08/23/2022
Way too late race update from racing The 24 Hours of Lemons at Autobahn Country Club.
Drivers - Tyler Smith, Nick Fogleman, Albert Pierceall
Friday, Test day - In what is becoming a slightly annoying routine, we started off with issues. Something didn’t feel right in the front end on our test day Friday, so we pulled things apart and found our passenger spindle was not torqued properly and was allowing for some undesired dynamic camber adjusting around corners. While tightening this up, for some reason completely unknown to anyone, Tyler decided to kick one of the rear wheels and we noticed movement. Both sides of our rear control arms were loose and allowed both wheels to wobble. Tighten everything back up and away we go!
Saturday - The start of the race was great, Tyler got in and the car felt dialed from the go. Albert hopped in next and after a couple laps felt something change in the front right, again (he's so picky!). Back to the pits we go.. We repeated this a couple times and double checked all bolts as well as a quick camber and toe check/adjustment, and accepted that while something was a bit off it wasn’t a safety concern. We drove the rest of the day without incident and Nick was able to get his feet wet in wheel to wheel racing for the first time.
Sunday - Race start on day two was much more relaxed now that we had a bit more confidence in the car and were all getting used to driving on a crowded track. The goal was to keep it mildly conservative until the last couple stints, but that didn’t seem to last very long once our times started getting faster and maybe just a tiny bit of ego started creeping in... Three stints in a row all produced PR’s for each driver!.... Directly before the car decided it was done for the day (you can decide if that’s a coincidence..) after what we presume was an alternator failure.
Our first experience racing lemons had the typical high points and low points of previous races, but was overall another great experience with tons of learning opportunities to take from it. For the first time we weren’t one of the slowest cars! There was LOTS of passing due to the overall field being slower than champcar, as well as having nearly double the cars on the track. We nearly managed to get into the 46’s with our little underpowered Neon, but settled on a fast lap of 1:47.280. Everyone hit a PR, the fellow racers were fantastic and the on track racing was the most exciting we’ve had so far!
Special thanks to Nick Foglemanwho decided to get all of his gear and join last minute so that we had more than just two drivers, and put down some serious lap times for his first time ever wheel 2 wheel racing as well as first weekend driving the Hellcan’t.
Next up - Hellcan’t gets a heart transplant and some bigger shoes!
