Quote:
Originally Posted by thstone
Its been a busy week at work so I am just getting around to posting the results from last weekends racing at Buttonwillow.
Race 1: Started 5th of 10, finished 10th.
Race 2: Started 6th of 9, finished 5th.
Running CCW was a new configuration for me so I attended the Friday practice day and did five 30-min sessions to learn the track and get up to racing speeds. In qualifying for Race 1, the top three cars were 1-2 sec's ahead of 4th-6th so there was a fairly big gap.
The start was crazy with one car being pushed off track into the dirt as the field went 4 wide into Turn 1 which is really only two cars wide. Shortly thereafter, one of the cars in the top 3 went off and I moved up to 4th.
I was running well and making gains until I carried just a little too much speed over Phil Hill which is a combination hill and turn. As I crested the peak, the rear end got loose and I spun into the dirt. Speaking of which, Buttonwillow is in the middle of California Central Valley farmland so the dirt isn't really dirt; its more like silt and when someone goes off, it creates a YUUUGE cloud and the silt goes everywhere. I mean everywhere. It took several moments after I came to a stop for the cloud inside the car to clear and then I had slit in my eyes and mouth for the rest of the race. The car was covered and I spent 30 mins cleaning it as best I could after the race. The video should be fairly exciting to watch!
The second race went much smoother; everyone was more cautious at the start and the pace quickly got into a rhythm. Unfortunately, I accidentally turned my video camera off (I'll blame it on my gloved hands) when I was resetting my lap timer, so there isn't any video of this race.
At the end of the first race, I heard the distinct growling sound of a dry wheel bearing at every left hand turn during the cool down lap. On the advice of Brad Roberts, I went ahead and raced the second race but by then it sounded much worse so I decided not to press my luck and headed home on Saturday night rather than take the chance of a wheel bearing failure and having to ride home in a tow truck on Sunday.
I went ahead and installed new brakes this weekend and the car goes to Tyson Schmidt at Pro Motorsports in Burbank tomorrow for a new wheel bearing and some other work.
Overall, I had a good pair of races and am looking forward to the next round at Willow Springs in early December.
Pics and video to come soon....
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Tom,
You are so right about the "dirt"
I just got back from running the weekend CW at Buttonwillow. One of my buddies spun out exiting Bus Stop and the car and driver wee covered is a brown dust. He could not see out the windshield and hi wipers were broken, so one of the corner workers wiped it off so he could see.
In the sprint race on Sat in the same spot a car went off and straight back on further in the turn and pushed 2 cars off. This created a huge cloud and it was amazing that no others cars made contact. As the cloud was clearing, 7 or 8 cars, mostly SPB out of the cloud and back on the track.