Texas Tippin’ at MSR Houston gave us a garage with lights, three drivers for the first time since New Orleans, five black flags and a CV boot made of tape. It was also the first race we spent hunting instead of hiding and surviving.
The short version first. Car #86 ran all fourteen hours of Texas Tippin’ at MSR Houston, covered 301 laps and 716 miles, and finished 37th of 121 overall and ninth of 35 in Class C. That’s two class top tens in a row. The car didn’t come in once for a repair, which isn’t a sentence this team has had many chances to type.
Saturday went about as well as a day with two black flags can. Driver C opened, B took the middle stint, C closed, and the car spent a good part of the afternoon in the class top three before ending the day seventh. Sunday was B, A, C and A again, with two fifteen-minute stays in the penalty box along the way. Driver A took the checkered flag, meaning all three have claimed one this season.
The long version of the numbers is its own article. Houston by the Numbers has every lap, every gallon and every minute we spent parked, with charts. This one is about how the weekend looked from inside the garage, and about a red Volkswagen.
01Garage 1
We got lucky. Garage 1 was available and we took it, and without it our weekend at MSR Houston would’ve been more… challenging. A garage meant power. It meant shade when the sun was out, a roof when the rain came through, and lights after dark, which mattered because nearly all of the improvised repairs and consumable swaps in this story happened between Saturday’s checkered flag and Sunday’s green. It also spared the paddock our version of tent city, which nobody has ever called luxurious.
If you’ve only ever worked on a race car under a pop-up canopy in a gravel driveway with a flashlight in your teeth, doing it indoors with the lights on feels faintly indecent. We recommend it.
02Three drivers, at last
Houston was the first race since NOLA where we had a full team of three drivers.
Driver A made his comeback. His last outing ended with the original engine coming apart underneath him in New Orleans, due to a lubrication issue that wasn’t his fault, but we still blame him for…mostly because it’s funny. Driver B made his second start, two weeks after his first at Summit Point, and no longer drives like the new guy and drove the most consistent throughout the weekend. Driver C did what Driver C does, which is show up and try not to break anything important.
The full pit crew was there too, and they were the best part of the weekend. They get the last word, further down, because, as always, they earned it.
03Five black flags, three from the same corner
The car was shown the black flag five times. Three were for passing under yellow, and all three were called in from Turn 3.
Turn 3 at MSR Houston is staffed by enthusiasts, and we mean that as a compliment. Nobody on the property waved a yellow with more feeling, and on three occasions that feeling was about us. The first call, on Saturday, was withdrawn, but still cost us time. The two on Sunday stuck, at fifteen minutes of penalties each. We’re not suggesting Turn 3 had a crush on the car, because we know they did. We’re saying three for three is a pattern, the pattern has our number on it, and Turn 3 is now the most carefully studied corner in our notes and in our video.
Houston by the Numbers has the bill for those lost minutes. Short version: about thirteen laps, in a class where fourth place finished ten ahead of us.
Saturday’s other flag was for contact, in the sense that a red 1970s Volkswagen Beetle ran into the back of us. Lemons holds that it takes two to tango, even when only one of you was dancing, so in we came. There’s no dignified way to be rear-ended by a Beetle, and although we still tried, we didn’t find one and Driver B will have to suffer the indignity of knowing he drove slower than a stock Beetle that was going faster than him through a corner (also not his fault, but still funny).
The fifth came on Sunday at Turn 12, where the yellow-and-red striped flag that warns of oil was a little slow getting out of bed. The oil got there first and so did we. We went off, reported in as required, and were sent straight back out.
04What broke, what we taped, and what got zip tied
For a car that never stopped for repairs, it kept us busy.
Saturday began with the wipers, which remained a mystery through the weekend. We gave up before the green flag, tried again on Sunday morning, and gave up again. We also found oil seeping from the over-pressure valve on the Accusump. We snugged the valve down and the leak seems to have stopped, which by this team’s history with the Accusump counts as a tender moment.
Partway through Saturday the oil-temperature gauge went dark. The sending wire had relaxed against the exhaust manifold, which is no place to relax, and melted. Before Sunday’s start we soldered a new wire to the spring in the swage fitting and potted it back into the sensor with steel-stick epoxy.
The radio had its own Saturday. The long-range antenna wire at our base station in the pit had a bad ground. Our pit crew re-crimped it, then reinforced the repair by handling the radio gingerly and not looking at it funny. After that it mostly worked, except through Turns 4 to 6, where the terrain and the paddock building got between us.
Saturday night was the long shift. The front brakes came off as planned, and the pads and rotors we’d ordered from Amazon had held up amazingly well. A caliper bolt on the passenger side had left the team at some point without giving notice, and Advance Auto Parts supplied its replacement. We then learned, the hard way, that the wheels our spare tires live on don’t share a lug pattern with the Accord. A good fit matters. We know that now. In the heat of the moment we decided our Kenda tires didn’t look so bad after all, so we put them back on and ran the race without incident.
We also found a substantial exhaust leak at the end of the header, which probably had a hand in our thirst: at race pace the car was burning about 6.9 gallons an hour. We patched it with Tiger tape and header wrap. The patch survived day one and didn’t make it into day two. The exhaust was held together with hose clamps and prayer after Driver C snapped the exhaust bolt off at the manifold, despite his previously expressed desire not to break anything important.
Lastly, the passenger-side CV boot was gone, torn clean away. We built a new one out of plastic, duct tape, aluminum tape and zip ties, packed it with white lithium grease, and stood back to admire it. It was the best-looking thing in the garage. Seven hours of racing later it had lost its looks and kept its grease, which is all you can ask of improvised protection. The crew even went as far as building a second cover, just in case we needed it.
05From surviving to hunting
Here’s the part that doesn’t show up on a parts receipt. In every race before this one, the job was to keep the car alive to the checkered flag and count whatever laps that produced as equal parts luck and skill. In Houston, for the first time, we spent the whole race hunting.
That was the crew’s doing. On top of keeping the car and its drivers in line, they kept track of the teams around us, and they kept whoever was in the seat pointed at the next car up the road. A driver who’s told there’s something catchable ahead drives differently from one who’s told to watch the temperature gauge and the racing ledger reflects that. On Saturday the car ran as high as second in class. That doesn’t mean we weren’t still worried about survival, because we absolutely were…but for fourteen hours the mood in the car was predator, not prey, and that’s new and a sign of just how far the team has come since January.
06Thank you
Thanks to the crew, who were fantastic from the first jack stand to the last zip tie, and to the people who keep this car on track: Haas Auto Service Center, Bad Ass Pickles, Heavy Truck Painting, SPADA Tractor Imports, SOARD Solutions, and the families of everyone on the team. Without them, none of this would be possible.
The wipers, the header and a real CV boot are on the list before next season. So is sorting out Turn 3. For everything else, read Houston by the Numbers.
All The Way.
