24 (actual) Hours of LeMons

[sperry]

This weekend, Lemons is running a full 24 hour event (10am Saturday to 10am Sunday, if I remember the schedule correctly) out at Reno-Fernley this weekend.

Some of you know Fred Austin from Reno SCCA time trials / autocross. He's put together a well-beat ex-rally car, 1984 VW GTI. It's got a $65 1995 2.0L motor in it. Fred, Michel Hoche-Mong (who you may remember from the NN Rally), me and Jay from IVM ran the car to a 16th place overall finish in 2009.

YouTube

YouTube

This year, the car is back and we'll be running it in hopes of a top 5... though we don't know how much stiffer the competition may have gotten in the past 2 years. Fred, Michel and I are back to drive, plus we've picked up David White (who I've yet to meet) and rally car builder extraordinaire Guy Light. Guy's had a bunch of experience running VWs in rally, including building Pikes Peak and endurance cars. He's given Das Bucket an extensive once over and fixed up all the little things that were primed to bite us in the ass over a long 24 hour race (you know, like the axle nuts that were about to fall off, and the quart-per-hour main seal oil leak, and the half-disengaging clutch, and the shifter so sloppy it wouldn't go into 2nd...).

If anyone's bored this weekend and wants to watch some clunkers beat on each other, I think tickets are like $10 or so at the track.

[Nick Koan]

Looks like fun. I'm busy all Saturday, but if I'm up early enough on Sunday I might come on out.

[sybir]

Damn. I'm house-sitting or I'd come up. I bought steelies from Hoche back when I lived in Santa Cruz, like 10 years ago, lol - great guy.

[zpeed]

I will be practice and race kart sat and sun too.

Good luck VW

[MattR]

I like the parking brake. Maybe see you this weekend..

[k-dogg39]

Wish I was around this weekend to go out there. Good luck!

[BOO]

Nice, I may cruise on up there and check out the two teams( Reno SCCA/SECCS and the Audi team out of Arizona).

[100_Percent_Juice]

I'll be doing the race with my friend Jack Bauer.

[sperry]

Welp... I didn't get a lot of pictures, or any in-car video from the race, but it was an eventful weekend...

First... 24hrs is a long ass time to race. As 4 pm rolled around, we were all exhausted and already well beyond the normal effort you put in at a PDX, and Ryan our crew-wrench extraordinaire, mentions... "hey guys, we're 1/4 of the way there!" That's sorta when it set in.

The car we ran is a 1984 VW Golf GTI with a 2.0L motor out of a '95 Golf. Old ass eBay coilovers, and a sweet $70 Chinese exhaust header.





But let's go back to Friday. Everyone except Michel and his GF Katiana were at the track before 7am. Pit got setup, registration/tech opened around noon. Guy Light's beefy cage, that's survived 2 rollovers un-bent, didn't meet the lawyer's definition of "safe", so we had to get an extra bar and some plates welded in at the track. We got the car up in time to catch the afternoon's practices sessions. I ran the first session to grab some in-car video to use for line discussion with our drivers that haven't been to RFR before (link coming!). Unfortunately, we couldn't power the camera off the car and didn't have the battery life in it to record the race, so we didn't get any in-car. There were a few practice sessions in the afternoon, and even into the night... after a brief track closure for lightning in the area (workers are sitting ducks under those metal sun shades!) RFR stayed open late to let drivers test their lights on-track.

YouTube

YouTube

Practice went well, and we started to realize that our local knowledge of the track was going to be a huge advantage. The car drove extremely well after Guy's changes to the front suspension that made the car very mild-mannered compared to the torque-steer beast that it was the last time we raced it. The only issue was a fuel tank leak at the filler pipe... the guys dropped the tank and addressed it after I left for the night.

Saturday morning the drivers meeting was at 9 am, and we were on track under yellow by 9:50 for an on-time (imagine that!) 10 am green flag. I was picked to run the first stint with the idea that my experience at RFR would be the biggest advantage while everyone else was still learning the lines. Sure enough, I had a huge leg up on everyone else. I was passing cars 3 and 4 at a time in each section of the track. Dean will know exactly where I got the best advantage: by giving up ground in the slalom before sunset to get a late apex onto the straight, I was passing cars with twice my horsepower easily.

My stint was planned for 2 hours, but about an hour in, I noticed the car was unusually loose in T2/T3 after the esses. The next lap by, it was even looser, so I called in to the pit wall to have them take a look at the right-rear tire next time by. Sure enough, Fred told me it looked low from the wall and to pit-in. That lap ended up being a nightmare... right turns were fine and I could take them at full speed, but any left-hander had to be at like 1/4 pace and even then the car wanted to spin. I limped it in to the pits, we swapped all 4 tires and put me back out. Sure enough, I had picked up a nice gash in the tire somewhere on track. Luckily we were able to get back without spinning or shredding the tire (Falken Azenis sidewalls FTW!)

Unfortunately, right after getting back out I get a call from the wall telling me it looks like my exhaust is dragging and to pit. I didn't notice, probably due to wearing ear-plug headphones, but by the time I got to sunset, they had the mechanical black flag out for me. A quick repair was done, and since I felt good still, they sent me back out after a quick run passed the tech judges.

Apparently, before my puncture, we had gotten as high as 2nd place overall. And on track, of the 80 some odd cars there, there were only 4 cars lapping faster than us: the eventual winning turbo miata, a "Model T" that was really basically a tube-frame mustang, a Sentra SE-R, and some motorcycle motor'd Honda (or something). Somehow our chumpy little VW was a contender! Unfortunately, the tire and exhaust dropped us down to 20th or so... but it was exceedingly easy for us to move up, as we were literally faster than all but 4 cars out there and could basically pass at will. I tell you, just bombing through traffic, even off-line through the esses, and putting the car pretty much wherever you want is an awesome amount of fun.

Due to the stops, I ran an extra 30 minutes and go out at 12:30, then handed the car off to Dave. Dave's a rally guy and hadn't driver RFR before Friday, but he picked up right where I left off and was able to pass cars easily and work back up the standings. Then, when turning on to sunset, some big-old Camaro locked 'em up on and early apex turn in and nailed the drivers side of our car. Huge thank you to the corner station that called it in and was very careful to explain we had nothing to do with the impact... the judges still black-flagged us, but treated it as a mechanical rather than as a penalty. We did see the Camaro back on track later with a whistle-tip welded on the exhaust however. The impact demolished the LR fender and scuffed up one of Fred's awesome and expensive 3-piece BBS wheels that were on the car. I guess the good news is that 3-piece wheels are easiest to repair... but we've got a set of ugly as sin wheels that would look better bent... why couldn't he have hit those!?

Bleeding the brakes later that night... you can see the damage on the LR fender:


We used the mechanical black flag as an opportunity to check the car, refuel, and put Michel behind the wheel. Once again we were working back up the standings when Michel radios in that he's lost power with about 1/2 a lap left in his stint. We keep telling him on the radio to turn the ignition switch on (see 3:22 in my practice video above ), but he tells us "no, there was a big bang!" Sure enough, the car has to come in on the wrecker. In the pits we're astonished to find that the crank pulley has completely sheared off... there's just the bolt, and a tiny circle of what's left of the pulley. Additionally, we lost a chunk of the cam pulley. Now, I'm not a VW guy, but the gaggle of VW rallyists in the camp are flabbergasted... they don't even bother to carry spare crank pulleys because they just don't fail! So, we probably got hit by some debris from under the car or something... either way it took some scrounging before finding some nice folks w/ a spare motor that lent us the pulleys off it!

Thrashing on the crank pulley:


After losing an hour swapping the pulleys and putting the belts back on, we fire the motor and there's still something wrong. Even though the motor should be non-interference, the over-rev when the pulley came off seemed to have floated the valves allowing them to contact the pistons... we had bent something in the motor. Of course, at this point, it's only about 7pm and only 3 of our 6 drivers have even been in the car, so Guy and Fred head back to Carson to pickup a spare head. One long, angry, yet heroic story about thrashing in the pits later, we re-entered the track sometime after midnight.

Katiana was the first to drive the repaired car... but since she and Michel didn't arrive until after 11pm on Friday, they didn't get practice. So Katiana's first ever lap at RFR was in the black of night, with just the track map and in-car video to prep. Needless to say, she wasn't too quick, but she did put in a 90 minute stint, kept the car on the road, keep track of the motor to be sure it was fixed, and was far from the slowest car out there.

After Katiana finished, Fred got up from his nap to run the dead-of-night stint... that transition period between night and morning, when no human should even be awake, let alone racing a pile of junk though the Fernley moonscape. Fred was probably the fastest car out there for at bit, chasing down even the 2-time winning turbo miata. I got the "honor" of sitting on the pit wall with the radio in the freezing wind from 2am to 4am, freezing my nuts off. Hats off to the course workers that stood out there all night... I only had to go 2 hours and it nearly killed me!

After Fred's stint, Guy took the wheel and I went to sleep. I was woken up by Dave because Guy wanted someone to build a squeegee for the inside of the windshield. After 4am, rain came through, and Guy was out there slogging along in the dark and wet with only Dave on the radio. Guy was loving it anyway... crazy rally guys.

I got into the car at 6:30, just after sun-up for another 90 minutes. The track was still soggy with light rain. I got a quick lesson in FWD low-traction torque steer. It was actually harder to drive straight than to turn... I though I had broken something in the front suspension it was so nuts. But after a while (and a trip to the pits to look at the front end and get laughed at by the VW rally drivers) I got more used to it, and the track got a bit drier, I was able to get my lap times down and have some fun passing the bit of traffic that was still out there.

From 8am to the race end at 10, we cycled through Dave, Michel, and Guy for some short fun stints... we weren't going to make up much in the standings, so we figured we'd give as many people some track time as possible.

I think we ended up like 48th or something... pretty far back. But we knew we had a top-5 car had we not had that pulley come off. All in all, it was a fantastic experience, with plenty of lows and highs... both of the temperature as well as our spirits.

[Dean]

Originally Posted by sperry

Dean will know exactly where I got the best advantage: by giving up ground in the slalom before sunset to get a late apex onto the straight, I was passing cars with twice my horsepower easily.

It is amazing how that works. Sorry you got hit by a idiot who didn't know that.

Bummer about the pulley and subsequent loss of position.

Otherwise, sounds like overall a good time was had which is great. Congrats on finishing.

[MattR]

Awesome job man, thanks for the report. I saw some pictures from the event, people are nuts with their car decor...haha.

[A1337STI]

Awesome write up. I would have stopped out there this weekend, but i had some unplanned crap happen to me. A brake line that i failed to install properly was rubbing my front tire, wore through and the line burst. Luckily it was when i was already down to 1mph at a red light.

then i got a flat tire early yesterday morning.

With my car changes i'm now in the same class as Katiana , for the CRS series.

If you ever need an other driver, lmk i have all the safety stuff now from rally

Sucks you guys had the weird motor pulley failure. guess that's the lemons exp for ya!

[sperry]

Hey look... we're the 2nd car on the left side during inspection!

YouTube

YouTube

My ugly mug gets up in the camera a few times.

[k-dogg39]

Wow! Nice write up. Congrats on finishing.

[sperry]

Also, best themed car out there IMO:



I should have asked around their pits to see if Beef Supreme was at the track.

[Nick Koan]

at... well just about everything about that car.

[sti deede]

Awesome write up Scott. I can't believe all the struggles you guys had and managed to work through. That's a pretty impressive list of repairs made mid-race. Congrats on completing the race.