A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...
Whoops, wrong story.
This weekend was the culmination of a lot of work and time on the part of an entire team.
10 team members, including my wife and two of my kids.
Plus an entire host of others that were willing to wrench, run parts, offer support, and just be generally awesome people.
Two really questionable cars. A '86 Honda Civic Si that has already seen 8 Lemons races and is getting a little long in the tooth, and a '78 Datsun B210.
Friday morning we met up to caravan out to the track. The problems started immediately in the form of a wreck that shut the road down. Driving 50' of RV and trailer, plus the rest of the crew towing cars and campers, there was no turning around so we were stuck. We finally creeped close enough to a left turn to hold traffic long enough to get the entire caravan onto an alternate route.
That was unfortunately the interstate, which I was trying to avoid. I ran the Beast up to 65 and set the cruise control. It did fine for about 40 miles and violently blew a rear tire. It was surprisingly uneventful, and I got it off the road within 1000' of a rest area. We eased down the emergency lane and into the truck parking. Unfortunately I didn't bring a jack capable of lifting a 15k pound motorhome. I ran the hydraulic leveling system as high as it would go, and used an aluminum race jack to get the axle high enough to get the tires off.
The spare was atrocious. I'm reasonably sure it had been under there since the RV was built. It was pre date code so I have no idea how old it was. The sidewalls were full of cracks and it only had 20 pounds of air in it. It's what I had so I put it on and ran the pressure up to 60 psi and got off the interstate. We made it to the track about noon, 4 hours to 130 miles.
With 84 teams registered, the paddock was packed. There was a pretty big group of local autocrossers with cars and we all paddocked together.
I was pretty unhappy that both cars failed tech. The Civic due to a loose battery hold down, and they didn't like how the fuel vent was run on the Dirtson. Both minor fixes, but still, I don't like to fail tech.
In BS judging we crushed it. The theme was Dirty Jim Racing and the Trailer Park Trash was there to win. The team captain was Tammy-Lynn the trailer park whore and she brought the entire Dirtsun family. From me, Uncle-Daddy, to Ricky the mullet wearing cousin to, even the murderer that escaped from prison for the weekend to race. The judges ate it up and we carried on with it the entire weekend. It was epic. Rule number one for Lemons is be memorable. Check that box, we killed it. Even made the Lemons FB page.
With no Saturday night shenanigans allowed due to a hot track, Friday was the time to party. We may have done so. At least long enough to piss off the neighbors. They were apparently there to race.
Saturday morning we tossed the radios in the cars, filled up the cans and got things ready to roll. The decision was made that my Wife and I would be first out. Her in the Honda and me in the Datsun. The Datsun was pretty horrible and by far the slowest car on track, even when it was running perfectly. My best lap, flogging it, was a 2:31 and that was the fastest lap the car made all weekend.
From there things started going down hill.
First up was the Honda. At about hour 3 it started misfiring. By hour 4 with would arbitrarily shut down and have to be towed in. By hour 5 it was off track for good. The problem was chased down to a failed distributor. The coil zapped me a couple of times in testing so I knew it was good, it just wasn't getting any kind of signal from the dizzy to fire. After spending several hours trying to track down parts, new or used, we determined that the distributor and all the associated parts are discontinued. Apparently Honda only used these on the Si cars for 2 years or so. They are made out of unobtanium. That put our "dependable" car out of the race for good. We put out a plea on Facebook and resigned ourselves to getting 10 drivers through one car for the rest of the event.
More to come.