Anyone going to Chump 24-hours at VIR Grand West on 8/11-12?

Scott Lusted · **Joined:** Tue Oct 27, 2009 9:52 am **Posts:** 215

Our group will be there as well. Looking forward to running grand!!!

JamesMilko · **Posted:** Fri Jun 22, 2012 4:08 pm

With those fancy spark plugs it should be good for the gold.

I'd be willing to drive someone car if they'd tolerate me. It all depends on the sale of Charlie's ride goes.

Roger McDaniels · **Posted:** Fri Jun 22, 2012 4:17 pm

What we really need is some new shocks; ours are pretty much gone at this point. I'm also thinking that I need to get some softer springs so it doesn't beat the new shocks to death prematurely.

Kevin Harvey · **Posted:** Sun Jun 24, 2012 2:41 pm

We will be there with our car lot: Milf Lite (Enterprise), S&S Truck, Supra, Integra, 4 seat Wagon, etc.

steve remchak · **Posted:** Sun Jun 24, 2012 3:12 pm

Kevin Harvey wrote:

We will be there with our car lot: Milf Lite (Enterprise), S&S Truck, Supra, Integra, 4 seat Wagon, etc.

Integra?

Kevin Harvey · **Posted:** Sun Jun 24, 2012 4:55 pm

I think it is an Integra. Jim bought a car for DEs, threw a bunch of parts at it, and wants to shake it down during the 24. I imagine it will be in the exhibition class. Or given ten billion penalty laps like the rest of our cars.

Roger McDaniels · **Posted:** Sun Aug 12, 2012 6:20 pm

Bernie Baake wrote:

Roger, I know I'm old and all but I believe your arse will get flat wore out if you only have four drivers for the 24hrs. If I were to do it again I'd have six drivers bare minimum.

You were correct, we decided to do the whole thing with just the four of us and I barely had the energy to drive home to Raleigh. It didn't help that the trailer wheel bearings failed on the way so we ended up having to drive the race car home while I followed in the bus. We may have to recruit a couple extras if we do that again.

That said, we had a blast, got to drive VIR at night with no forward-facing lights, and only had 1.5 hours of downtime (had to replace a head gasket and put some lights that faced forward on the car). It was nice to see Simon Says win it with clean, fast driving and good strategy.

Marty Howard · **Posted:** Sun Aug 12, 2012 7:02 pm

Congrats to Simon Says. Overall THSCC had a good showing.

JohnByers · **Posted:** Sun Aug 12, 2012 7:34 pm

Congrats Simon Says!

Kevin Harvey · **Posted:** Sun Aug 12, 2012 11:07 pm

Congrats to the Simon team. Great effort!

MikeWhitney · **Joined:** Wed Aug 20, 2003 9:15 pm **Posts:** 4724

Thanks guys for the congrats! Honestly I'm still a little in shock that we actually won. During tech we conceded that there were a ton of clearly superior cars than us that would easily beat us if driven well. And the results for most of the race were like that ... some competitor would be 5+ seconds a lap faster, be closing the gap to us, then break, crash, or penalty out. So luck was definitely on our side!

I'm amazed that we managed to keep the car (mostly) on the track and clean for the whole race. Rob got hit in the right rear corner once, other than that I think we escaped all the idiocy that occurred overnight. I have never seen so much insane aggressive driving before. It was kind of comical to watch the carnage and people crashing out all around. Since we were doing well we just tried to steer clear of the zombies that came out at night.

We had 2 unscheduled stops. 1 for a couple of flat spotted .... wait, a better term would be "flat corded" tires, and one for a speedo cable that popped loose on the last stint (yes, P75 ECU requires speedo input, else baaaad things happen). Maybe 6-7 minutes of downtime for those little issues. Otherwise our pit stops went great right at 5min...

Best race of my 13+ years in amateur motorsports so far. Big thanks to Cody, Chad, and Andrew for coming out to crew for us! Sorry to see Magnum in the wall, I was out and saw the ambulance assisting and had a pit in my stomach that someone was hurt. Glad Chris was A-ok! We had fun racing with Sri, and Blitzen, and whoever was in the white Fiero at night (very good driver). I won't mention the half dozen teams whose driving I had issues with (Rbank, mealtime, hong norrth ... oops) at night

Stephen Westerfield · **Posted:** Mon Aug 13, 2012 7:52 am

Congrats to Simon, great race guys. I'll also second Mike on the "insane aggressive" driving. I'm trying to remember if there was a THSCC car out there that didn't have contact. I don't think it was any of our teams that initiated it either. As Mike stated, Chris Brown was driving our car and got punted into the armco about 5 and a half hours in. When he radioed in we feared the worst but it actually ended up being fixable and Chris was ok. A new radiator, some massaged sheet metal, a close enough paddock alignment, and three hours later we made it back on track.....but not for long. We ended up parking the car due to what we think is really leaky cam seals in an effort to preserve our new to us motor.

Kevin Harvey · **Posted:** Mon Aug 13, 2012 8:01 am

We missed all of the idiocy in the middle of the night. Our cars were parked from about 9pm until about 7am.

What exactly were people doing?

JamesMilko · **Posted:** Mon Aug 13, 2012 8:03 am

We had a great race as well. We knew we weren't in it to come anywhere near winning since we were sitting out 10a-4a. We ended up running until about 9:30p Saturday and starting up again around 5:30 Sunday morning.

Luckily we missed the whole aggressive driving period as we went out right before the come to Jesus meeting and got held at the track entrance until after it ended.

We only got hit twice. One time ended in a spin on the front straight. I'm still trying to work out the mental gymnastics that Cumpcar used to not sit a driver out for the remainder of the race that spun the car in front of them on the front straight. The other impact was a Miata and me bumping together in south bend when he either didn't realize I was next to him or just didn't care and tried to apex my hood. I believe Kent was right behind me for that one.

The front spin cost us about 30 minutes and made us remove the crash support on the front bumped. Unfortunately that was also the mount point for two of our lights. We ended up reworking the mounting during the safety break.

Roger McDaniels · **Posted:** Mon Aug 13, 2012 8:57 am

I don't think that we got hit; at least nobody said anything about it. It's really hard to tell by looking at the car. I saw a lot of aggressive driving out there, mostly faster cars hitting slower cars during passing, or ill-advised passing attempts that could only end off-track. There were also the usual incidents from poor situational awareness, but I didn't see any infraction enforcement until after they stopped us all around dawn to gripe at us about the results of not enforcing infractions.

The night sessions were interesting, I had never driven at night before and had poor lighting, so I was going very slow, but I only had really scramble to keep from getting hit once. I mostly tried to stay out of people's way until my second night session when we had installed some more lights.

The best was our first lap in the dark (for the car and for any of our drivers), and I couldn't see anything in front of me (headlight aiming problem), so I settled in behind a Miata and just followed it around. There weren't any other cars around, just the two of us, and he flew right past the Bitch without slowing. I was thinking that something wasn't right about the time that I saw the orange and white barricades in front of us that prevented us from going all the way through to Roller Coaster.

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Anyone going to Chump 24-hours at VIR Grand West on 8/11-12?

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