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, Tue, 23 Jan 2007 09:57:24
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Hey Dietrich,
If you have to choose, you should be choosing reliability over speed for this event. It's a long, long time out there! It was described at one point as "not a race, but more like a really long, noisy commute to work".
Reliability means 1) the car doesn't have a mechanical failure of a wear item 2) the driver doesn't cause a mechanical failure due to poor driving (ie blows the transmission to bits) and 3) the driver doesn't cause a mechanical failure due to contact w/ other cars or objects.
We a few issues with reliability that you could learn from:
1) We got knocked out by car-contact, which meant that we missed the last few hours of the race. That cost us hundreds of laps!! We were as high as 8th place Sunday morning, but once we got knocked out, there's nothing we could do but watch everyone else rack up laps and push our finish down, down, down. We ended up 18th out of 33. Ouch. [see #3 above]
2) We had to replace the rear axle from car-contact (or wall or tires or something) which gave the RR tire about 2 inches of toe-out. That's a lot of work in the pits for something avoidable. [see #3 above]
3) Gradual loss of power over the two days, and engine temp running 3/4 hot in the last few running hours on Sunday. We measured low compression in our after-race teardown, which could have a lot of causes. One thing we have decided is to use better air filtration than what we had - an exposed K&N filter. It got so clogged that it looked like an old shop-vac filter. This is dirt country, and you gotta prep like the baja 500. Even if you never leave the track there is so much dirt in the air and all over that you may as well be off road. [see #1 above]
Keep in mind that the race will be run in the hottest part of the year this time, so the cooling system will have to be in tip-top shape or else you'll blow that up for sure.
You need to start collecting drivers and teammates now! Good luck! Damien
posted by 12.186.77...
, Tue, 23 Jan 2007 09:57:24, Tue, 23 Jan 2007 20:01:19
, Wed, 24 Jan 2007 13:25:36, Tue, 23 Jan 2007 13:36:34, Tue, 23 Jan 2007 20:59:02, Tue, 23 Jan 2007 23:14:09, Tue, 23 Jan 2007 14:55:17, Tue, 23 Jan 2007 16:07:42, Tue, 23 Jan 2007 15:53:17, Tue, 23 Jan 2007 16:13:55
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