The Big Bang

The size nine stiletto of one miss Lady Luck kicked us square in the chops this weekend as we lost our first engine of the season.

Sixteen thousand RPM's one second, and absolutely nothing the next.  And as it usually goes, the catastrophic failure always occurs on a high speed stretch of the track so to anyone who has experienced this before you know it can be quite the horrific moment.

After all this sudden excitment he still managed to keep it out of the fence, or anything else with some weight behind it, and coasted safely off the track.  Later it was found that a ring had let go and got ingested in the engine, putting day one of a two day race weekend in the books as a DNF.

On the brighter side of things, thanks to Greg Hobbs (son of legendary sports car and formula one pilot David Hobbs) Sam learned a few things this weekend that are already proving to be key in his development.  Greg so graciously took Sam under his wing for the day since I could not personally be there and besides an occasional chassis or engine set up tip, he worked with him on some trouble spots he was having on the track.  Now he has a new mantra when he sets off down pit road that should hopefully bring us one step closer to his goals.

What could have easily been one of the most disappointing weekends to date actually was a great learning experience for both of us.  Thanks again Greg for all the advice.  I figure it would have cost far more for a professional driving coach than the rebuild I'm facing so we're pretty much ahead of the game here.

Next up, Shawano, and my turn at the wheel.  If, and only if we get this engine back together in time I might get to finally find out what it is that I'm expecting from my son every weekend.  And although I expect to have fun, I feel certain that I probably won't be able to deliver.

Oh how frustrated he's going to be.

The year so far

Ughhhh!

One word can sum up the season so far and that's pretty much it.  Actually we could very well insert another single word into this mix but doing so would seriously compromise our PG rating on this website.

Some of you might be saying it can't be all that bad can it?  And my response to you would be that you're right, it could be far worse.  So what could all the trouble be?

In a nutshell, we haven't been struggling like this for a long time now.  I feel I know my way around a chassis and the whole art of tuning has begun to make sense to me. Sam certainly knows his way around the track so how could we possibly be so far behind if all the pieces are in place?  Where the problem lies is in the fact that we can't seem to get everything to come together in one cohesive ball of mind numbing speed.

Late last season we borrowed a TaG engine to play around with and immediately ran fast.  Faster than most of the guys who had been running the class for a while.  And this season we jumped right out of the box onto the track and found our legs almost immediately.  The problem is that for some very strange reason we've been back pedaling lately and can't seem to pin point why.

In today's age of on board data acquisition systems and just about every means possible of monitoring your driver and vehicle, it can prove to be more of a curse at times than a productive tool.  Case in point:  The crew sees inconsistencies in lap times and can only attribute this to some driver error.  But said driver feels that he's squeezing every ounce out of his machine and that it can only be traced to an improperly tuned chassis.  You see where I'm going here?  One weekend of this kind of thing can have more drama than an entire season on the Springer show.

After a couple of heated conversations and one promise of an early retirement we all arrived at the point where we decided that we're all going to have to try harder out on the track and be more understanding of one another off it.  This coming weekend at Badger should hopefully provide the groundwork for future success.  We have a lot of work to do to get back into the mix of things so our fingers are crossed and we'll let you know how we fare.