LeMons B.F.E. GP 2018 – Part 2

Sunday June 10

I arrive at the track a few minutes before 8. The weather forecast for today calls for high temperatures a few degrees warmer than yesterday. One of Brett’s great decisions was to rent one of the carports to keep us all out of the sun. Instead of brilliant clear blue skies, we have some smoke that has blown in from the wildfires near Durango. I don’t think it will help with the heat, though.

Tiny discs

When I left the track last night I was under the impression that the brakes had been completed but Brett told me he’d worked on the car until nearly 3am again. When they installed new pads there was an issue. They kept an old pad on one side of the rotor and put a new pad on the other and things were still a bit tight. I’m not sure what the implications of that might be, but I don’t think pad wear was the critical issue. When they bled the brakes, the fluid that came out was quite dark. I think the controlling factor is that the discs are so small. They’re not vented and can’t shed the heat, so the fluid cooks.

I don’t know that “all is forgiven”, but when I got to our carport, Jan was applying my name to the car. The guys continued to make tweaks to the car, and continued to struggle with fuel filter issues. By now we had a number of little water bottles filled with the backwash from the filter, each with a thick layer of sediment on the bottom.

Jan is out first in the car. She’s out about an hour. James is next, also about an hour. I’m up third, Brett wants me to go an hour and a half. While Jan is out, James and I spend some time shooting the breeze. We talk about lap timers and he downloads RaceChrono. He had been playing around with a different one, one that also does video. They made an attempt to mount his phone onto the dashboard of the car with zip ties, but that really had no chance. I told him it would work with the phone in his pocket, so that’s the route he went. I saw a tablet in one of the cars nearby; that looks like a good way to go. You can mount it securely and the display is plenty big.

Jan in the car

I help refuel the car twice. For LeMons, it only takes two people. Each must be in full gear – driving suit, helmet (with visor closed), gloves, fire proof shoes. One pours the fuel and the other stands ready with a fire extinguisher. The driver can’t be in the car. Yesterday, I poured gas during the one refueling exercise I participated in. Today I did both roles once each. During the second refueling of the day, I had to help Hank get back into the car. When I was buckling him up, I made the mistake of taking off my gloves. This is a big no-no and could have gotten us penalized.

In my stint in the car, I again try to count laps. Yesterday my 22 laps took an hour and nineteen minutes. That’s from the time I started the lap timer to when I stopped it. To get an hour and a half, I should count laps again and go an extra lap or two. So I get to 22 and go one more before exiting the track. When I get to our garage, nobody is expecting me. Hank isn’t suited up and nobody else is there. Brett arrives and asks how I’m doing. I say I’m doing fine and that I figured my time was up. He tells me I should do 3 more laps to give Hank time to get suited up. When I’m out of the car I find the lap timer has logged 23 laps. So clearly I’m unable to count.

I really thought I was doing a better job counting. How hard can it be to count to 22, you may wonder. Each time I crossed the start/finish line I’d announce to myself the count. I’d repeat it in turn four. I’m sure if I was the only one on the track it would be dead simple. But whenever I’d get stuck in a clump of traffic, with cars passing me and me passing other cars, it can get quite busy. It takes all my concentration.

Attrition has been working on the car count the whole race. There are a number of cars in the paddock when I start my session and traffic is noticeably lighter than yesterday. I am able to run several laps without having to pass or be passed. But I occasionally hit clumps of traffic. At one point, we’re going three wide up the hill on turn 11. Still, there are some really aggressive drivers who I must take action to avoid hitting when they’re passing me. One BMW steals my apex in turn 2, then gives me a wave. I take it as a “thanks for letting me by”, but when I relate the story to James he suggests that perhaps it was a “sorry” wave. Funny how there’s no doubt in my mind in the heat of the action but afterwards I can accept the possibility that it wasn’t exactly how I saw it at the time.

I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m seeing lots of “unique” racing lines. I’ve done in the neighborhood of a thousand laps at HPR and certainly a bunch of the drivers on track this weekend are here for their first visits. Many, undoubtedly, have never lapped anywhere before.

I don’t know if it’s because there’s less traffic or I’m just getting used to the car, but today I ran nine laps that were faster than my best lap yesterday. James says his best lap was a 2:41, which is a pretty good lap considering his lack of experience. He said he thought Jan was running more like 3:00 (but I’m not sure how he knows). When I later reviewed the video of the wheel coming off yesterday, I see that Hank’s times were in the mid to high 2:40’s. I would assume everybody’s times were better today than yesterday.

Hank came back in after only a few laps – fuel filter problems again. It worked fine for me, but seemed to crop up after we put more gas in the car. Not every time, but often enough. They back flushed the filter and sent him back out. Again, he was in after a lap. Turns out the filter wasn’t installed quite right. There was a tense moment between the mechanics but Brett reestablished the chain of command, the car was fixed, and Hank was back on track.

By the time Hank was in the car, the tenor of the race changed for us. I hadn’t been at all concerned with the results. I figured we had no chance at a win of any sort, so I wasn’t particularly interested in how we compared to anybody else. Brett now told us that we were in a race. One of the awards is the IOE. He explained it as the Index of Effort, or doing the most with the least. Turns out it’s the Index of Effluency. Our competition for this award was a Pinto station wagon. At that moment, we each had run the same number of laps. We needed to finish with more laps than them to win the IOE.

There’s an app available to keep on top of the results, but I didn’t bother installing it. Also, the post a hard copy of the standings in the classroom. The standings show our place, how many laps we’d run, and our fastest lap. That fast lap was a close match to my fastest lap according to RaceChrono. So I was fastest in the car. I expected this, as I have much more track experience than the other drivers.

Brett kept Hank in the car the rest of the day. We fueled him up one more time. James and I went looking for current standings with something like half an hour to go. By then we were up by 5 laps. As long as we didn’t have a wheel come off again things were looking pretty good. Nobody had run double the laps we’d completed, but half a dozen had run a hundred laps more. We had a couple of hours in the pits, so that would account for maybe 40 laps.

A big crowd gets all lined up where the cars come off the track when the checker flew to cheer all the cars. Standing at the fence, we met the crew of another car. They were in our class (C), and a lap ahead of us until their car broke down just before the checker. So we not only beat the Pinto but moved up from 6th to 5th in our class. There are three classes: A, B, and C. Aaron described them as “might win”, “might finish”, and “good luck”.

When Hank got out of the car, I asked him how the brakes were. “They’re gone. Double pump and get just a little braking in the rear.”

Turns out the IOE award is one of the top trophies, if not the top. I believe it has the largest cash prize. It also means Brett gets a free entry to the next LeMons race. The trophy is an overturned car with the driver running away. All the drivers get patches, too. We got the award because of the issues we had in getting the car running Friday, the fuel problems Saturday morning, and the wheel coming off Saturday afternoon. We had no gauges: no fuel gauge, no speedometer, no tach, no temperature gauges. By the end of each day we had no brakes.

Conclusion

We had 5 drivers in the car and turned 157 laps. (At least, that’s what I recall. I can’t find the official results.) If they were equally divided, that’s 31 or 32 laps each. I ran 45 laps according to RaceChrono. Hank undoubtedly ran more. Brett didn’t drive at all the second day, so he shortchanged himself. I certainly got more than my share of seat time, in spite of my lack of participation in getting the car built and keeping it running.

My instructions were to be kind to the car; not to rev too high, not to abuse the brakes. I think I did this, not only taking good care of the car but turning consistently fast laps. I’m sure there’s a fair amount of luck involved, but I was the only driver who didn’t have any problems with the car.

As to the car, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. This LeMons car is not at all like my Arrow. About all that’s the same is the body and the steering wheel. It’s a different engine and transmission. Mine was a 1.6l 4-speed, this has the 2.6l and 5-speed from a Fire Arrow. The wheels and tires on the Lemons car are bigger than on mine, and the car rides maybe three or four inches higher. My young self thought the car handled well, but of course my young self had no real clue. This LeMons car has considerable body roll due to the high ride height. When I was in the car, everything worked, but all felt … imprecise. I occasionally had trouble finding 3rd gear (never missed a shift, but struggled a few times). In the uphill right hand turn 11, I often experienced a nasty hop in the rear end under acceleration. I was able to alter my line in that turn and by not getting on the throttle as early or as hard more or less eliminate it.

Brett’s take on LeMons racing is that it’s more for and about the mechanics than the drivers. I have no aptitude for working on cars and it’s not particularly interesting to me. That is, it’s not something I want to learn, at least not in the context of running a LeMons race. For me, it’s all about driving the car. I’m more an “arrive and drive” guy. I’ll be surprised if Brett asks me back.

I have to thank Brett for letting me drive his car, and big thanks go to everyone on the team. They really put forth a great effort and they’re fully deserving of the IOE trophy. Aside from some tension early Saturday, I enjoyed the weekend.