ChumpCar Racing

[Shane@DBPerformance]

We broke on Saturday, passenger side front wheel hub/axle sheared off. The only thing left holding the wheel on was the brake caliper around the rotor. We quickly found out early on Sat morning that we had no chance of getting a podium finish due to our fuel consumption and small gas tank. If we ran at normal power levels we would have to pit for fuel 2 times more than the teams that would end up winning, which would cost us at least 11 minutes of track time. Two of the guys drove back to the cities to get parts to fix the car and we got it back running.

On Sunday we tried turning the boost down to save gas. I didn't get to drive on Saturday due to the failure, so I went out first in the morning, after maybe 40 minutes the car started overheating. It wouldn't totally go out of control, but it wasn't good, so I babied it until I starting sputtering from lack of fuel and brought it in. We kept going the whole day, if we kept the RPMs under 5500 or just went 50% throttle we could keep the temps from going out of control. With us babying the car and running slower times, we were able to run pit one less time and get it down to only 1 too many pits. We ended up 6th with 199 laps, shake and bake was 3rd with 200 laps, so things are very tight out there. I did a 360 coming into the carousel in the morning on Sunday, lost a little time waiting for a clear spot to get back on the track. A couple laps later another car did the same thing right in front of me in the same spot. Had a couple minor off track excursions, that only cost a couple seconds and passed a car in heavy traffic with all 4 wheels off the track between turns 5 and 6. I drove the last stint on Sunday and mostly just fell in behind other decently fast cars and just followed them to keep the car from overheating and finish the race, by then the tires were getting pretty bad and I would see chunks fly off the front drivers side in turn #2 at around 105 mph.

It's likely that we will dump the turbo setup for the Chumpionship in Iowa, because every time you pit there is 6-10 laps lost. Iowa is wheel bearing/hub killer on Hondas too, we destroyed two of them at the last race and the hub failure we had at BIR also happened to another Honda at Iowa, guess they weren't actually built to do high speed cornering.