BertOne

10/18/2025

NHMS practice and day 1 summary

Practice was on old tires - we ran some 1:25s and a 1:24.9. Kinda crazy for our old Volvo on worn out street tires.

Day 1 with Falken 660 tires. Much more grip at the beginning of the day, but corded the right front with about 20 minutes left in the race. We’ve never gone through a tire in 1 day before. So the 660 is definitely not good for Bert.

Had a 1:25.6 in the morning, so surprisingly good in traffic.

Put on a backup set for falken 615s for tomorrow - we’ll see what that brings.

Finished the day in 32nd place

06/11/2025

Paging Three Pedal Mafia- 24 Hours of Lemons Racing Team

06/08/2025

Another sub-optimal weekend…

We blew a head gasket on Friday practice. Reasoning that it was due to running lean from having more boost than our fuel injectors could handle, we dialed back the boost, got the head milled, and reassembled things (in the rain, lying in a puddle).

Got on track Saturday to find the engine not happy to rev over ~4.5k and lots of oil smoke. We’ve seen this before - most likely oil blowby which fould the MAF.

Replaced the MAF and got some higher revving for a little while, then something went catastrophic again and we wound up with another blown head gasket.

We have theories, but it will take some investigation to try to figure out what is actually going on now. But 4 head gaskets in 2 races isn’t a good sign. Especially after being reliable for sooooo long.

This is a different block than the reliable one. So we want to look more closely at the block / rings.

Also, it looks like all the head gasket failures have been on cylinder #4, so we want to check the injector for that one to see if it is clogged or something causing that cylinder to run more lean than the others.

And, we want to see if the oil seals in the turbo are good or not as a possible source of MAF fouling.

06/07/2025

Things are going great!

06/07/2025

Another trying day at the track with two big problems. First, Bert overheated again and blew another head gasket. Second, Russ’s tow rig went into limp mode and was definitely not going to be able to tow the trailer back to Vermont at the end of the weekend without a repair.

Bert: our best guess is we had been living right on the edge of failure for a few years in terms of boost and fuel delivery available to us. When freshening up some parts, we found that the stock intercooler is becoming unibtainium and we wound up with an aftermarket (larger) intercooler. So, cooler charge air = a little more boost = running lean = overheat. We found shop to machine the head tomorrow morning and will dial back the boost a little.

Tow rig: diesel truck was complaining about DEF fluid, but the actual problem was a NOX sensor. A handful of phone calls led us to a diesel repair shop that worked late to get it fixed

On to a better tomorrow!

11/09/2024

10/19/2024

The track time is paid for, so someone should use it Moot Point Racing

10/19/2024

Apparently it’s not fixed

10/18/2024

We got everything back together but not in time for practice laps. So we will find out tomorrow. It starts, idles, revs, etc - but that could also have been said about things this morning.

10/18/2024

Going back together. Hoping to finish early enough to get at least one test lap

10/18/2024

We are running out of good theories. Thought it might have been a leaking injector, but we don’t see any leaks when attaching the fuel rail and running the fuel pump.

Best current theory is crap in the head bolt hole in the block preventing one (or more) of the head bolts from torquing correctly