Rochester DSM OneLap

After a very rainy second half to the trip, we have arrived in South Bend.
Actually we are about 10 minutes away. We are survivng off of frequent flier points of our seasoned traveler in the group to keep costs down.
We unpacked a few items, unhooked the trailer and went over to the official hotel for a beer. There are only a handful of people here so far. We found Brock Yates Jr standing post at the bar, knowing we found the right place.

Tim drove the first leg into Ohio. We made 232 miles and averaged between 18-19 MPG. We certainly won’t win any of the gas efficiency challenges halfway through the trip. We made good time as Mike ran a full office of confernce calls from the back seat.
We headed to subway at lunch since some very generous friends gave us a gift card to help us on this trip. Sure enough we find the one place that doesn’t have the register running to process the card. The next subway better be ready.
Sure enough I hop in the drivers seat after lunch and it starts raining. Then it really starts raining.
I am still not sure how we drove the car on the 3000+ mile road trip that doesn’t have any cup holders. Tim couldn’t take it and took out the front speaker in the dash to accomodate the fountain drink.

The days proceeding our departure became a blur. I have updates and pictures to post from every day, but some how time was stolen from me.

This morning the team assembled somewhere in Penfield to fill every crevace of space left in the trailer and trunk as we headed out on our 10 day journey. For us the first leg of the trip is actually getting to the start of the race, in South Bend Indiana, some 532 miles away. This little skip across states will take the better part of a day.

So far the car rides smoooth, even with the trailer. Altough we packed light, the car is loaded. Thank goodness Tim got the cruise sorted out.

Tim spent the wee hours of last night working up a bracket across the ceiling, so we can have something to mount cameras to. We aren’t live with cameras yet, as we bolted the bracket in place this morning after the paint was tacky enough.

We will probably post some updates and mess around with video when we make a lunch stop.

I will have to keep a log of all of the people on this trip, other than ourselves. There will be the list of people who are gawking and there will be a list of people who don’t know how to drive. Don’t think we will forget you Mr silver Evo that almost lambasted us coming onto 490.

Sunday was our last full day of work before the start of One Lap. Steve and Chris joined me on Sunday to finish up some of the little things.
Steve worked on completing the installation of the power inverter and we now have 1500W of AC anytime we need it. That’s going to come in hand if we ever need a drill or grinder and it allows us to have full AC power in the car so keeping laptops and cell phones charged is going to be a snap.
I pulled the rear shocks and added some stiffness to them. I was happy with how the car handled but you can see on the track that the rear end was bobbing around a bit. It takes 2 full turns to be full stiff and I am at 1.5 turns. I haven’t noticed a big difference in how the car handles and I think the ride got a bit better.
Chris is the guy who built the cold air box and we asked him to come by and give us a hand finishing the duct work for the front fascia. We finally sealed in the area around the FMIC and he even cleaned up the brake cooling ducts while he was in there.

When Chris had the front fascia apart I took some time to paint up the trim piece that goes over the bumper. It was in black primer and stuck out in the pictures.

Steve finished up the gauges and wired the AEM into ECMlink so we can log that.  This morning I dropped off some of the tires to be mounted and tomorrow morning I hope to have all 6 of them ready to go.

For having a short list of items, it turned out to be a full day of work in the One Lap garage. I arrived early with the car, since Tim was coming in from out of town, and did some little items like mounting the new trailer spare, under the trailer.  Chris arrived nursing a hangover and Tim came in shortly after.  We had a list of items, including finishing up the nose work, adjusting the rear shocks, and painting the trim piece on the front, and wiring the rally lights.

I removed the gauge bezel for the last time and ran the wire for the AEM wideband o2 sensor, so we could log it with ECMlink. I also finally wired up the inverter in the trunk.  This will power our broadband router, as well as recharge laptops and whatever else we need.  It has enough power to run a small city or a nice drill if we need it, but we need to draw power in strides unless we start adding more batteries to the car.

Chris got to work on the front of the car, to finish up ducting into the intercooler.  Knowing that the air will take the path of least resistance, we want to make sure the only path for the air is through the intercooler and radiator.  Chris’s ducting came out perfect, although we had him cursing the removal process of that front bumper.

While the nose was off of the car, Tim moved in to get the black strip above the bumper painted to match the car.  There is a long history and tale behind the black trim piece, which can only be told in company of friends and lots of beer. 

We noticed that the car was running a little soft in the rear when we were at BeaveRun.  We actually didn’t notice it in the drivers seat, but it was more visible from the stands.  Tim pulled the Koni’s out of the car to stiffen them up.  To adjust the Koni’s you need to have them out of the car, fully compressed and rotate them to change the rebound rate.  After measuring the upper and lower movement tolerances, we stiffened them up from what would be considered 1/4 stiffness to 3/4 stiffness.  That should accommodate the extra weight of the Galant over Tim’s Eclipse.  We ran some rebound races, until we fine tuned them into the same rate on both sides.

The last touch on any car that resembles the original rally car is of course rally lights.  I had these lights from 199/1000 which I actually bought off of SCCA Rally driver Bruce Perry.  While the weren’t the round huge lights that the original car got outfitted with, they made a nice edition to the car and will probably help us if we need a little extra light.

It looks like we will have a second event on Sunday, which now starts off with an official autocross. After canceling BlueGrass, we are going to be running a sanctioned autocross in the morning, then running at Highland Rim in the afternoon.

Highland Rim Speedway in Greenbrier, TN. www.highlandrim.com is a quarter-mile oval on the way to Talladega that we run in the early evening. It will definitely add to the schedule for us to double events for this day.  It will at least give us some more time to split up seat time between the drivers.

I grabbed the car from Tim today, so I could finish up some of the electrical work, before the scheduled work day started tomorrow. It was nice to have the car, as I was able to pay off a few debts by giving some rides in the car.  I was headed out to go grab a spare tire for the trailer, when my mom pulled in the driveway.  My mom helped organize the East Rochester Library staff donations for this trip, so it was nice to be able to take her for a ride around the block.

I made it up to Irondequoit to get the spare tire and stopped in to see the Buehler’s, who live around the corner from where I was headed.  We put the family in the car and did a nice expressway drive around the proverbial block, so they could enjoy the car as well.  Phil and Sherianne had made a private donation to the car, so it was nice to share what all of our hard work had gone into.

It is unusually hot in Rochester today, giving me a glimpse at how painful it is going to be to have a car without air conditioning down south.  It we will need to keep a cooler in the trunk or trailer to be sure we can keep some cold towels on standby.  Sitting still in the car, the temperature is rising.  Rising more than it should at least, meaning we need to be sure to test the radiator fan switch tomorrow.  I also plan on making a length of wire to by pass the temperature sensor to bring with us.

Tomorrow we have one of the last full work days on the car.   While the work list is light compared to our past efforts, there really is no more time left to entertain putting things off.

A Friday drive in sunny 75 degree weather in a rally inspired 355hp One lap VR4 with working CRUISE CONTROL!

Yep, I fixed it and in the end is was simple. At the beginning I didn’t have power to the cruise and the horn didn’t work. A fuse fixed that. The next thing I did was to remove the clutch switch mod that was in the car. That didn’t fix it. Then I swapped the entire cruise control unit to one that I knew worked. That didn’t fix it. Then I swapped a good gauge cluster to be sure the speed sensor was working, and that didn’t fix it. Finally I started to pull out the clutch/brake switches one by one. Each one of them worked so that didn’t fix it. Next I check the switches in place with a continuity meter and the brake switch worked, the lower clutch switch worked but the upper clutch switch did not. I looked at it again and everything worked and I knew when the switch was out of the car it worked so I tried to adjust the switch closer to the pedal. nothing. A bit closer and still nothing. Finally I adjusted it to the point it was loading the clutch pedal and I said..hmmm that’s not right. I looked at the little rubber pad on the lever and it was there but when I got out my mini maglite and depressed the clutch with my hand I could see the pedal moving but the switch plunger was not. !

Stupid Mitsubishi uses a rubber pad where the pedals push the switches and those pads have a nipple on them that pulls through a hole in the pedal to secure it in place. Anybody guess what size that hole is? Yep, the same size as the switch plungers. The rubber piece had worn down enough to eject the nipple that held it in place so the plunger never closed with the clutch off. So the cruise thought I always had the clutch depressed. I taped a small piece of sheet aluminum to cover the hole and took it for a test drive.

That was it…and now I am happy.

Tim

PS. The injectors should be here Monday.

We were informed this week that the event at Bluegrass had to be canceled.  They are not yet building the facility, and it will not be ready for our race, by the time the day rolls around.  The schedule has changed to reflect Turfway Park, in Florence KY as the alternative.

7500 Turfway Road, Florence, KY 41042

http://www.turfway.com

While it IS a horse track, Tim did some satellite work to find a Google Maps aerial view of the location when the parking lot was setup for auto-crossing.  I can already hear Tim giggling at the prospect of Autocrossing the car on this one.

Today was a pretty awesome day for me. I had lined up to swap cars with Tim for the day, so that I could bring the car into work to share with everybody. The morning ride in was nothing really special because it was raining.  We are weening out time until the last week possible on Tim’s old Kuhmo MXs, and they are pretty damn bald to really have fun with in the rain.

In my day job I am an IT supervisor at a local manufacturing company in town, called Rotork.  Being on the IT side of things, I usually hold some classes and seminars at lunch, covering various technologies for people.  This week, I thought there would be nothing more fitting than to cover automotive diagnostics touching on ODBII for our 96 and above cars as well as giving them a glimpse of ECMlink for the One Lap car.

For a volunteer seminar, it turned out to be one of the larger classes that I held, and I had a lot of encouraging words from the group when gave them a glimpse at the hours we have spent getting the car ready. I had a pretty broad spectrum of people in the classroom, so I kept it fairly light, but talking about turbochargers and how MAF sensors measure incoming air is really like second nature.  If we survive this adventure, I owe a few people some rides in the car from work, who helped out along the way.

By the end of a long and mentally draining work day (minus the fun lunch), I was able to reconnect with an old friend with new life in it.   I went out and warmed up the car for a few minutes while I cleared my head from the day, and took a nice drive home in 187 / 1000 on nice dry sunny roads.

First of all the car is not the car I drove at BeaveRun a few weeks ago.  The suspension has learned it’s place, any abnormal noise we heard before has long sense been eliminated, and this new 187 had a rejuvenated life in it which I had not seen in a while.  The tuning at STM has transformed the car quite a bit and that turbo is absolutely ridiculous on this car.  I love it.  I took the long way around the building leaving the office, just to have at least one stretch of road to hit the gas before falling in line with traffic filled roads.

The upper powerband of that car is so strong that it is almost giggly to think we didn’t have this at BeaveRun.  Let’s throw it out there, we were slow at BeaveRun.  The car had issues, we had issues, and together we looked like a very brightly painted up 4 door who only resembled a race car.  I can’t wait to run this car, on a track, with other cars.  I feel like I want those same people back at BeaveRun, who said “man that thing is pretty quick” to run the same laps with this new car.  I believe the new saying will be “what the hell was that thing?”.

I needed that afternoon commute more than the car or team would ever know.  The only thing that could have made it better is if there as anybody on the damn road to play with.  It is SO painful driving a high horsepower car around Rochester with drivers who pick a lane based off of their comfort zone.

I was walking into Wegmans for some dinner after handing the keys back to Tim, and I just happened to run into Rob Barlow, the reporter who came out to the garage last week.  It turns out our article just came out the day before, so I made a B-Line for the media rack.  I grabbed 4 copies of the latest Penfield Post and brought one back to Tim before heading home.