Final 2018 Race Report: Meet Team Economic $timulu$
(you're welcome, economy)
Having secured enough points for the Super Touring 2 Championship, it was time to have some fun and close out the season at the NASA AZ Finale at Wild Horse Pass Motorsports Park Main Track (WHPMPMT for short). Saturday had a sprint race, and Sunday would have a 90-minute sprint race. The latter can be driven by one driver, but I thought it would be fun to invite
@ArizonaBOSS to codrive the car with me. His season was cut short with the accident at COTA, and had been a huge help over the years in getting my program rolling. That said we worked on a team name and settled on the fitting "make it rain" Team Economic $timulu$ , then quickly registered for the event.
Saturday
With all the changes on the car, I took it out for a shakedown on scrubs to validate everything was good on the car before handing it over to
@ArizonaBOSS who would run the car in TT. Everything worked great. With the car seemingly settled, handed over the proverbial keys to AZB who ran it in a TT session then started a race that started in the very next session (no need for points, but a good opportunity to familiarize the car in both open and competition environments). The car ran well enough and some decent battling occurred, the car being behind the other ST2 entrants down the straight, but AZB was able to reign in the gap on the backside of the course every lap and kept cadence with the rest. Halfway into the race he radioed in trouble: a dash was showing no oil pressure, so he shut it down and put the car in a safe place. We had live telemetry in the system, and showed that the oil pressure was indeed there, so we had him drive it in to the paddock to look closer.
We couldn't find an exact cause, but a loose harness seemed to be the problem. rerouted and zip-tied, the car was ready for Sunday after a thorough check. In other good news, coming off the track early might have been the best result for us, as there was a 5-car pileup shortly later in the race that sent two drivers to the hospital to be checked out, and demolished 3 of the 5, and heavily damaging bodywork on the remaining two. We finished 4th for the day, but that was no consequence to us.
Sunday
With good preparation, a huge contingent of helping hands (
@mattlqx ,
@steeda5 and others) we were set for the enduro. We had a simple strategy for the race:
Being the slowest ST2/ES/ESR car, we had to win this in the paddock. Our paddock space was just as close to the track entrance as the pit lane, but allowed us to have our full team present and wide selection of tools and equipment (and guaranteed we would not get stuck behind another car in the narrow pit lane they set up for us).
Additionally, with a stock fuel tank, AZB would take the green and run the tank to practically empty, at which point 11 gallons would go back in the car and I would take over, hopefully completing the remaining laps on that 11 gallons.
As it worked out: executing that plan was exactly what we needed to do. We qualified 3rd overall, and immediately had a gap behind the faster cars. More worrisome, our fuel consumption rate was initially higher than we had expected (a burn rate of roughly 1gallon/3minutes was the estimate). However AZB stayed out for over half the race before bringing it in (a outbound radio failure also created some trouble, but thankfully hand signals from the car on the course allowed us to be prepared).
The team went to work when the car came in and kept our driver swap and refuel to 2 minutes (and another 30 seconds to get off and then back on track). I lost a couple seconds getting into the car as I didn't get a belt secured, but it didn't hurt us in the end. I also had lost use of our Autoblip system (it failed, not sure what went wrong this time, but thankfully ManualBlip 1.0 was available to me), and both GoPro cameras ( I was running two to be SURE that they would work for once). One failed inexplicably while streaming to Facebook, and the other locked up/froze. The tablet dash also failed, which meant I had no idea where we were with fuel consumption, nor could I ask since the outbound radio stopped working.
Despite all those system failures, the car ran mostly great (its definitely down on power in the mid range compared to the older setups and wasn't getting any better). Once fuel started cutting out, I was hearing 5 minute alerts from the crew chief who doubled as the race engineer. Our friend Will Patterson did a fantastic job of getting the right communications and calls in to help us stay on track and make it to the end. I was able to conserve some and finish the 90 minutes.
The checker was a great feeling as the last 2 years with this car as a full time racer has been a very mixed bag, seemingly the one constant had been unreliability (as many are happy to remind me of on a constant basis!). However this year the car took EVERY green flag at EVERY NASA AZ (and NASA Championship) race, and ony failed to take two checker flags: once at Chuckwalla in February where the crank on the aluminator ejected itself at the end of the main straight, and again when AZB brought in the car early on Saturday - to which we weren't competing in anyways.
That said, we took home first in class (I didn't realize the lead ST2 car had been stuck in the pits with an extended fuel stop)! What a great way to end the season, and was extra sweet to get to share that with
@ArizonaBOSS as his own season had been filled with ups and downs.
While I didn't get to do a victory burnout (I asked the NASA officials a dozen times, and unfortunately its just not something they can sanction), we did get to have our first podium champagne! I had also brought champagne that I had obtained when the car was first being converted to a race car, saving for just the right moment, and was absolutely the right time to crack it open with our crew who busted serious tail to get the job done. I'm extremely fortunate to have their support and I hope they all had a blast and felt their share of the victory.