America. Here are some pictures and links:

Jalopnik Article
Co-driver’s write-up