Halfway to Houston, in a hotel that allows trailers if you back in with confidence. Here is what got done to Car #86 before it left Virginia, roughly why, and nothing at all about the plan, which is laminated and staying that way.
Where we are
It is Monday night in a hotel off I-20 outside Meridian, Mississippi, which is halfway to Houston if you measure in miles and about two-thirds if you measure in Buc-ee's. The rig is parked across a couple of spaces at the back of the lot, still coupled, so that we can get on the road quickly in the morning.
Car #86 is under a cover for the first time in its racing life. It has spent the seasons on an open trailer in full view of the Eastern Seaboard, so the modesty is new, and it is handling it with the quiet dignity of a 2007 Accord that knows exactly what it looks like underneath.
Eight hundred and fifty miles down. Four hundred and fifty to go. The forecast has a cold front crossing the Gulf Coast tomorrow afternoon, which is also when we arrive, because of course it is. The continental breakfast opens at seven. We'll be up at five.
02Where we are going
Texas Tippin' at MSR Houston, 7–8 November: 2.38 miles, seventeen turns, and as flat as a rice field because it used to be one. This year Lemons is running it counter-clockwise, which it has not done in years, so every regular in the Gulf paddock gets to be new at it with us. We find this comforting in the way it is comforting when the whole class didn't study.
03What got done before we left
Two weeks ago #86 finished ninth in class at Summit Point with its oil line replaced by low pressure fuel hose wrapped with duct tape. Our prep list had three headings, none of them was "make it faster," and by the end of last weekend all three were crossed off and the torque wrench was back in its box, ready to head to Texas.
Brakes. Summit Point has three real braking zones and a hill to help with one of them. Houston has five hard stops a lap from somewhere near a hundred miles an hour and no hill anywhere: more brake energy per mile than anything we have run, on a car that weighs 2,900 pounds with a driver in it. So the TSX calipers got new pads and rotors, the rears got new pads, and the whole system got topped off with Castrol SRF, a brake fluid that costs more per litre than anything else on the car and earns it by not boiling. The one thing we could not do is bed the new pads in, because there is no test day for us on Friday. So the bedding happens on the pace laps Saturday: firm, progressive, and no sudden stops.
Oil. Three races running, the oil system is where the hours went. The factory K24 starved itself at NOLA. An Accusump line burst at NCM which helped contribute to the blown head gasket. At Summit Point another car used us as a brake in Turn 7 and split the high-pressure line to the Accusump, and it took two hours and forty-one minutes of stops to identify and fix it with the only hose on the truck: fuel line rated for 35 psi, against an engine pushing 70. It finished the race wrapped in a double helix of duct tape, which is how the fix got passed from one race to the next, like DNA. Sunday it came off. In its place: hose and fittings rated for the pressure instead of for optimism, routed and secured, plus a second line made up and labelled so the next one takes ten minutes instead of a hundred and sixty. Every other fitting got touched by hand: cooler, lines, filter base, pan drain. Fresh 5W-30, because a nineteen-year-old Accord needs a lot of fluid to stay happy, and we respect that. This car has no warning lights. The gauge is the warning light. The driver reading it every 10 minutes is the warning light's warning light.
Reinspection. A hit hard enough to sever an oil line moved something else too; we just did not know what. So the car got a nut-and-bolt walk through the front end, subframe to tie rods, hubs by the spin-and-rock test, coilover collars by hand, and a toe check with the string, on the theory that a car that was true in October might have been pointing slightly toward Louisiana. Then the Bowling Green greatest hits got their encore: the thermostat housing that leaked, the fan switch that quit, the battery that died, the ignition connector that broke, the radios that turned a race into a weekend of hand signals. Inspected, tested, spare in the case. The transmission's epoxy case repair, which cost us a test day in September and then behaved perfectly for two race weekends, got looked at and left alone. Knowing when to leave something alone is a skill. Ask anyone that's been in a long term relationship. Everything looks suspiciously ok…
What didn't change: the Haas-built K24 on its conservative map and 93 octane; the Kenda set, three lefts and three rights, one set for whatever the Gulf Coast does; and the gearbox, still an automatic, still deciding for itself, still right more often than we would like to admit.
04Why all of this, instead of horsepower
Because the arithmetic from Summit Point is simple and unflattering. Ninth in class came with two hours and forty-one minutes of unplanned stops. At Houston, one unplanned half-hour stop is about a dozen laps, which in a tight Class C is two positions. Four seconds a lap, every lap, all weekend, is nine laps. A black flag is a dozen more and a weekend of the judges remembering our number for less than flattering reasons. None of the numbers from the last race was about horsepower, so none of the work was either. The car does not need to be faster. The team needs to lose less time.
There is a plan for that. It's printed. It's in the truck. We aren't publishing it, because there are 123 other entries and some of them can read. What we will say is this: three drivers again, including the one the day job kept out of West Virginia; a pace band for each of them, written to be moved rather than argued with; pit stops rehearsed dry on Friday until eight minutes means eight minutes; a traffic plan that boils down to being predictable in the braking zones and doing our passing on the straights; a spares kit organized under the heading "things that have already broken once," which is the most useful heading a packing list can have; and, since nobody on this team has turned a lap at MSR in either direction, a first stint that is honestly a test session with a transponder on it. Also a sunset problem. Saturday's last half hour puts the sun about ten degrees above the Front Straight, dead ahead in the braking zone for Diamond's Edge. The rest of the issues we will have to sort out as we find them…
05The weather, briefly
Behind tomorrow's front: dry and sunny, highs in the mid-70s, mornings in the low 50s, a small chance of a shower Sunday morning. Cooler than the climate books promised, which is good for the car and bad for the crew's tan. The driver who already owns the wet laps also owns Sunday morning, so if it rains the plan does not change; it just gets damp.
06Tomorrow
Up at five. Four hundred and fifty miles, the last hundred of them in a rain band, with the car buttoned up tight under its cover. Then a dry Wednesday in a Houston parking lot to finish anything Sunday did not, gates Thursday, tech Friday, green flag Saturday at ten.
Thanks to SPADA Tractor Imports and SOARD Solutions in Texas along with Haas Auto Service Center, Bad Ass Pickles and Heavy Truck Painting, in Virginia for backing a Northern Virginia small racing team that measures its rotors with a flashlight and backs a trailer into a hotel lot in one shot. Without them, none of this would be possible.
All The Way.
