Whatever_Racecar Endurance 745T

[rb92673]

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.

 

[rb92673]

I think I got all the life I could out of these pads.

Maybe I could have got 10 minutes more.

 

[rb92673]

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.

 

[okoye]

This thread needs more pictures and video! cool to see a 7 being built and raced.

 

[rb92673]

This thread needs more pictures and video! cool to see a 7 being built and raced.

I will be putting together a video for youtube this week.

 

[towerymt]

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.

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.

 

[rb92673]

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.

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

 

[towerymt]

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.

 

[rb92673]

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.

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.

 

[rb92673]

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.