Bumblebee Up The Stinger at High Speed
18Spt15; Fri. Tired from the 10-hour tow from Birmingham and strung out on gas station coffee, Jamie, David, and I arrive at CMP well after sunrise, unload the Blitzwagen, and set up in garage bay 20. Bay 19 is reserved for Dale Sale and his Camero. Hawkeye and Dr. Steve meet us there.
This race, we have quad 37mm piston aluminum Wilwood Dynalite calipers up front, and dual ATE/VARGA's 40mm piston cast iron in the rear, both ends on Porterfield AP-30 carbon Kevlar pads and Wilwood 570° F. brake fluid.
We have Lanner Kahn's extra-rigid 5.25" bolt-space brake caliper adaptors up front. http://www.vdubengineering.com Lanner makes great parts and is a real craftsman.
We mount the 60-series Accellera tires to the car. David takes the Blitzwagen out to bed the brake pads and determine the best bias adjustment. We adjust the brake bias valve by laying on the ground and reaching into the master cylinder area for the adjuster. In two trips back to the garage, Jamie has the bias set, decreasing front circuit pressure just three full turns of the knob.
Vital tech note for those who are planning to use one of the black-billet EMPI brake bias valves. On ours, the IN and OUT ports on the body were reversed. And they are engraved, not just marked with paper stickers. When we installed the lines off the master cylinder the marked way, the IN coming from the master cylinder and the OUT going to the brakes, the brakes would drag and lock. We actually found this same warning on the Internet from an EMPI bias-valve user. Hooking the lines up "backwards" fixed it.
After lunch, Dr. Steve goes out for practice. The Wilwood brakes prove to be powerful and easy to modulate. The engine is running right and the handling is good. Oil temp is 220° to 240° F max. No pesky oil pressure warning lights anymore since Dale baffeled the inside of our dry sump tank.
In fact, our only carb tuning for this race was to change a fuel filter and readjust the idle. Try racing a Weber-equipped car after months in storage with no cleaning or balancing.
This event's Hawkeye-Steve parade theme was Cheech and Chong. Rather than just dress up for going through tech, the show is a moveable feast in downtown Camden. Hawk and Dr. Steve pimp our ride with shag carpet, red tassels, a big chromed naked winged lady hood ornament, and enhanced the "Love Machine" effect with a theatrical smoke device. They look too good in their costumes, and you have to wonder where Cheech and Chong begin and Hawkeye and Dr. Steve end. Disturbing thought.
Dale's BeatRetroRacing Team go to Camden as the Braille Racing Team, with their driving suits marked "Can I feel your fender?" That's Justin on the hood.
Most of the race teams travel to Camden for the party. David and Jamie stay with me back at the track. We're beat, and too scared of our wives to go downtown drinking and whoring.. Jamie makes a big cast iron pot of chili and at least we eat well.
The cars return from Camden near midnight after an evening of drunken debauchery.
19Spt15; Sat. Over sunrise coffee, readying for the race, we learn the pimped-out Blitzwagen was the star of the show. "The women were rubbing their butts on it like cats in heat," Hawkeye said.
The weather is excellent, sunny, and summer warm. The 111 car field begins pace laps at 0900 hrs. Hawk has first driving shift. He is soon black-flagged for a bad transponder, pits, gets it changed, and is out again just after the green flag went down.
He soon has the Blitzwagen cruising, passing clusters of slower cars, weaving through traffic. The brakes are right, the engine is right.
55 minutes into the race, at a high-speed spot in the track called the kink, which leads into the infield esses, Hawk lifts throttle a second early, steering into the coming curve and traffic cluster in it.
The rear suspension goes light, and the Blitzwagen spins clockwise at about 90mph. The tires dig in as he goes sideways, the car about to flip-roll as it spins back across the road, facing traffic for an instant. A yellow and black striped Toyota #157 smashes Hawk in the rear just as he makes his 360°. It is a hard but glancing blow.
https://youtu.be/zJxQESWtKtI (video of the accident)
The Blitzwagen bounces to a stop, but the Toyota keeps going, his right hand side caved in.
Hawk tried to restart the engine and got a few RPM out of it before it died altogether. The rear end of the Blitzwagen is out of our line of sight from the front straight fence. We can't see the damage.
Yellow flags abound. Finally, the Blitzwagen is hauled in on a flatbed, the rear wing loose and bouncing.
We finally get to see the damage as the car is rolled off the flatbed at our garage bay. Both rear fiberglass fenders have been shattered, the aluminum push bar and bumper brackets are smashed to the left, the exhaust is broken and flattened, the stinger missing. On the engine itself, visually the alternator pulley is creased, and the crank pulley notched. The right rear diagonal arm is bent. No oil is leaking, but the cylinder 1 & 2 cast aluminum valve cover is broken in half and the Kad manifold on that head broken, the whole carb assembly laying to the side.
Somehow, we avoided a fire.
Hawk lays down on a cot in the trailer with nervous prostration. It's not so much what happened, but what might have happened. Regardless, the Blitzwagen is out of the race.
The BeatRetroRacing team, in the #20 garage beside us, offer to give our drivers rides for gas and beer in their 1978 Camero. Now the weekend looks more promising. The Retro drivers, David, Jamie, and Dr. Steve, are all going to swap from the nimble, 150-horse Bug they know to a full-race 350 cubic-inch Chevy that might be better suited to a short round track.
BeatRetro isn't all altruism. The day has grown hot in the sun, and in a front engine car, all the heat from the engine and transmission makes the cabin very hot. And to make it worse, the exhaust pipes are routed through the cabin, with no more than an heat-transparent sheet metal box over them. Already, Dale Sr., chief perp behind the team, has declared he is too old for this, and his driver-daughter is threatening mutiny.
We send out Dr. Steve first in the Camero. He does an hour, and mentally (if not physically) keeps his cool. In fact, he runs a 2:07, and the Camero's best time at CMP this even will be a 2:06. "And I was just taking it easy," he says.
But trouble has found the Camero, and the cause of it's previous crankshaft vibration, and frequent shift-linkage tinkering from Barber and CMP in the spring now reveals itself. The transmission case itself is cracked. Oil is now bleeding out.
In the Saturday night break, BeatRetro pulls the transmission and takes it to the dark hinterlands of South Carolina looking for a welder while the other racers rest and party.
20Spt15; Sun. Dawn Sunday finds the track an encampment of those who drank too much (and those who drank way too much) unconscious in their tents, campers, race cars, under their trailers, or staggering around like zombies to the showers and toilets building moaning "Kof-ee ... kof-ee" instead of "brains."
BeatRetro already has the Camero transmission welded and reinstalled, a feat of determination by BeatRetro crew chief and driver Justin who is living on Pepto-Bismol.
Our Jamie and David get written into the day's driver schedule. The Camero has no rear suspension mods, just staggered shocks and leaf springs. No control arms, no Watts linkage. Not even a basic Panhard rod. We expect trouble, but the opposite is true. The rear end is just along for the ride. The front is very heavy, the (power) steering feels limited in its traverse lock to lock, and the front tires have an understeer range from bad to worse. The power, however, is first class.
Jamie runs slow 2:11's, wary of the handling. David is different. He pushes the big Chevy, trying to steer with the throttle to get through the corners. At one point, David almost spins, but catches the tail in time. He is black flagged anyway, because the corner workers thought he had spun.
Through it all, the Cameros' transmission fix held.
Finally, Dale's daughter takes the last driving shift and comes in under the checkered flag, wags spraying beer and dumping bottles on water on the procession of returning cars.
Dale's Camero was to finish 63rd overall (of 111 cars) with an official best lap of 2:06. The Blitzwagen was credited at 98th place (just 19 laps), and a best time of 2:11, which we attribute to our "take it easy, make laps, not lap times" strategy.
The Blitzwagen does not run again until February 2016, at Barber LeMons. We have the technology. We will be stronger and faster.
FJC
