21Apr23; Fri. The big feature of the yearly LeMons CMP race is the accompanying block party in nearby downtown Camden, which must be hard up for entertainment to allow such a carnival of drinking and carousing would-be racers and their crazy cars loose on its streets.
Citizens, lock up your daughters, dogs, cats and hamsters. Police, look the other way. Bartenders, haul out the cheap stuff and lube your cash register drawers. LeMons is in town.
To understand Johan’s choice of party costume, you have to remember last year, right here at CMP, the Blitzwagen broke a valve cover bolt and in one lap doused the track with several gallons of Lucas Hot Rod oil. The cleanup cost Johan a thousand dollars in Oil-Dry, took hours, and made even those people who might normally tolerate us sneer and spit on the ground when they saw us.
This year, just to poke the bear, Johan has concocted a Saudi Arabian team costume theme. He, Dr. Slick, and Justin are dressing as Saudis in genuine white thobes and authentic red-checkered pattern ghutras. They have plastic motor oil bottles – real ones – they’ve washed out with sterilizing vodka or some such, and they carry them around sipping adult beverages from them. The psychological effect is significant, especially on the race organizers, whom came within a heartbeat of throwing us out because of the track-oiling incident.
Johan has shown up with Aramco and “Got Oil?” decals for the Blitzwagen, a bottle of dishwashing liquid and an oily stuffed duck to wash.
Johan’s style was only slightly dampened by the unexpected fact there was no downtown block party this year. A grave of a confederate soldier had been discovered, locally and the exhumation regalia nixed Lemons.
22Apr23; Sat. After a damp, chilly sunup, with people awakening, stirring, and cooking racetrack campfire breakfasts, we see it’s going to be a clear sunny day. Engines are starting. David fixes a pivot problem on 57’s windshield wipers as we coffee ourselves up and get Dr. Slick ready to take first stint. Johan and Justin redress as Saudi and prepare to drop the green flag, from the tower. Does LeMons really think Johan is a sheik wanting to buy the track? Or is the Saudi attire just so ridiculous Johan has won the booby prize?
At 1000 hrs local time, Johan whips the green flag back and forth as the massed mob of 66 cars rumble toward the tower, all together, floor their throttles.
Dr Slick is one of the herd. He dodges ahead, plunging through holes in traffic like threading the eyes in rows of evasive needles. The Blitzwagen’s 94 x 78 engine fed by Kaddie Shack Solexes on 44mm throttle bodies and 160 mains. The cam is a veteran Engle 125 pushing 1.25 rockers. DRD ported heads, 40x35.5 valves. Double valve springs. The engine pulls strong to over 6000 RPM, but we insist the drivers keep it under 6K for reliability. Slick keeps moving ahead in traffic. This is that engine’s third enduro weekend.
The field is divided into three classes, A, B & C. We are in C, the numerically largest group. Classes A and B are mostly 6 and 8 cylinder cars, although a few of the larger engines are represented in Class C. And if you win in Class C you get bumped up to Class B. Our lap times often overlap into Class B.
Readers of our previous posts know very well what has kept us in Class C is either collisions or reliability issues. We’ve been bullet-proofing the Blitzwagen a race at a time, boosting reliability. And our drivers are finally overall better at avoiding crashes than initiating them.
Dr. Slick has a few exciting moments oversteering through an oil puddle or two, but impresses us all by advancing our position towards the middle of the 66-car field, having started near the end of the field.
Johan takes over at 11:45 hrs, the oil temp reading only 160° F as he goes out. We need 180° F or more just to reach operating temperature to burn the water out of the oil. We’re already getting some milkshake foam out of the dry-sump breather vent. And we have one of our dual oil coolers totally blocked off from cooling air!
One lb of hydrogen combines with eight lbs of oxygen to form nine pounds of water, which means burning one gallon of gas produces about one gallon of water. Most of that water goes out the exhaust, but some gets past the rings and into the oil. Our dual cooler oil cooling system is enduro overkill. Below 180° F (82 C.) the water doesn’t boil out. We know the day will warm up. It’s just now high 60’s.
All the good luck Dr Slick had turns bad on Johan, now in his driving suit, as he spins in traffic, gets black flagged in, but is soon let go at the penalty impound area to rejoin the race. Maybe it was an outright bribe that cut him loose. Neither LeMons or Johan would be above that.
Then, to add injury to insult, at 13:10 hrs Johan runs out of gas, thinks it’s an engine problem and pits, throwing off our refuel/driver change schedule. Jamie is not suited up. He laps to 13:15 and repits, with Jamrod taking over. His old Jamrod nickname was due to his metric hammer mechanical habits, but recently, Speedy seems to fit better. A quick oil temp check at the driver change shows we’re just over 200° F, with 210° in reach. We like about 220-240° because it thins the 20w40 Lucas Hotrod oil and it takes less power to run the dry-sump pump, without heat degrading the oil.
The Blitzwagen has a cylindrical, 3-gallon, spiral-baffled dry-sump oil tank that causes most of the air bubbles in the oil foam to dissipate due to the simethicone additive in the oil, exactly what you find in anti-gas pills for your stomach. Our simple 2-stage Schadeck dry-sump oil pump fits exactly in the stock oil pump cavity and uses just the stock oil pickup tube but works like a charm.
Speedy is now in the race, and he flogs it without crash or mechanical incident, improving our overall position a few places before coming in at 1500 hrs to change drivers. The sky now is dark and foreboding.
David is ready. During today’s refuelings, we’re noticing the car is using more gas than it should. Our Jaz fuel tank bladder holds 12-gal. Refueling every hour and a half normally takes five gallons, more or less. Now we’re refueling at almost empty. Our first suspicion is a leak in the Solex carbs manifolds balance tube. That would explain it, and in fact, when we would drop the engine weeks later, we could discover a severely frayed spot in the braided line, cutting through the wire reinforcement. The balance tube had been rubbing against a sheet metal edge behind the fan housing.
David had no more entered traffic than heavy rain and lightning strikes. You can see the car's outlines in the brilliant flashes, and we think for a moment the race might be called. Something about lightning storms and insurance coverage.
But no, no black flags. David is the rain master, slipping and sliding through and around traffic. The rain separates the men from the boys in racing. David’s competitors become obstacles.
You have to hand it to the Blitzwagen for handling. We have competition coil springs and a strut inserts up front supported by a heavy duty front sway bar, adjustable rear spring plates, a 19mm rear sway bar, and Koni rear shocks. David can lean into any corner as hard as he needs to, oversteer or understeer, drift through the esses, and powerslide like Dr. Porsche intended.
We begin to hear popping noises as David flies by with each lap. It sounds like an exhaust nut or stud has let go. David brings the Blitzwagen in and Jamie and Justin have the loose header manifold fixed quickly.
David finally comes in for fuel and a driver swap at 1630 hrs, and Dr. Slick goes out to finish the day. We’ve been pushing it since ten this morning and we’re wet and tired. We’re in the very front row of Class C. So far so good.
23Apr23; Sun. The weather is warm and clear. Our team is confident, assured, and calm. We’re pushing for top three in Class C. We can smell a class win coming. All we need is luck.
Dr Slick is first out. And the racing gremlins attack him like a duck on a June bug. The shift linkage coupler to the transmission breaks. He has to be slowly flatbedded back to us. David reacts like he’d trained just for this exact occurrence all his life. He dives into the Blitzwagen, twisting through the roll cage, opens the inspection door, sees the problem, yells for tools, miraculously finds the pin that’d fell out of the coupler, safety wires it in, and Slick is back out on the track ten minutes after arriving.
We feel good about the quick fix. We feel bad about the half hour of lost time with the flatbed and the fix.
Steve returns at 1100 hrs for LeMon’s “quiet time” a Sunday church-only mandated no race engines cease-fire. We bleed Blitzwagen’s brakes. The day is warmer. Oil temp is now a healthy 240° F., so we rip away the tape blocking one oil cooler scoop. The other scoop has been supporting all the cooling.
Speedy roars back into the race at noon, regaining lost positions, On the track, a hero. He stops for refuel and driver change at 1330 hrs, after 90 minutes of steady gettin’ it. If he died out there, the morticians would never have been able to get the smile off his face. Oil temp now reads 195° F.
Johan takes over from Speedy at 1330. Johan has nicknames too. Some might call them aliases. This weekend it’s Mohammed Sedik.
When Johan took over, the shift coupler incident had knocked us back and Speedy and Johan had brought us up to 7th. When Johan came in for fuel and transfer to David, he had brought us up to 4th. At this point yesterday we were 3rd in class.
The racing gremlins noticed that as well. Earlier yesterday we’d discovered we were not getting our usual fuel economy of about five gallons per hour. The Solexes are very efficient, even on 160 and 170 main jets.
Johan hands over to David at 1530. The Blitzwagen’s 12-gallon Jaz cell is almost dry. David is our last driver of the day. Of the race. We gas him up and get him out. The clock ticks. The Blitzwagen weaves through traffic.
David is going flat out, even with the time we lost yesterday and today, we can make a 2nd or 3rd place. It is just our luck that the C Class in this race has some very competitive and reliable cars in it. Few drop out, few have crashed. All we have to do is keep up the pace to 1700 hrs.
Then it happens. As mentioned earlier, we will later discover a leaking carb manifold balance tube, which fools manifold vacuum and causes higher then normal fuel consumption.
At about 1620 hrs. The Blitzwagen begins to run out of gas. David nurses it, the engine sputtering. He runs out at 1630 hrs, the race still ongoing, but we don’t have time to refuel and get back out again.
We officially finish 4th in class and 19th overall out of 66 cars. The winning C-Class car was a 1993 2.4 liter Mitsubishi rebadged as an Eagle Summit hatchback. He makes 342 laps. We made 308. And we won the Halloween Meets Gasoline best team theme, a thousand dollars US. That paid for the penalty last year.
For both of us (at almost one lap every two minutes) our total time lost absolutely made the difference between 1st and 2nd place. But no crying over spilled oil. We’ll be there at Road Atlanta in December.
The Team. Johan, Slick, David, Justin, and Speedy, in camo.
