Page 50 - KCRPCA Sept-Oct

50
Sep / Oct 2017
the driver from each side get everything hooked up properly. The rst driver change dropped us a bit (even with a great stop), but Rygh got us right back up in the top 10 quickly. All in all, we would hold in the top 10 positions, with much of it being between 5th-8th for about 22 hours of the race. The drivers followed with Kris Loveless, and Mike Armentrout bringing us into the night stints in great position.
With the race progressing quickly noticed that our transmission temperature was running about 290-300 degrees, which is about 75 degrees higher than normal. It was likely a pump or sensor issue, but we weren’t going to stop unless the transmission gave out. At 8pm, Aaron took the rst full night stint and burned down some great times in his 2 hour stint. I went in for the 6th stint at 10pm for a double stint ending at 2am. At about the 1am mark, we realized we had a slightly leaking exhaust gasket, causing some fumes in the cabin, which would make double stinting the rest of our drivers impossible, so after I fell out of the car at 2am, Mike D took back over, followed by Rygh getting us to the 6am mark.
Headlights....a lot of LED headlights at night in your mirrors are blinding to everything in front of you. That was really the only issue at night that we had, but struggled through it and did just ne. Throughout the night, we would run a skeleton one to two man crew in the pits, while others tried to sleep, although most efforts again at that were futile. At the end of Rygh’s stint, we needed to do brake pads and a tire change as they were getting pretty thin, and wouldn’t make the full 6 hours that we had remaining. We knocked all 4 brakes and 4 tires, along with a fuel stop and driver change
in about 8 minutes. Kris jumped back in at this point, and took over in the daylight. We ignored his complaints about the fumes, his panties being in a bunch, and ran him almost 3 hours with a fuel splash in between in order to nish strong at the end with one and a half drivers. Mike D got back in the car, followed by Rygh who brought home the checkered ag in the last hour stint. I, honest to God, feel like I have that driver order out of place slightly; I might have been slightly delirious throughout the night, to remember exactly who drove when. Blame it on my 4 hours and exhaust fumes.
In the end, out of 40 cars, we took 6th place overall and 5th in class. About half the eld did not nish the race due to mechanical issues. What these cars, drivers, and crew are required to do in a race like that is unheard of. We completed 615 laps, approximately 1568 miles, and other than our tires and brakes which we expected, we never put a wrench on the car during the race. The car, running Driven Race Oil, burned about 1.5 quarts of oil the entire race, which is unheard of as well; many have heard me preach about Driven oil before. The transmission running 300 degrees (which was accurate) for much of the 24 hours, never gave us a hint of a problem. (also running Driven Race Oil). We had one yellow penalty ag for driver error, which cost us 3 minutes in the pits, and one 2 minute issue where we were releasing Aaron for his stint, and a car had wrecked in turn 1 and was blocking cars on pit exit, which held us for another 2 minutes. A couple of minor things is all it takes to drop a couple of positions in this series; it is incredibly competitive. All in all, we were happy with the results. Once the car pulled off the track, we put it right in the trailer, closed the doors, and