We continued to try to dial the car in, and actually got it pretty good with our last change after qualifying. Qualifying wasn't so hot at 20th place with something like a 2:19, but Brian never got clean track and we kept stopping to make setup changes. Early in the race he was running 2:14's easily and felt like it was a 2:13 car if you were qualifying it.
One of our changes along the way had been to lower our rear gas pressure to get the rear more compliant. Unfortunately it appears we may have lowered it too far and about 15 laps in they finally cavitated and that contributed to a slide that caused Brian to have to drive off in the field at T10. Our splitter mowed enough grass to completely seal up the radiator, and we were at 255F before we got it stopped and cleaned off.
That doesn't appear to have hurt anything, however, as we got him back going and he was then running 2:16's, then 2:17's and finally 2:18's.
Then he noticed a puff of smoke and soon the steering starting getting difficult. We ended his stint at two hours and fifteen minutes thinking we might be getting low on fuel only to find a) he still had over four gallons left and b) the left front CV boot had torn. We went back to the paddock and put another axle in and sent Don out on track. We didn't have what we needed in the paddock to up those canister pressures (that stuff was in the pit) so we decided to send Don out like it was hoping to catch the lunch caution flag to fix the shocks. That wasn't to be as apparently they decided to only do a dinner caution.
But now the front end alignment was apparently pretty wacked, so the front and the rear of the car were bad. But the power steering had come back initially. Then it went out again part way through his stint. And our brake lights weren't working (which is a requirement). So at the end of Don's two and a half hour stint where the car was so bad he was down to averaging around 2:23 laps, we took it back to the paddock and parked it. Don did have one on track incident with another car that caused some contact in the right front (chipped wheel, small dent in fender) which may have caused another steering problem to start to develop as we now had some strange popping noise as you turned the wheel. Or that might have been why the electric power steering shut itself down, we don't know.
What we did know was our brake light switch was bad and we couldn't find another. Both ends of our car were bad in the handling department. The steering was broken. Time to park it for good before it gets broken bad.
We learned a lot in the process, though. We have a good direction to go on the rear handling. We can fix whatever is wrong with the front. We can fix the steering and brake light thing. We learned how to keep those CV joints from blowing (everything was new under there and it didn't get hit by anything!). And we have a car that if it held together can do this race on four total stops while still averaging 2:15 or so lap times.
Now to get more track time on it to get it where it will last the whole way...
--Donnie
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