Philip Slate
Well-Known Member
TBL was great. The Hell part was the weather. The weekend continued with record breaking high temperatures and on Friday the air temp was 117 and the track temp was 145. Very toasty. By Sunday, though, it had cooled down to the low 100s. Darn near sub-arctic. The practice session on Saturday morning must have caught TBL by surprise because by lap five the engine was overheating quite furiously and a few turns before pit in a bolt fell out of the throttle linkage. We had to pull off the track and wait for the session to end. As luck would have it, there was a fire and rescue truck where we pulled off and the crew offered me a seat inside their air conditioned truck and then gave me a bottle of cold water. I couldn’t help but feel guilty as I sat inside the cool, comfortable truck while TBL was outside undergoing a mass exodus of liquid from the cooling system. Anyway, after the session was over we limped back to the pits and remedied the two situations hoping that the cooling issue was just a stuck thermostat. Our lap times (all five of ‘em) in the morning warm up placed us 11th on the grid for the qualifying race. Qualifying was uneventful with TBL running at a warm but very acceptable temperature and by the end of qualifying we had moved up to 6th which would be our starting position for Sunday’s race. I should mention that this was the first race at CalSpdwy with the ‘new’ M5 engine and I discovered that while TBL now had the balls to carry speed through the banking, I did not (it wasn’t until the last few laps of the race on Sunday that I was able to find at least vestiges of my scrotal area attachments… or is that TMI)). I thought I was driving fairly well until I saw my lap times which were, at best, embarrassing. I won’t say that I was slow, necessarily, but it does explain why the guy on the three speed Schwinn (Sturmey-Archer equipped) was ringing his bell for me to pull over to let him go by. I could only hope that by Sunday’s race my head would be removed from my…er…well, the not sunshiny place. As it turned out, Sunday’s race was both fun and frustrating. As usual, when the green flag flew some of the Mustangs, Cobras (in this case kit cars) and ‘Vettes motored past us heading for turn one. We knew TBL could out brake ‘em so we just waited patiently for them to start braking and then drove right by them, did a little late braking and that was the end of that…or so I thought. For the first few laps we were closing in on a Corvette that we qualified behind but knew we could beat. Then it happened. On the front straight/banking a V-8 powered Sports Racer flew past us. My first though was “Damn, that guy is fast”. And I have no problem with being passed by a faster car/driver. My Second thought was, damn, I forgot to turn on the video camera (so if you watch the video, that’s why it doesn’t start at the beginning of the race). However, when we got to the second set of turns, it was all I could do not to run over the guy. And in the last set of turns before the front straight I had to brake hard to avoid running up the guy’s tail pipe…the car’s tail pipe, that is. The deal is, in order for TBL to be competitive with the V-8 guys we have to take the turns as fast as possible and then insure that we get a good launch out of the turns so we can carry good speed on to the next set of turns. Well, with the Sports Racer guy practically parking in the turns our forward momentum was shot which left us easy pickin’s for the more powerful cars behind us. Because of that, though, we had a good close race with a Corvette that was driven by a very heads up driver. Again, should you watch the video, you’ll notice that once the Sports Racer spins and we get by him, our forward momentum improves dramatically. In any case, the racing was fun, TBL was an absolute pleasure to drive and we had a very good time.
The video is huge…192MB and took me about three minutes @ 1100+KB/sec to do a test download. Tried to upload the video to youtube but it was rejected because it was too long at almost 18 minutes.
The video can be downloaded from http://tblracing.com/e9coupe/ file name Cal Spdwy 06-22-08.
The video is huge…192MB and took me about three minutes @ 1100+KB/sec to do a test download. Tried to upload the video to youtube but it was rejected because it was too long at almost 18 minutes.
The video can be downloaded from http://tblracing.com/e9coupe/ file name Cal Spdwy 06-22-08.