Zink Formula Vee

Maybe it's time for a new awning. 

We decided to cut the top ply off as duct tape only worked for an hour. 

Okay, race weekend recap. First, some great pictures taken by our friend, Jon Zomer.

We had a wet track for about half of the sessions. Jack ran the Zink and got some practice, but took it fairly easy. He didn't feel it was worth running the Miata in the wet as this was basically a shakedown weekend. In the dry, the Zink was fast, ran in the front, and did well. The last race was an epic battle with the top four cars duking it out and Jack swapping in and out of first six or seven times. Alas, near the end, he saw the oil temp rise and pulled off to avoid damaging the engine. But it was fun while it lasted.

The best part of the weekend was all the friends who showed up. Gingerman is only about 40 miles from us, so a lot of local friends hung out over the weekend. Theo flew back from Seattle to help crew. 

We had by far the largest amount of young folks hanging around, helping, and getting excited about racing. I didn't have to get my hands very dirty at all as a result. And you can see some of us old folks were there as well.

We left with a few issues to address by the next race:

• The upper link pin on the left side loosens up a little after every session. It may be because we're using replacement bolts instead of factory bolts on the clamp, but we want to figure it out for sure.
• We lost the air filter in one of the final laps. We usually safety wire the air filter to the car and didn't on this car. We will with the next filter.
• As mentioned above, the engine got hot--we saw the oil temp at about 280 degrees F. We wonder if the Daytona tail is affecting air flow.
• The engine developed a pretty bad oil leak from one of the pushrod tubes. 
• We checked the compression once home and cylinder #3 is down a little. We fear we may have hurt the engine a little with the high temps. Fortunately, we have to pull that head to fix the pushrod tube oil leak anyway. We're going to send the oil out for analysis as well.

Big fun and more work to do.

Gingerman!  What a fun undervalued track!

280F is normal for me here in Colorado.  I don't get worried until I see 300F, and I make sure I'm running oil that can handle those temps.  At sea level, you've got a lot more cooling capability.

In reply to Berck :

Thanks! 

Cedricn said:

Car looks really good! How do you finish that seat insert after the foam is shaped? Might be something i need to do in a not so distant future..

We taped it with aluminum tape, then on the driver side we glued black Nomex to it.

One of the upper parts was pretty thin and broke off, hence the asymmetry. Jack was comfortable, but we may pour another one at some point.

The engine is back out and we're addressing a few things.

Owen has been a great helper and pulled it pretty much by himself. Jack was the extra set of hands needed when the car was split apart.

First, I'm working on the oil leak. It was leaving a puddle nearly 12" overnight, and I was pretty sure it was from a pushrod tube. However, I wanted to be sure so I cleaned everything up really well and left it on a table to watch it leak again.

About 30 minutes later, the larger puddle confirmed the pushrod tube, but there is a 2nd puddle from the oil pressure relief valve. I'll wait another day or so and see if anything else shows up.

So a lot of FV guys trim the cylinder tin an it was time to do ours as well. It's a bit of a pain to adjust the valves with the stock edges of the tins.

Most guys just cut them down and are done, but that leaves a sharp edge and I don't like to bleed.

I cut them down with a 3' wheel on a die grinder, then tipped the edge on my bead roller. If i didn't have a bead roller, I would have just used a vice grip.

Then I hammered them over 180 degrees with a body hammer so I had a nice non-bleeding edge.

Valve adjustments will be much more comfortable. 

And on the leak front, it's clear that the pushrod is the biggest problem. The new puddle comes from the valve cover, but I think it's really the pushrod leak finding its way to the valvecover/head seam. 

I ruined my first ACVW build with a slipped push rod tube seal. Glad you caught it before doing any major damage.

Pulled the head to address the pushrod seal and see why compression is down on #3.

A visual inspection shows the valves looking okay from the top. I'll remove them and see how the seats look on #3 to see if that's why compression was down a little.

The Vintage Grand Prix AuGrattan is a week and a half away, so we thought we should put the car back together.

Last week, we popped the valves out and saw some nasty exhaust seats on #3 and #4. With some help from Bob, we took care of them.

The flat black paint on the engine was too hard to clean, so we went with gray primer under clear like the chassis. We added a little black to the gray to give a little contrast. The original plan was to match it to the floor paint we use at Eclectic so we could touch it up. We got a little lazy and the match isn't quite right. Oh well.

Theo is back, visiting from Seattle, and helped Jack and Owen get it all back together.

We have dyno time on Monday to confirm we've got our power back and to try a few new things. Then we're off to the races next Friday.

Jon @ Capizzi Automotive, our closest DynoJet, is a real gem.  He's always very backed up in the summer supporting mainly drag racers and off-road guys who make 1000-1500+WHp. Even though he's swamped, he agreed to let us make some pulls at 7:00am yesterday. We were pleased that we got our lost power back with the valve job. We tried a few other things, like a better flowing intake manifold and a new air filter, and lost a little power. So we went back to our baseline and we're happy with that for now as that should be very competitive this weekend.

We're going to play with some setup changes and a few other things as Friday has some good practice time and there is an optional enduro we'll use for testing on Saturday. The weather is showing potential for some rain on Friday and Sunday with sun on Saturday. Temps are supposed to stay below 75, so we should have some nice conditions at least some of fthe time. 

I wonder how much the air filter robs (do you have any numbers?), non of the ol vees here runs filter, everyone have just an open trumpet poking up through the cowl. I would prefer to run a filter, but not if it robs to much hp. I hope your car runs great next time out!

In reply to Cedricn :

We've tested several filters and the two best were the one we used to run and one that Bob loaned us to try. They made no difference in power--nothing lost, nothing gained. We've tested some others that lost 1-2 HP. I've tested air filters on a lot of small bore (mainly British) cars and found similar results. Good air filters don't affect power, bad ones do.

The one we were running was a cheap unbranded filter I had laying around the shop. It fit and it came out fine on the dyno, so we ran it. Unfortunately, it fell off at the last race and we can't replace it because we don't know what it is. 

And speaking of things falling off, here are a couple of confessions.

1. We usually tether the air filter to the car with safety wire so that if it falls off, we won't lose it. And we usually have spare parts for all critical components. So you can see we didn't follow our normal practices with the air filter--no safety wire, no spare. I guarantee the new filter will be safety wired and we'll have a spare.
2. More embarrassingly, we try to be very meticulous about prep. We have a prep checklist with every foreseeable failure point, and we go through it between races and put our initials on every item as we check them off. When we find new risks, we add them to the prep sheet for next time. So why am I embarrassed? We had a wheel fall off on the dyno on Monday. We were very lucky. Before making pulls, our normal procedure is to strap the car down, then run it on the rollers at 5-10 mph to make sure everything is okay and the straps are positioned well. That's when the left rear wheel fell off. We hadn't gone through our prep sheet before the dyno because we planned to do it afterward. Dumb dumb dumb. We were so lucky the wheel didn't fall off during a pull. No damage was done as we stood there thinking about what might have happened.

The enduring lessons are to change the word "usually" to "always" in our practices.

p.s. We also are usually sure to never put a fastener on finger tight--it's either not on, or properly tightened. We clearly had the lug bolts finger tight. Always tighten trumps usually tighten.

An un-oiled K&N generally makes no difference in power.  Until you go off track and kick up a bunch of dirt.  At which point, the filter keeps you from losing several HP to a new cylinder bore pattern.

I'll admit to having one of the popular vee velo stacks, and while it made great noises, I don't think it was any faster around the track than an un-oiled K&N.  I just don't really buy the claim that the velo stacks make a difference on the track but not on the dyno.

It's possible that out east you don't have enough dirt for it to matter, but here's what the aftermath of an off in Colorado looks like:

Carl Heideman said:

p.s. We also are usually sure to never put a fastener on finger tight--it's either not on, or properly tightened. We clearly had the lug bolts finger tight. Always tighten trumps usually tighten.

It's a good rule, but not sure how you do it for lug nuts.  You've got to thread them on the wheel in the air and then tighten them with the wheel on the ground.  So you put the car on the ground and then you turn around look for the torque wrench, but someone at the track comes up and asks you a question...

I also regularly violate the rule with the Z bar bolts on one side.  I loosen the Z-bar between races to prolong its life, but leave the fasteners loosely attached otherwise I'd lose them.  I haven't forgotten to tighten it up yet, but it's probably just a matter of time.  I suspect I'd notice at the first turn-in, but whether I'd be able to save it from what I'm guessing would be some initial understeer (from lack of z-bar preload) translated into some massive oversteer (from lack of droop limiting) is something I probably don't want to find out.

Thanks for the response, thats interesting, maybe i need to get a filter and try it out and log speed on the straights. Filter+long stack will probably end up to tall, do you have any link to the filter you use, seems to fit decently?. IT isnt very dusty in general, but we do have gravel traps, some are proper ones and some are filled with dirt. Check the pic below from the race I was in in june, thankfully not my car, he had some cleaning to do. And who knows what went down the engine..

In reply to Cedricn :

Here is the K&N part number for the new filter: KN RU-0500

Pegasus noted this is a good filter for Formula Vees on their website, but didn't have them listed so we went to Amazon.

Keep in mind we have not tested this on they dyno and could be robbing power...

Here's our approach to going to the track.

The above pile is all the stuff we take with us. We like to be very prepared, so we probably overdo it a little. But it pays off when things go wrong.

We keep the primary FV spares in labeled tubs on this rolling cart at the shop. We have a similar cart for the Miata and other cars. We also have this HF toolbox with a combination of Snapon, HF, Craftsman, and other decent tools that we dedicate to the track. When we prep a racecar, we work out of this box and not out of our normal toolboxes so that we know we have all the right tools when we go to the track. 

We have a 24' trailer, which gives us plenty of room. Here's how everything looks when it's packed up.

We have a cap on the bed of the truck and we put a few more things in there, like the spare bodywork and the tent frame. I guess I'll edit this and add that photo.

Anyway, we're loaded and off to Grattan tonight. Jack, Theo, and Owen are camping at the track. I'm too old and lazy for that, so I'm commuting from home as it's only an hour away. The updated forecast shows rain Friday afternoon, a nice day Saturday, and rain Sunday. Hopefully, it will get better.

Grattan is a beautiful track. 

When we prep a racecar, we work out of this box and not out of our normal toolboxes so that we know we have all the right tools when we go to the track. 

if that's not in a "how to get started in racing" book somewhere, it certainly should be.