I just got home from the YeeHaw 24 Hours of Lemons race in Houston where we
campaigned a recently assembled rust bucket 1970 TR6. It was quite an
experience but we shot ourselves in the foot too many times to have a good
finish. You can see a few pictures of the car by checking out the YeeHaw
coverage on Jalopnik. The really liked my clear coated rusty valve cover.
http://jalopnik.com/5636123/and-the-real-winner-is
Saturday was going well for us. We got through our first rotation of 6 drivers
and were feeling pretty good. Driver one gat back out and proceeded to collect
2 black flags in about 5 minutes. The second one resulted in a broken wheel
stud and bent swaybar mounts. The repair was difficult because we only had
brought rear hubs as spares leaving a freshly machined rotor and hub was
behind by accident. The next driver proceeded to go off in the picture shown
on Jalopnik and collect black flag number 3. Lemon's rules are 4 black flags
in a day and you are done for the weekend so we had to park it at 2:00 or so.
Sunday started out much the same. We got black flagged after 4 laps for
dumping fuel. They thought it was our overflow line which didn't have a check
valve, We should have put on in but that wasn't the problem. We had
incorrectly installed the access/fill cover after removing the cell foam, and
it was leaking around the cover. Not a good thing at all. It took us hours to
find a suitable tip over valve so we only raced about half of the day. We were
chasing a severe miss that continued to get worse as the day progressed but
the lap times didn't change as the drivers got better. When I drove it I
though our TR6 really handled well so I can't explain the spins. I got in it
this afternoon and very few cars passed me while I had a lot of fun passing
more cars in one session than I ever have in my life. It was nice to be able
to out brake almost everybody, be able to drive an inside line on almost
everyone. I'd immediately pass the guys that just passed me on the straight,
the old crossover move. Then another straight and they'd take it back.
I know there was some metal to metal contact, but I didn't see any. The
driving was great but the only problem area that I saw was the traffic jams
that occured whenever a yellow came out. You could run up on that line right
after passing a station that wasn't displaying yellow.
My biggest frustration with this whole thing was how many mistakes we made.
Not everyone understands was race car prep should look like, and it is hard to
tell them and hard to check everything they do. Not to say I didn't make some
too. We put together a car in a matter of weeks from a basket case, we should
have started sooner. I got to use a lot of old parts that I've taken off my
cars. I used the rear springs and swaybars that came on my TR4A. '60's vintahe
stuff. I cut dowm some TRF comp springs for the fronts and then had to cut
some more to fix ridde height. Remember those comp springs? They were the
rallye height springs that some many of us bought. Mistake included the fuel
cell. We bought a used one that had one year old foam that was disintegrating.
We put in new foam and then found out that ethanol fuel hurts the foam. It was
in there already but we pulled it in trying to find a fuel delivery problem.
We didn't check the distributor in our junkyard dog and the advance wasn't
working. We tried to run on increased static advance but we couldn't get it to
rev over 4500. We'd time it in the pits and think we had it but it would get
some centrifical advance at extended runs with the pedal to the floor.
I'm rambling, look at Jalopnik and tell me if you'd like more.
Bob Kramer
Volente, TX
Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch
excellence.
Vince Lombardi
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