Let’s do the ending first, because we’ve earned it. Sunday afternoon at Summit Point, Car #86 took the checkered flag ninth in class, with our newest driver at the wheel, the full crew on the wall, and the oil, for once, inside the engine where we keep asking it to stay. It’s the first top-ten finish in Black Flag Racing’s short, loud history. The build plan we wrote in September set a goal of finishing in the top ten consistently. We’d like it noted that “consistently” has to start somewhere.
Now the beginning, because that’s where the story is.
Turn 7 has a braking zone. On Saturday, we were it.
Summit Point’s Turn 7 is a perfectly good corner with a perfectly good braking zone, and most of the field used it as intended. Early on Saturday, one team elected to use our beloved Accord instead. We don’t know what their brake pedal did to deserve it. We do know what it cost us: track position, an Accusump feed line, and a plan that had been going fine right up to that moment.
A refresher for new readers. The Accusump is an oil accumulator we fitted after New Orleans, where the original engine starved itself to death in a corner. It holds a reserve of oil under pressure and pushes it into the engine when pressure drops. It’s a good system, and although it’s been problematic from time to time, it has done its job at every race since. What it can’t do is hold onto oil when a line takes a hit it was never designed for, and that’s roughly where Saturday went.
What followed was two hours and forty-one minutes of unplanned stops, which we’re reporting as a single number because Summit Point by the Numbers is coming and it will have charts. The short version: the hit started a leak, fixing the leak led to chasing the next one, and the oil system spent the afternoon finding new ways to coat everything under the hood. Every time it did, the crew found the source, fixed it, and sent the car back out. The driver who climbed in after the repair ran a long, patient stint with a car that was dripping and a radio that kept asking about it, and a crew that kept it in the race when the trailer was the easy option. By the Saturday checkered the car was dry, sealed in one important place by duct tape (more on that in a minute), and a long way down the running order.
Here’s the thing about a long way down the running order: it’s a lot of room to climb.
When the high-pressure line feeding the Accusump let go, we went to the spares bin for a replacement and learned something about the spares bin. We didn’t have one. What we had was fuel line. The line we needed has to stand up to the 70-ish psi of oil the engine pushes toward the Accusump. The fuel line we had is rated for 35. That’s half, for anyone doing the math on the wall with us.
So we did what we always seem to do mid-race: we improvised. Prior to fitting the fuel line, we reinforced it with a double helical wrap of duct tape: one layer wound one direction, one wound the other, so once it was under heat and load, the oil had to defeat two layers that disagree with each other about which way to unwind. Then we sent the car out. Then we sent it out again. It ran like that all the way to the checkered flag on Sunday.
Did it work? Absolutely. Do we recommend it as standard operating procedure? Absolutely not. But it did work, and the tape will be retired with full honors, having done a day and a half of a job it was never rated for, which at this point makes it a member of the team and a permanent addition to the spares box.
The climb
Sunday was the day the strategy the team had been developing since September got a chance to shine. Green flag, full stints, scheduled fuel stops, driver changes that happened when the plan said they would and took about as long as the plan said they’d take. No oil on the ground. No surprises in the pit. The car went out, came back when it was supposed to, and went back out. We’ve been racing since March, and this is the first time we’ve had a whole day of that…
And the team slowly climbed up the running order. Not in one dramatic pass, but the way endurance racing actually pays out: a position here, a position there, as the cars ahead of us took their turns having the kind of day we’d already had. By the afternoon the #86 was back inside the top ten in class, and then it stayed there, which is the hard part. The by-the-numbers piece will show the whole curve. For now: we ended Saturday near the bottom of it and, by the end of Sunday, ninth in class. Everything in between was earned one lap at a time.
The pit finally looked like the laminated version
The biggest improvement this weekend didn’t happen on the track. It happened on the wall and behind it.
If you read the Bowling Green recap, you’ll remember we ran that race on hand signals and a pit board because the radios consistently failed. At Summit Point the radios worked. All weekend. Driver to pit, pit to driver: a voice in the helmet saying there’s a car coming out of the pits, and a voice on the wall hearing “oil pressure’s fine” instead of guessing from the body language of a Honda passing at 90 mph. It’s hard to overstate how much easier a race is when the person in the car and the people on the wall are having the same conversation.
The organization caught up, too. A summer’s worth of checklists, pit-ops sheets, and gauge labels, the ones we kept writing about and kept not getting to test under pressure, finally got tested under pressure. They held. Fuel stops were choreographed instead of improvised. Driver changes had a sequence. When the leaks showed up on Saturday, the troubleshooting didn’t look like everybody discovering a problem at the same time. It looked like a crew working a problem, with jobs, an order, and somebody watching the clock. Two hours and forty-one minutes is a lot of unplanned stopping. It would have been a lot more without the pit crew.
And the support. Six crew plus the off-duty driver, for a team that ran its last race with two people on the wall, is a different sport. Somebody always had water out, somebody always had the next set of hands ready, and nobody had to ask twice. The success of this team is largely owed to the people who solved problems and kept us on the track.
Our newest driver took it all the way
This was our newest driver’s first race weekend as a driver with the team. They drew the hard stint on Saturday, the one between the hit and the fuel stop, when the car was leaking and the day could have gone either way, and they brought it back every time the wall asked. On Sunday they got the closing stint and the checkered flag, which is not something we hand out lightly, and which they’d earned the afternoon before.
There’s a version of this story where a first weekend with a new team gets hit in Turn 7, falls apart by lunch, and everybody drives home defeated. We’ve seen that version, but we will never live it. This team won’t stop. Our version ends with the newest person on the roster taking the flag ninth in class.
What the number means
Ninth in class is not a trophy. Nobody’s coming to the paddock to measure us for a plaque. But it’s a top ten, and we’ve been chasing one since January, through an engine that starved itself in New Orleans, a transmission case we glued together in Kentucky, and a head gasket that turned the oil into a milkshake. The K24 that went to Haas Auto Service Center with that milkshake came back stronger and, as far as we can tell, never once came up in Saturday’s troubleshooting. Two days, every lap, not a word of complaint.
So here’s where we are. The car finishes. The pit works. The radios talk. The crew is bigger than it’s ever been and better than it’s ever been. The newest driver has a checkered flag. And the build plan’s goal, “consistently in the top ten,” now has its first data point, which we intend to give some company in a hurry.
Next up: Summit Point by the Numbers, where the charts live. After that, Houston.
Thank you to the crew who ran the wall, the two drivers who ran the car, the Lemons staff who ran a clean weekend, the roll of duct tape that finished the race as a high-pressure oil line, and the team that used us as a brake in Turn 7, without whom this story would have been much shorter and far less interesting. We are finally dialed in and ready for our next race.
Ninth in class. First top ten. All the Way.
