The Build · NCM series, part 1 of 3 · Race prep
The #86 hasn’t turned a lap in anger since April. Between Carolina and now it sat in the shop while we printed prototype aero, built a dash, shopped for brakes, courted sponsors, and wrote a great many documents about what the car could do next. The car did not read the documents. It sat under a tarp, quietly forgetting how to be a race car.
That was the point of NCM. We didn’t go to Bowling Green to win Class C. The season’s real targets are Summit Point in October and Houston after that, and we’d rather find out what five months of storage did to the Accord at a race we’d budgeted to learn at than at the one we want to be good at. That’s called a shakedown. Ours came with epoxy. We’ll get to the epoxy.
Why go racing to find out what’s wrong
After a long layoff, every system on the car is a rumor. The brakes probably work. The cooling system probably seals. The wiring probably still goes where it went in April. A test day confirms some of that. A race confirms the rest, because only a race runs the car at temperature for seven hours with traffic in the mirrors and a clock that doesn’t care about your feelings.
So the plan for NCM is deliberately modest: one driver all weekend, a crew of two, and a list of things to learn rather than things to win. The three included the two newest members of the team, who signed on over the summer and were, in the Black Flag tradition, handed a pit wall and a laminated procedure before they’d had a chance to reconsider. The car was getting its shakedown. So were they.
What happened after One Month Out
When we last wrote about the list, the KTuner was still learning the RBB3 and the steering column was in pieces. Here’s the month after.
Brakes first, because Carolina made them first. The single most expensive thing we did at CMP was a fifty-minute brake change, so the front axle got the full Acura TSX package: bigger calipers, bigger rotors, endurance pads, and Castrol SRF in the lines. SRF is the brake fluid that costs about what the calipers did, and it doesn’t boil when a 2,900-pound front-driver asks it to stop twenty-three times a lap, a quality you only appreciate from a gravel trap.
Wheels and tires next. The 205/65R15 all-weathers on steel wheels that carried us through the spring were, to be kind about it, tires. For NCM the car moved to seventeen-inch Acura five-spokes and Kenda Vezda UHP tires at 235/45R17: wider, shorter, stickier, and directional, which means our spares now have a left and a right and the tire rack is labeled like a pair of shoes. Three lefts and three rights came to Kentucky. It’s the first real endurance tire on the car, and it did what a new tire always does: made everything else the weakest link.
The cockpit got civilized. The 3D-printed dash, BFR-CP-001, replaced the factory center console and put every switch that matters where a gloved hand can find it. The factory ignition, the immobilizer, and the column hub all left the building, replaced by a push-button start and the quick-release wheel we promised a month ago. Honda no longer has a vote on whether the car starts. We’ll come back to that sentence, at which point it will be funnier.
The quieter items. TSX injectors to match the engine that came out of a TSX. The heater core relocated to the hood, which took weight and a small radiator out of the cabin. Fresh engine oil, a full ATF flush on a transmission that ran hot at Carolina, and a fluid quick sheet on the pit wall with green, yellow, and red limits for every temperature and pressure the car reports, so nobody has to remember a number while holding a jug. Red means pit. Yellow means slow down. Green means stop asking.
The paperwork
Black Flag Racing produces documents the way other teams produce lap time, and NCM got the full treatment: strategy binder, pit-ops manual, checklists, data workbook, and a point-mass lap simulation of the 3.15-mile course. The sim (the one we wrote about here) said a healthy #86 should run a race lap around 3:05 and live in a 3:03-to-3:13 band once the driver settled in. It also said the Friday test day should walk him down a ladder from 3:30 to 3:12. Write those numbers down. They come up again.
Then the pit choreography, rehearsed in the driveway until it stopped being funny. Lemons fuel goes in by gravity from five-gallon jugs, so the stop was built around one person over the wall and one on it. The driver pulls in, kills the car, climbs out, takes the extinguisher and stands facing oncoming pit traffic. The crew member over the wall fuels, about eleven gallons, two jugs, then belts the driver in and does the walk-around. The one on the wall passes jugs over, takes the extinguisher back, runs a comms check, and releases the car. We rehearsed the refuel and a tire change. We also rehearsed all of it with no radio, because comms fails when it’s least convenient, and that turned out to be the best hour we spent all summer. More on that in the wrap-up.
And the heat plan, because a week out the forecast for Bowling Green settled on 97°F with a heat index over 100, both days. With one driver, that forecast is the strategy. The stop model was simple and strict: driver recovery happens only in the paddock, never during a fuel stop, and only when needed. Every time he climbs back in after fuel, somebody hands him a CamelBak packed with ice and electrolytes. The lap targets got a heat clause: 3:08 to 3:18 when everything is green, 3:22 to 3:35 when anything goes yellow. In Kentucky in September the car doesn’t choose its pace. The thermometer does.
Race week
The daily plans ran Thursday through Monday, a suspiciously professional number of days for us. Thursday was pit setup and tech. Friday was the test session: scrub in the new tires, bed the new brakes (we have opinions), confirm the fuel burn against the sim, and give the KTuner the running time it needs to relearn its sensors on new injectors. Everything we couldn’t test in a driveway would get tested Friday, in daylight, before anybody was keeping score.
Friday: two cracks and a tube of epoxy
Friday morning, with the test session on the schedule and the car on jack stands for a last look underneath, we found two cracks in the transmission case beside the drain plug. An eighth of an inch and a quarter of an inch, the kind you only notice because the case is wet in a way that doesn’t excite anyone. Welding a cracked aluminum case in a paddock isn’t a repair anyone sane offers, and a replacement transmission does not fit in a five-gallon jug or our current budget. That left epoxy.
“Welding isn’t an option, but epoxy is.” Everyone nods. Nobody feels good.
So the case got cleaned, prepped, and filled, and then the whole team did the one thing a test day was supposed to spare us: waiting. Epoxy cures on its own clock, and its clock ran out about the time the session did. Tires unscrubbed, brakes unbedded, ECU still learning. The driver had seen NCM Motorsports Park only on a simulator screen, at room temperature.
Saturday at ten o’clock, with ninety-six other cars for company, all of that would get learned at once, under green, on the clock, in a heat advisory. We’d planned to shake the car down on Friday. The car preferred Saturday, in front of an audience. That’s the thing about a shakedown: you can schedule it, but you can’t make it wait.
Next up: Bowling Green, by the numbers.
Green flag, 10 a.m. Shakedown in public. All the Way.
