Anyone from here go to race weekend before last? It was a really great weekend if you missed it. For three events we've been trying to track down a really weird issue where the car will run fantastic for a few laps and then starts to sputter. So I go out to qualify Saturday morning and after my two warmup laps I'm about to set a qualifying lap and the car sputters, ugh. Go back to the pits but there's not enough time to go out and qualify the rental car I brought as a backup. (The guy who runs my car has a second Juno he uses for rentals that we brought just in case)

So, Saturday race #1 I have to start at the back since I didn't qualify, and I'm in the 250 HP car, meaning qualifying is that much more important since the big HP cars are very difficult to pass. I worked my way up to 8th by the end of the race though, so race #2 I start in eighth. In that race I believe I ended up fourth. This is only the second time I had driven the car and I got my lap times down to 2:16's so I was happy with that.

Sunday I qualified fifth and ended up finishing in third, it was an hour long race but I was not too happy with the format of it because it was split 30 minute segments, so whatever lead you build up in the first half hour is wiped out by the restart, which means the Porsche cup cars and Ferrari's that I have to work for several laps to pass end up blowing by me on the restart again. I think I would have been able to take second if it was a real hour-long race. Of course I would not have really been able to because I ran out of gas on the final lap and coasted across the finish line. We underestimated how much fuel I'd need to finish. I did get my time down to 2:14 though so I was happy. In some ways fighting the other cars was a lot of fun, it was a good change of pace from my normal car where I am typically just fighting the clock trying to break a two minute lap.

Oh yeah, in the mean time while all the racing is going on, we were tearing my car apart to find more things that could be the issue. Between April and now some battery cabling had been replaced, battery replaced, alternator replaced, kill switch replaced, all six ignition coil packs replaced, pulled the oil pressure sensor lead since low oil pressure can cause the kind of cut out I was experiencing, re-routed some of the cabling, so on and so forth. Finally, someone noticed on the data that the car's oil temp was varying by more than 40 degrees celsius low to high over the course of each lap, which is physically impossible since there's no way the oil can cool off and heat back up by that much on a hot lap; pulling up old data to confirm, normally the oil temp varies by no more than three to four degrees over the course of a lap. So we pull the plug on the oil temp sensor, PBOC lets me go out in the last student group of the day and the car is back to normal, I did nine or ten laps without issue. So, new oil temp sensor is on the way; evidently the engine computer was cutting ignition when the temp went beyond a cut off point.

Crew and umbrella FTW!









Out of gas 50 feet past the finish line LOL

 

Sounds like you had a great weekend. Beautiful car!

 

I was the guy right next to you in the homoslow miata. glad you at least had a backup car to race and got it figured out (even if it was before the last session sunday).

 

Oh cool, are you from Vortex? Yeah I was really happy to find that temp sensor bad, I've been really getting frustrated month after month trying to find an issue that can only be reproduced with actual track driving, makes it difficult to diagnose in the garage.

 

Yeah my father and I run with vortex. We rent out a few different cars and provide instruction, trailering, and track support.

glad to see you finally got it figured out thugh. I definitely understand as I had an overheating issue that could only be replicated on track and I spent 5 weekends trying to diagnose it.

 

2:14? You must've run the club circuit.

Seriously, 2:14 is cookin'. Congrats. Is that the SSE model?

 

2:14 not so hot, my coach has done 2:08 in the 250 hp car; it's a four cylinder duratec with paddle shifters although he did the 2:08 on fresh Hancook imsa lites spec tires and we were running fairly old ones for me. In my car I'm down to 2:05 flat, still trying to work towards breaking two minutes, he's done a 1:59 in my car at a Chin event in the pass on the straights group.

 

Didn't know those cars could do 2 minute laps. I've always liked them but they seem to have reliability issues. Is that true? What's the price tag?

 

Compared to other cars that can do two minute laps, they're quite reliable, but any car that can do that kind of lap takes a serious punishment, especially at Sebring, and you either fix when it breaks or you proactively replace parts; I do a combination of both and we're constantly adjusting what we replace and when based on experience. I don't have the budget that an ALMS team has to just replace a ton of parts after each race.

The issues I've had have all been small stupid ones or major ones caused by me. i.e. the problem that has baffled us for the past three events with my car turns out to be a $5 oil temperature sensor, and the last expensive problem was when I missed a shift, chipped a gear which proceeded to destroy all the other gears; that's not necessarily difficult to do when you're running a dog engagement gearbox, you don't clutch and you have 390 HP, so just one of those things that can happen when you're driving a car at that level; one mistake per year means $5k in new gears. Other than stupid things like that, the car is rock solid, nothing like my old Radical where things broke all the time and I went through three engines before selling it.

The 250 HP Juno with paddle shift is $85k, the 390 HP model like mine can get into the $135k+ range. The 250 is really a great deal, the thing has nearly three times the engine rebuild interval as the V6, costs much less to run and in the right hands can do a 2:08, there's really no car that will touch it in both its price to buy and price to run. Makes a good rental car too since the paddle shift won't allow you to overrev the engine. Only downside to it is it doesn't have 390 HP, so although mine costs a lot more to operate, there's just an entirely different rush trying to break two minutes vs trying to break 2:10.

I've just put in an order for paddles for my car, I figured it will prevent me from destroying any more gears and will also let me concentrate on my driving alone rather than thinking about shifting. I'll have it installed before the Sept PBOC race.

 

I'm scared to ask, but how much is the rental for the 250hp car? seems like a good car to rent before stepping up into a professional series.