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Whatever_Racecar Endurance 745T

Put the turbo all back together and go to test the actuator, and...nothing. Diaphragm was torn. Grab spare...also torn. Meh.

And then I found out my front brake pads are completely gone. Meh.

At least I have 5 weeks until my next race.
 
I think I got all the life I could out of these pads.

Maybe I could have got 10 minutes more.
 

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Well we took 32nd out of 133 cars at Sonoma. Saturday had lots of rain. We were slow and had to come in for a little bit to fix a blown fuse for the wipers. Finished about 39th. Sunday was mostly dry and we made up some positions, but two pass under yellows (different team mates) and a spin (me) meant 3 black flags and we donated to the charity to get out of jail.

Final driver had a strong finish to get us into 32nd overall and 13th in class.

Car ran well all weekend. It seems to run richer at Sonoma, maybe the cold air? The exhaust stayed together for the first time in a long time. Inconel on manifold to turbo studs and stainless 316 on wastegate studs. Both with nordlocks and resbond thread locker. I did have a spare manifold, hot side and wastegate bolted together with all inconel studs just in case.

We were also able to run 2 full hours on the new gas tank without having to go easy on the throttle. I don’t know the limit yet. Before we could get about 15 minutes less.
 
rb92673 said:
Well we took 32nd out of 133 cars at Sonoma. Saturday had lots of rain. We were slow and had to come in for a little bit to fix a blown fuse for the wipers. Finished about 39th. Sunday was mostly dry and we made up some positions, but two pass under yellows (different team mates) and a spin (me) meant 3 black flags and we donated to the charity to get out of jail.

Final driver had a strong finish to get us into 32nd overall and 13th in class.

Car ran well all weekend. It seems to run richer at Sonoma, maybe the cold air? The exhaust stayed together for the first time in a long time. Inconel on manifold to turbo studs and stainless 316 on wastegate studs. Both with nordlocks and resbond thread locker. I did have a spare manifold, hot side and wastegate bolted together with all inconel studs just in case.

We were also able to run 2 full hours on the new gas tank without having to go easy on the throttle. I don’t know the limit yet. Before we could get about 15 minutes less.
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Awesome result despite the finishing position (which doesn't matter). Coming out of a race with a good-running, non-broken car was always a great feeling.

Why were you slow in the rain...visibility issues due to wipers, or something else like tire/suspension performance in the bad conditions? I drove Sonoma in the original death cab v8 244 (under new ownership in 2011), and it felt like it had major toe-out, and it had no wipers at all, and it rained all day Saturday. Pretty pretty prettttttty terrible to drive and quite slow...could only run hard about 3/4 of the straight because you couldn't see and had to slow down just in case.
 
towerymt said:
Awesome result despite the finishing position (which doesn't matter). Coming out of a race with a good-running, non-broken car was always a great feeling.

Why were you slow in the rain...visibility issues due to wipers, or something else like tire/suspension performance in the bad conditions? I drove Sonoma in the original death cab v8 244 (under new ownership in 2011), and it felt like it had major toe-out, and it had no wipers at all, and it rained all day Saturday. Pretty pretty prettttttty terrible to drive and quite slow...could only run hard about 3/4 of the straight because you couldn't see and had to slow down just in case.
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My car is very tail happy in the rain. My first driver was very cautious, my second driver was new to the track. It was pretty good for the third and fourth drivers on Saturday. The RS4s on the car had already seen a weekend in the rain last year, plus a Buttonwillow race. We flipped them inside out to even the wear, but I never felt very confident in them. I debated on some 300TW tires for the rain, but didn't pull the trigger on a set.
Wipers worked great, no real visibility issues.

We also felt like we never got into a groove where you have a bunch of laps with good lap times. We would get a good lap or two then get stuck in a pack. Some of the A class cars were really aggressive and they didn't need to be. See exhibit A below. Cerveza racing ran a clean race and took overall. See Exhibit B.

We are happy with the overall result, but disappointed in our three black flags. It is nice not having anything major broken at the end of the race. I wish my new shifter had arrived.

Exhibit A:
Exhibit B: https://www.youtube.com/live/0YITc74RsmM?si=nLbwDqtfg4S94YpU&t=21123
 
haha, exhibit A, starting at 3:45 mark...the throttle blip at 3:58 mark, what are you trying to do????? Those cars occasionally do well cause they're fast, but so often it ends with black flags or offs.

I think Cerveza did a 1 stop strategy on the Saturday in the rain when I did that race, and they were in the lead. They've been doing this a while now...pretty good at it, too.
 
towerymt said:
haha, exhibit A, starting at 3:45 mark...the throttle blip at 3:58 mark, what are you trying to do????? Those cars occasionally do well cause they're fast, but so often it ends with black flags or offs.
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It's pretty obvious the guy doesn't care about the car or the others in the race, he also had Randy Pobst on his team, so maybe he was trying to prove something. There seemed to be a few BMWs and Miatas driving that way.

Anyways, when I saw Cerveza in my mirror, they got a wave by. When I saw an exhibit A team, they had to figure out how to get around me.
 
When I put the 20 gallon tank in, I lost my fuel gauge. I no longer have any Volvo gauges, so I decided to use a Arduino to measure the fuel levels. I also thought it would be convenient to add the measurements to the canbus so that my Racecapture device could log and transmit the levels to the cloud. I also wanted to see if LoRa could be reliable, so I also broadcast the fuel level over LoRa to a receiver arduino.

This solution worked really well during our race. It counts down from ~18 usable gallons to zero. We had a pretty good idea +/- a gallon of how much fuel we needed during our fuel stops. LoRa worked fairly regularly. It was set to transmit every 15 seconds, and I think the longest we would go without an update in the garage was 45 seconds. If anyone is interested in the boards we used or the sketches, I can post.
 

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Car has been in storage until last weekend. I took it to Racer Mo's for him to work on over the Summer. We are going to add BMW MK60 ABS, reroute the oil lines to the remote filter and oil cooler, add SerialNine CD009 shifter, and some other miscellaneous stuff. Next race is Buttonwillow in September.

I also have been playing with Arduino for gauges and lights. I created a Microsquirt can bus emulator to test with racecapture and other can bus arduinos. Also created some shift lights using Neopixles. Pretty easy to do, even for a non programmer once you figure out how. If anyone is interested, here is the Github for it.

github.com

GitHub - rb92673/racecar

Contribute to rb92673/racecar development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com
 
After 3 races with the Porterfield R4-Es my rear calipers looked like this.
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I guess I should have changed them sooner. I found Raybestos ST-43s so I will be switching back. Those seem to last about 6 races.
 
Excellent to see some information about the various brake compounds. We recently ran with the R4Es for our first time and were happy to see them last an entire 24 hour race. We are in discussion about racing a California race in 2024. Either Buttonwillow or Sonoma in November...
 
qwkswede said:
Excellent to see some information about the various brake compounds. We recently ran with the R4Es for our first time and were happy to see them last an entire 24 hour race. We are in discussion about racing a California race in 2024. Either Buttonwillow or Sonoma in November...
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I will be at both races. That is a long pull for you. Sonoma is an amazing track, has lots of places to stay and eat, but is super aggressive and usually rains. Buttonwillow is a fun track but is in the middle of nowhere and super hot.
 
We raced 24 HoL Buttonwillow in September. It was hot. We were doing pretty good, up to about 15th overall after 6 hours on day 1 when I got in the car. About 15 minutes in I was getting a flicker at the end of straights on the oil light, came in and added some oil. Got back on track and a few laps later car felt like it was missing badly at lower RPMs but felt okay at top end. Brought it in, and started trouble shooting. No compression cylinders 2 & 3.
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I pulled a spare head and gasket out of the trailer and we got to work. We had been boosting a bit more than normal and it was hot, later saw intake air temps were in the 150F range. Perhaps we were pinging and we didn't know it and blew the gasket. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Lost about 1:45 of track time on day one. Had the engine back together by midnight, but couldn't get the waterpump to seal. In the morning I pulled a new pump and gasket out of the trailer and also applied blue gasket maker to everything. Problem solved. I think we spent more time on the water pump than the head gasket.

We also disconnected the wastegate arm on the turbo to make sure we would get through day 2.

Made the green flag in the morning and made it through the day with no drama. Car was running good, but slow. At the end of the race we were flagged to park near where the awards would be held. Even though we were out of the race for almost 2 hours, we placed 34 out of 93 and 13th in class. The judges awarded us with the 'Dirty Butt' award. The rear end of the car was covered in oil and dirt. We have a leak somewhere.

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The car has had a clunk in the front end for a few races now and we tore apart the front suspension trying to find it unsuccessfully. Since we were leaking a lot of oil, we decided to pull the engine last weekend to replace the rear main seal and search for leaks.

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We pressure washed a large amount of gunk out of the engine bay and engine/trans. Then we found the front crossmember was cracked, I bet that is where the clunk came from.
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Since the engine was out, the oil pan had a huge divot in it, and the oil pan gasket was suspect, we pulled the oil pan. How was this not leaking. Maybe it was.
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Decided to check a rod bearing just to be safe.
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A little bit of wear...send it. I figure there is about 7k miles on this engine since we rebuilt it.

We should have a new crossmember in a few days and will put it back together for our next race at Sonoma November 23rd. If anyone has any crossmember reinforcement suggestions let me know. We have the 960 brackets we are going to try and fit.
 
I should also mention we installed a Serial 9 shifter and BMW MK60 ABS for Buttonwillow. Both worked great. The ABS is probably the best upgrade we have done in a while.
 
yobrojulian on IG recently braced and plated his crossmember. He does drifting and it might be a good example of what to do for bracing especially if you do a lot of hard braking and curb jumping
 
Awesome Stories.
Our Volvo team is discussing racing in California for 2025. One of our team mates lives in San Luis Obispo. We want to ship the car out there and try to make 1 or 2 of the races on the California series next year. Especially attractive to race in the winter when we need a vacation from heavy Colorado Snow.
 
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