Archive April 2009
Highland Rim Sunday
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.
0A few favors paid and a sample of heat
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.
0What beats a Sunday Drive?
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.
0BlueGrass Cancelled
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
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. 
A day alone with 187
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.
