“At least the winch is working!” “Yeah, this trailer is sweet! So, where do you want all the parts?”
We’d ended an endurance race in our LFX V6-swapped Miata with this conversation. No podium, no trophies, just a long tow home in awkward silence.
And we’d done it twice.
First, at Carolina Motorsports Park after a broken axle ended our …
Mistake one mission creep:
You could have fixed what needs fixing in the harness rather than redoing the whole thing now. The harness in my Datsun is cobbled together garbage but last year I fixed the really jenky stuff I did 20 years ago. Fixing the jenky stuff took about an hour. I actually have a complete unmolested harness but there are other things that need doing.
Mistake two:
Hurry-up Syndrome or better known has how planes crash do to rushed decision making.
If my car is not ready and tested at least two weeks before I don't go..............period.
How to stop this from happening:
Reliability and servicing come first; after that upgrades can happen when time permits.
I have a upgraded race engine that is 6 hours from being completed. We'd been working in the garage every Saturday for a 5 weeks. As soon as I knew we were going to be cutting it within 3 weeks I put that on hold.
The back up motor in the car is not as fast as I would like but the car is running.
We did spend one more Saturday installing a new diff (lower ratio) that will now have the car in the meat of the powerband coming off corners.
The motor will be installed in late December as I have no events from then until March.
Note all of this is my .02
Good article.
I learned this the hard way the second time we ran the Open Track Challenge in 2003. We'd run in 2002 and made a bunch of changes for 2003. Poor decisions and rushed work under a deadline led to broken things and insufficient shakedown led to failures. I don't remember all the details, but I do know we were changing a motor the night before the first day of competition, we had to source an oil cooler from a 911 and I changed at least two transmissions that week - one between sessions.
Never again. For Targa Newfoundland 2008, I literally had the car in the trailer a week before I had to leave for the race. I was originally supposed to race in 2007 but a recently changed immigration status kept me from leaving the US. Good thing, the extra year of shakedown made a huge difference to the car and the team.
Rushing to make it has killed a lot of pilots. I try to remember that when I'm hustling non-aviation things.
I should add that I had really good racing mentors in a couple of machinists.
I learned prep from them.
I also watched fellow racers thrashing away the night before an event and it typically turned out badly.
I spent a winter (22-23) rebuilding my first engine and rushed to complete the car before the first track day test. I had driven it a few hundred miles to work and around town, and I knew it had a little coolant leak. I went to bed suuuper late and woke up unrested and derpy. I opened the coolant tank to top it off, and went out onto the track. It overheated and blew up in one lap. The coolant cap was just waiting there for me on top of the tank, right where I left it, sandwiched between the tank and the hood's foam insulation.
Good article.
This year I did an engine swap in my track Miata, with a complete re-wire on an AiM PDM. Even taking 6 months for the project, and being a bit OCD about it, it took another two months and a few wasted days at the track before I had all the teething issues fully sorted.
Good preparation is the key to avoid wrenching at the track (and I HATE wrenching at the track!). That said, something as major as an engine swap or re-wire, even with fastidious preparation, is likely to show you a problem you didn't expect.
Rushing to be ready only increases the chance that something will go wrong.
Props to GRM/Tom for being willing to publish an article like this. Many would sweep it under the rug or at least wait until it isn't so fresh to write about it. It shows a real care for the community to want to share mistakes like these in a candid way.
Hope the prep for the next race goes well!
Appleseed said:Rushing to make it has killed a lot of pilots. I try to remember that when I'm hustling non-aviation things.
Related aviation lesson: My instructor emphasized that at the beginning and especially at the end of your preflight, to just stand back...like 50ft back...and look at the plane. Crazy how many things you see when you "zoom out" a little. Missing the forest for the trees is real. So, I try to step back from whatever project I just finished, even after I think I've checked and doubled checked everything, and just look at it from outside the door of my shop, or whatever the case may be, and see what I might have missed.
During my NASCAB days, we had check list for checklists. It got a bit over complicated, however, a simple Excel spreadsheet is what we ended up with. Each Sub team had their own printed out checklist, and the summary information was kept on the Master Crew Chief / Engineer's Phone / tablet.
Good Luck
In reply to RacingComputers :
I'll admit it: I love a good Excel sheet and a checklist. Old habits die hard. These days we have Monday and people here know how much I love using that. :-)
We won a NASCAB Championship using Old School
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