Hello,
Yeah, well, I didn't know said fan before this weekend, so I figured I might as well leave it in his court if he wanted to "out" himself. Of course, if everyone knows him already... hahah
Well, frustrating in some respects, but let me tell you - our whole crew was having a blast. Tommy, Brian Z, and I all love working on the car. Mike's always got great ideas for us. And the drivers did a great job of taking whatever we gave them and driving the heck out of it. It's weird for me, since I'm always the mechanic, to have two mechanics who are both as enthusiastic as me, but even faster at doing things the RIGHT way. I would crawl under and start working on something and I'd see Tommy or Brian Z sitting around, done with their task, obviously waiting for me to get out of the way. By the end of the weekend, I was pretty much pointing at stuff and getting out of the way (too many cooks in the kitchen). It really freed me up to work with the drivers, work with Steve, and also to work on the car on things aside from the crash damage.
This race weekend was a great adventure and frankly, we're very happy with the results despite them being not what we initially hoped for. We did get 21st out of 37 professional race teams, which is not bad for our 3rd Grand Am Cup race! And heck, after all the adversity, we still posted the 4th fastest lap time during the race! And more importantly, I learned that I can have 100% complete faith in my crew to do everything I ask without any supervision. And I know that my drivers can respond to whatever I ask of them, even punching out exactly what lap times I want them to.
As for the brakes, we really have no idea what the failure was. It is quite possible that the caliper slider got bent during the accident and we simply didn't see that, which then led to the rotor overheating or being stressed, etc. Or it could have been something else that we haven't thought of yet. We hope to know more once we have time to examine everything closely... Obviously, the way to avoid this in the future is going to be to simply replace the entire corner after an accident that affects the corner so significantly.
Joel