Day 1 – Driving to Southbend, IN
By: Devin Clancy
Common knowledge for any One Lap veteran and a lesson learned quickly for any rookie is that the main competition ender lies not on the racetrack but rather the roads separating them. We got a brief taste of that today.
Like any true grassroots motorsport enthusiasts, we waited until the night before we left to do some much needed maintenance to the car and apply sponsor graphics, and like any such night tends to go… nothing went according to schedule. For instance, two guys trying to apply a six foot graphic that conveniently crosses directly over a door handle takes time, a lot of time, especially when you have to do it twice and they’ve never done anything like it before. Fortunately for us, we believe in the credo that stickers are indeed proportional to speed.
After starting at 6 pm and applying graphics until 2:30 in the morning we were able to get a quick nap in before waking up at 7:30am in order to head back to Doug’s in order to get the maintenance portion of our list done. Honestly, what better way can you think of to start an event that tests the limits of you and your car’s endurance by not sleeping? Brilliant, eh? Yeah, we’re good like that.
During maintenance, we encountered a few
minor setbacks, like the tire sidewall barely resting on the spring perch
without the suspension compressed. Some screwdrivers, hammers, and cursing came together in a last minute fit of fury through Doug’s hands in order to make clearance for the tire. That and other problems solved, we finally got the trailer loaded and got on the road at 5:30 pm. The original plan was to leave at noon. Off to a great start…
… but the fun didn’t stop there. It’s at this point that I should probably tell you that in a last minute fit of genius and planning, we decided to bring one of Doug’s old BMX bikes from the days when he was still moving without a walker (
) in order to allow us to walk tracks quicker if we were in a time crunch. Having no room left in the car or trailer, plus no bike rack, we decided to tie strap the bike on top of the trailer. Now it’s at this point that I should also probably tell you that we didn’t inspect the 14 year old straps because we were rushing to leave at that point (hindsight is 20/20 by the way). Well ~70 miles into our trip, in Asheville, NC, it started to pour. In an amazing bit of foresight, Doug quickly turned around to check the state of our securely mounted bike, which, to no surprise now, was getting ready to fall off of the trailer. We quickly got off of the interstate and pulled toward a gas station, only to have the bike finally fall off of the back of the trailer in a decently busy intersection. A Chinese fire drill and some strange looks later, we had the bike wrangled and were sitting at the gas station. Lucky for us, we had exited at the exit I live off of in Asheville when I am working, so I knew exactly where to go in order to get new, non-frayed/non-broken tie straps. (Thanks for the St. Joseph’s Lucky Bean, Mom, it is velcro’d to the roll cage!)
Still, though, the road’s hazing ritual was incomplete. About 2 hours after the bike incident, the car threw a check engine code, TPS Sensor issues. During our reading of the code, I got under the hood to investigate a burning smell, only to be greeted a fire-red glowing exhaust housing on the turbo. Ken was previously powering up a series of hills, but not being familiar with turbo cars, he was unaware of the massive affects this would have on EGTs due to the increased load placed on the motor. Simple fix: less throttle on the hills. We monitored EGTs for a good while after the stop, and everything is fine, thankfully. As for the TPS, well it’s still giving us problems, so we’re just going to have to disconnect and reconnect the battery every time we run the car until we can sort it out.
As for the drive to Southbend, IN, we abandoned ship tonight at midnight in Georgetown, Kentucky due to us all wanting some much needed sleep. We will get back on the road tomorrow morning and hopefully make it to Southbend by noon.
Devin
Wish it were me. 
-- "Awesome-o" 
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