02/18/2020
Don't Panic had a tough weekend to open the season at Road Atlanta... The race weekend started on Thursday with our temporary replacement for the venerable #60 needing some finishing touches before getting out track to participate in the practice day organized by Kelsy Hill. #61 was last raced in AER under The Cardorks banner and had been on hiatus for a year and a half... After warming the car up in the pits it wouldn't start when we were ready to get on track . Didn't hear the fuel pump so we replaced it and we had a running car again. Team principle Ed Tatios took the car out and within a lap thought he heard dreaded sound of a rod knock. He pulled the car into the pits and varified the noise and diagnosis. He parked the car and made arrangements with Ken Oswald at OTP Automotive to spin a new set of rod bearings into the engine. Ken had been a huge help to us last year getting 801 out on the track after a catastrophic first lap engine failure.
801 was out on track turning laps with some of our RA virgins getting their first laps around the challenging track. Late afternoon we started getting blowby from the crank case breather on 801 indicating a serious issue with the rings... We had our work cut out for us... We decided we had to swap the spare motor into 801 for Friday qualifying... Fortunately our friend Mike McCoy at TRM offered the use of his shop for us to swap the engine. We pulled the tired motor out and started to swap bits over to the used engine. We decided to look at the rod bearing while we had the pan off and found they didn't look so good. Ken from OTP Automotive ordered us a set of bearings so we stopped for the night to get some much need sleep. We picked up the bearings as soon as the warehouse opened in the AM and continued reassembly finishing up around 1pm. Loaded the car back in the trailer to get back for the final 2 hrs of qualifying.
Unfortunately we found out at this time that the repair on 61 wasn't going well. The crank was locking up when the new bearings were installed and torqued. We polished the rod journal to no avail. The #1 cylinder connecting rod was damaged and needed to be swapped. We resigned ourselves to come back and get the engine back together that night. Returning after qualifying we started pulling the cylinder head and getting piston 1 out... We were able to source another rod from a donor engine in Mike's inventory and began reassembling the motor. We got the engine together and running about 1 AM... We loaded #61 in the trailer with high hopes...
Saturday Race 1 was fast approaching and Bob G hadn't even had the opportunity to sit in #61 so he asked to drive it around in the parking lot to get used to it... disaster struck while he was driving around and the plastic throttle pedal broke jamming the throttle wide open. The engine started bouncing off the rev limiter until Bob got it shut down. He tried to restart it and got the same result... Someone ran over to help but they were unable to fix the cable and the engine was started a third time with the throttle stuck open... At first it seemed the engine was unharmed but after missing grid to repair the throttle pedal two laps into the race the dreaded knocking noise returned... 61 was done for the weekend.
In the mean time 801 was turning laps and performed admirably with the team bouncing back to a 5th place finish on Saturday.
Sunday Race 2 got away from us... Mike started in 801 and quickly worked his way up to second in class and then the rain started coming down just before mandatory quiet time. The black flag was shown to 801 because the rain light failed to operate... We had damaged the wiring to light by stupidly leaving the jump box in the trunk earlier in the weekend... Once the car was repaired the team put it to the test once again but the time lost in the pits was too great. We finished 8th in race 2.
Not the weekend we hoped for but we proved once again we Don't Panic...
