(stay tuned to OneLapSupra.com during the race for daily updates!)
Update #2 Thursday, May 08, 2003
By Andi Baritchi
I thought this year would be relatively drama free, what with all the extremely
thorough car preparation, the practice days I did at some of the tracks, etc… Last
year, it seems like we had nothing but huge problems throughout the race, yet
had a guardian angel watching over us and helping us get through all these
problems without any adverse affects on our points standings. This year, the
exact opposite seems to be the case – no catastrophic failures off the
track, just performance issues surfacing during the track sessions and costing
us big points. That and, unlike last year, we weren’t fortunate enough
to avoid having to race in the rain.
The Supra is ideally suited to fast, sweeping tracks with long straights – preferably
dry ones. I was really excited about Road America before One Lap – I
knew that our Supra’s high horsepower and great high speed stability
would help us a lot there. The rain took away our unfair advantage at Road
America and made it just a test of how well I can drive a twitchy 600hp car
on a wet track. I ended up getting 18th place in the wet Road America time
trial, so as you might expect I was very disappointed that it rained at Road
America. I kept thinking to myself how cool it would have been if Road America
was dry, and how much better I’d’ve done.
Then I had an epiphany – had it not rained at Road America, I would have
been much harder on the brakes there – and I’d’ve had two
sessions instead of one on that track. In that case, it’s quite likely
that I would have had the front left brake come apart on the track at the end
of one of the 160mph straights. The consequences of such a failure at those
speeds aren’t pretty, i.e. jerking the car hard to the right when applying
the brakes, so in retrospect I’m thrilled it rained at Road America.
To the Gerrard/Church team that was doing the rain dance all day on Sunday,
thank you. Who knows what would have happened to me at Road America in the
dry….
After getting the brakes fixed in Rockford, Illinois, the rest of the drive
to Tulsa was pretty calm. I spent some of that drive sleeping, some of it writing
the previous web update, etc. We had a pretty big caravan of One Lappers going
~80-100 most of the way, so I can’t complain. Clint and I ended up arriving
at Shane’s house in West Tulsa at about 2:30am, so we got about two hours
of sleep before waking up at 5:30 to head out to Hallett.
Hallett is a pretty cool track, rewarding horsepower a little and good driving
a lot. There’s a lot of blind turns and tricky elevation and camber changes
here… so I thought I would do rather well here, with the two practice
days I’ve done at Hallett since last year. And I probably would have,
had the race fuel there not been crap. You see, Clint filled up the car at
the track with the track’s 103 unleaded race gas, which should be just
fine for the boost we were running (~23psi).
As soon as I started my warm-up lap, however, the engine was absolutely not
happy. The car started 
detonating severely, and to make matters worse, the
timing retard from the detonation caused a boost spike to 30+psi, which immediately
registered an exhaust gas temperature of 930C. That’s motor melting territory.
:-(. I turned the boost down to 16psi and richened the air fuel mixture, and
did my best to short shift and protect the motor as best I could. The EGT gauge
ended up hovering between 880 and 910C the whole session, and the car ran like
absolute shit. I think I ended up getting 7th in the morning session.
During the lunch break, Clint dumped the shit race gas that caused this problem
and dumped in half a tank of 110 leaded, which seemed to fix the problem during
the multiple 40-160 pulls he did on the street by the track to test it out.
Then, as soon as I started the second session, the car began misfiring worse
than I’ve ever seen, and I again turned the boost down to try and complete
the session with the motor in one piece. The check engine light turned on sometime
during the session, too. Nice.
The diagnostic procedure for the check engine light revealed a code 13, and
after calling home and asking my mom to look that up on the Internet, I found
out that the crank angle sensor had gone bad. Shane checked the local Toyota
dealers in Tulsa, and of course nobody had one. Damn. Now we had good race
gas, the EGTs were fine, but we had a horrible misfire. The ignition had gotten
so bad that even cruising off-boost at 5500RPM was choppy – it wasn’t
just a high boost problem.
Oh, and we had to be at Tulsa Speedway, about an hour away, by 3pm the same
day for the dirt track time trials. We hauled ass towards Tulsa, and stopped
in Sand Spring at a shut down Conoco to change spark plugs in the shade. Still
misfired. Oh well, we don’t need a lot of power for the dirt anyway.
So, it’s 3:15 and we arrive at the dirt track. Clint pulls off the engine
undercover / radiator air scoop so we don’t destroy it on the track,
and unpacks all the crap from the car. We hurry so we can get in line early,
as I recall last year all the fast times were done early on before the track
dried up. Last year, all the fast people went on the very high line near the
wall, and the slower ones were slow because we didn’t have the balls
to 
pitch the car in fast and high. So this year, I had learned my lesson, and
I took the high line, getting real sideways and close to the wall in my quest
to not suck at the dirt track this time. Balls were not lacking this time.
58th place. Stupid 58th place is what I got at the dirt track. It turns out
that the grippier line this year was down low – the line I took last
year – and I again sucked at the dirt track, worse than last year’s
spectacular 33rd place performance. This brought us down to 7th place overall,
with a 200-point gap to the next better position. It would now be a game of
attrition – it will take a DNF from one of the top 6 for us to move up.
Attrition is a big factor in One Lap though, so I decided to continue running
as well as I could and just make sure I don’t make any mistakes and slip
down further.
So now we’ve got the second longest leg of One Lap head of us – Tulsa
to Mephis – and our Supra doesn’t run for shit on boost. What do
we do? Shane Duvall rescues us again – this time by letting us scavenge
parts of his Supra until ours would run well again. We were at his house by
5pm and Clint went to work on both cars. First we tried his engine computer – no
luck, still misfired. Then his ignitor – same thing. Now came the hard
part – swapping the crankshaft angle sensor. That part is a pain in the
ass to get to as it’s under the car and you have to loosen the timing
belt tensioner to get to it.
Clint first pulled out our Supra’s crank angle sensor and found the problem.
There’s a big dent in it. WTF? Who knows… So Clint took Shane’s
230,000 mile crankshaft angle sensor out of his car and installed it in ours.
Of course some bolt stripped on Shane’s car and we had to get a tap and
die set to fix that, but I think it was all fixed in the end. We started our
Supra up and the check engine light was gone – a promising sign. Then
Clint test drove it and it still misfired. Dammit!
Upon further inspection of the engine bay, Clint found that the adjustable
intake camshaft gear had slipped 10 crank degrees, from my setting of +2 to
-8. He adjusted the cam gear, and now the misfire was gone. Clint then went
back to work on putting Shane’s car back together, and I went to sleep
for a while. We ended up leaving Tulsa around midnight, just in time for a
nice, leisurely overnight drive to Memphis. Right.
The drive to Memphis sucked. The highway was very choppy, and the weather was
just a constant downpour the whole way. I did hear later that we missed a bad
hailstorm by a few hours, so I can’t complain about the weather. At some
point, we hit a really bad dip in the freeway and the prototype undertray /
air scoop Wayne made last week got torn off. :( .
When we arrived at Memphis Motorsports Park at 7am, the entire area was engulfed
in a torrential downpour. There were tornado watches and flash flood watches
active for the entire Memphis area, including the city of Millington that houses
the track. It was obvious there would be no drag races – the VHT all
over the drag strip is extremely slippery when wet. But what would they do
about the road course?
It stopped raining around 7:30am, and they decided to just dry the track as
well as they could and have us run. I was already a bit nervous about this
track when I walked it, as there was a river running down the 100mph banked
turn 1, as well as numerous other slick, wet areas. Then Brock made the big
announcement: due to the standing water that had accumulated on the drag strip,
we would diverge from plan and not use the drag strip as the front straight.
Rather, from the back part of the track we would make a wide u-turn and accelerate
up pit lane. Pit lane runs parallel to and right next to the drag strip, separated
from it by a strong concrete wall.
Pit lane is only one quarter of a mile long, however, and we would be transitioning
to the drag strip at the end of pit lane for the next quarter mile of straightaway.
Pit lane ends abruptly with a concrete wall, and we would make this transition
to the second front straight at speed through a 1.5 car length long hole in
the wall. At speed. Let me restate.. you’re driving along pit lane (walls
on both sides) and you go through a very short hole in the left wall onto the
drag strip, which also has walls on both sides. Tagging the wall on the transition
is not an option – it’s not like hitting some wall with the side
of the car and just scraping it. Hitting this wall would be a disastrous head-on
collision with a two foot wide, four foot tall, immovable concrete object,
and would probably send the car spinning into the opposite wall on the dragstrip.
So, you’re thinking, there must be a chicane before this transition to
slow us down so nobody tries to be the hero and ends up going to fast and hitting
the wall, right? In a word, no. I asked Brock Jr. about putting in a chicane
to make it safer, and he said “your car has 3 pedals – use them
at your discretion to make the turn safely.” Umm... okay, I’ll
do that.
I ran in the second run group, so I got to see the top 5 negotiate the kink
between the walls. Scary is an understatement. By the third lap they were going
almost flat out, with just a lift to rotate the car on the way to an insane
triple-digit-speed lane change through a 25-foot hole in a concrete wall. Insanity.
When it was my turn, I think I braked a bit on the first two laps, and only
let off the gas on the third. I took the kink at about 110mph. It may have
been scary, but surprisingly it didn’t seem as scary in the car as it
did when walking the course earlier. After the session, I talked to Ron Adee,
the man currently first in the field in his 427 Vette. He said he was still
letting off in the kink, but that in the second run group he planned to run
totally flat out and keep the nitrous on through both straights. Words to live
(die?) by….
The afternoon session at Memphis was a lot more exciting – everybody
was trying harder, and I swear I saw Brian Smith get within inches of the right
wall through the kink. I thought I was seeing him hit, and then somehow the
Viper kept going and was no crashing sound, but nonetheless the daylight had
totally disappeared between the red Viper and the concrete wall. And now it
was my turn to go out again. The car was running pretty good, accelerating
strongly to 150ish on the front straight, and was only getting slightly sideways
now in the afternoon when crossing the river through the banked turn 1 at 110mph.
This session was a lot more exciting, and scary. I got a much better exit onto
the front straight (pit lane) than before, and was shifting to 5th around 115-120mph
before the kink. On the first flying entrance to the kink, I recall I let off
slightly to adjust my line, and all was well as I flew through there. On the
second flying entrance, I stayed in it, with the only let-off being the shift
to 5th. Now THAT was scary. I’ve since watched both in-car videos we
have of the run (roof mount and trunk-mount in-car), and I still can’t
believe we did that. At 120. Damn. That’ll be the first video I post
to the net…
The drive from Memphis Motorsports Park to Carolina Motorsports Park was another
600 or so miles, and for once, this drive was totally uneventful. We got to
Kershaw at about 2am and pulled into the Executive Inn. No rooms. The hotel
was totally empty at this point (there were maybe 6 cars parked outside), yet
the whole thing was reserved. Karl Troy was on the patio when we arrived, and
he said people were going back to Lancaster to get rooms. He had his red, white,
and blue race Diable parked outside, and his wife was there too in his yellow
Diablo (the one he ran in One Lap last year). That just looked way too damn
cool in the hotel parking lot.
We ended up driving to Camden (15 miles south of the track) and getting a room
at a pretty run-down hotel there, the onl one that we found. Oh well, we only
got two and a half hours of sleep anyway… Upon our arrival at Carolina
Motorsports Park this morning, we had a nice empty gas tank so we mixed some
104 unleaded and 110 leaded. Clint did some more testing on the street and
the car ran strong, so stuff seemed to be going better. Ryan Hoskins brought
a bicycle with him to the track for me to use this morning, which was pretty
helpful in reminding myself what this track looked like.
I started the first session and the car just felt weak. The EGTs passed 900C,
so I turned the boost down to 18psi and the EGTs stayed in check. But the water
temps didn’t – they started rising, and passed 105C. Damn. We think
the severe detonation from the bad race gas at Hallett might have hurt the
head gasket. :( I got 7th place in that session, which I guess isn’t
too bad considering the problems. What really impressed me is Karl Troy – he
got 3rd place, meaning he’s very close to the pace being set by Brian
and Ron. Karl’s really stepped it up this year, that all-race Diablo
is a beast, and he’s not driving it too badly either.
I went to the Media RV where Kim was selling One Lap merchandise as usual.
I was going to ask her if she’d mind if I rested in the RV’s air
conditioned comfort for a bit, when Billy from the Car & Driver Television
crew came up to me with the camera and started chatting with me on camera.
Billy’s a real cool guy, and it’s funny how every time you look
up from getting a quick nap at the track or working on the car, he’s
got a camera on you. Kinda cool too, hopefully we’ll get some good TV
time this year; I can’t wait to see. Anyways, Billy said we can go in
the RV, and came in w/ me and his other camera guy to chat about our progress
this year on camera. They left after about 20 minutes of interviewing me on
camera, and I subsequently just laid back and fell asleep on the couch in the
RV overlooking the start/finish line.
An hour later, I woke up, looked out the window, and saw the Diablo and the
other cars in my run group lined up on the starting grid and read to go. SHIT!
I bolted to my car, where Clint was standing there with my race car and helmet
ready. Not 90 seconds later I was on the track doing my warm up lap. What a
way to wake up.
This second session, I did my best to keep the motor in one piece, suspecting
the bad head gasket, and turn the boost down to minimum (16psi), not to mention
running the heater on maximum. The session felt pretty good, and I think I
ran a way better line than in the morning – so I would guess I did okay
considering this isn’t a power track anyway.
One problem – the coolant temperatures, even at just one bar of boost,
rose from 90C to 98C in the warm-up lap, and to 110C by the end of the four-lap
session. That’s *with* me nursing the engine by short shifting at 6k
on every straight. A damaged head gasket is starting to look more likely. Where
do we get one of those, and how the hell can we replace it in time?
About 10 minutes after my session ended, Greg Caloudas arrived in his GSC Motorsports
Excursion, and somehow he had a brand new sealed 2JZ GTE head gasket in the
back of the truck. Talk about weird coincidences – that’s pretty
funny. He gave us the head gasket and we took off, driving as quickly as we
can to Beaver Falls to hopefully have time to replace the head gasket if necessary.
While passing through Charlotte, we stopped at a Sears to by the right tools
for changing the head gasket, and Clint tracked down a Snap-on truck and bought
an exhaust content coolant tester (head gasket tester). It’s now 9pm
and we’ve got 200 miles left on our journey to Beaver Falls. We’ve
already passed the same group of One Lappers at least three times this afternoon;
it’s interesting how we can be driving on a 600 mile stretch of freeway,
separated by hours among each other, yet we keep running into each other. It’s
kind of cool, actually.
Tomorrow is the last day of One Lap of America 2003 – we have two time
trials on Beaver Run’s main (north) course, and one run on the go-cart
track. The day is a big variable for us right now, as we don’t even know
if the head gasket is okay right now or if we will be replacing it all night.
I’m going to go to sleep now, I gotta wake up soon whenever Clint gets
tired and asks me to drive…
