Build Thread 84ttop: I Suck At Updating This Thread...

Ok, so here goes the story of this weekend...

Things started out great! We had the car hooking and were close to making full hits under power on the Gen 1 M/T 275 radial. The car made a few passes on Thursday that looked really promising, carrying the wheels out almost 300 feet on one hit. This is about where everything started to fade on us...
Friday morning was a new day, things were looking up. We had a great breakfast at the track and the car was ready to go. We bring the car around for the first hit, put it in the beams and annihilate the tires 40' out. The car hooks off the hit and proceeded to blow the tires off just shy of a second out. No biggie, a shock adjustment should take care of this. We make a change to the chassis setup and bring the car right back around for a hot lap. Again, put it in the beams let it all hang out and watch the car put down the track in second gear ... Waiting on Kris to bring the car back around and he doesn't show up... This is when I jump on the golf cart and ride to the end of the track to see what's up. "The only gear we have left is Park" muttered Kris . I head back to get a tow strap and while he gets on the phone with our trans guy (we intended to replace the trans at the track at this point). This is about when @TOOLOW91 calls me to let me know the cavalry was at the track, I probably sounded like a sobbing widow that just lost her husband or something... boy was I disappointed. I get the tow strap and head back to the top of the track, now we can't get the car out of park to tow it... We look under the car and the linkage isn't moving, is it a broken cable? Nope... the damn shifter broke, yeah I know what you're thinking right now "How does a shifter break?" we were thinking the same thing. We get out some McGyver tools to pop in in neutral and tow it back to the pits. 30 minutes later we manage to fix a stripped pin in the shifter gate and are back in business. Just as we are getting ready to pull around for the last test hit before qualifying we hear "Lanes are now closed for testing" FML....FML... Now we have to wait to finish testing during first round of qualifying. While we are waiting @srtthis shows up with some corn on the cob and we proceed to eat smoked chicken wings and smoked corn on the cobb. It wasn't until 11:00pm that we were call up for our first qualifier. As we are standing in the lanes we watched 9 out of every 10 cars spin off the hit and didn't have the warm and fuzzy about the radial track prep. Sure enough, we went out about 40' again and blew the tires off.
Wait wait wait... I missed something important here. So after messing with the shifter we must have knocked a wire loose or chaffed a wire on the line lock, this arc'd and shorted out a portion of my one relay board in the car. When going to leave for the lanes we had no transbrake (for reverse) and scrambled to find some mini fuses to get things working again. I thought that was the end of this.
Saturday morning comes and I wanted to check over a few electrical things after last nights mishap. I test a few things and find the circuit for our ramp retard had a blown fuse, I'm sure this is the cause for the lack of traction as we were applying more power than we should be off the hit. Problem solved! I replace the fuse and arm the system to test things. I flip the switch and the entire car promptly shorts out.... No XFI, No MSD, No digital dash, No gauges, Won't Crank.... NOTHING! This is a FML moment at it's worst. We trace the wiring and finally find one of the 12v pathways in a printed circuit board under the dash has burned up. I wire around it and we are back in business, what else could go wrong? Why did I just say that... WHY??? After this debacle we were able to meet up with Marc Menscer who built the new shocks on my car. He reviewed some video that we had and gave us a chassis setup to help with the wheel spin down track. This is a busy dude and I can't believe we were able to get a word in with him let alone some seriously personal attention. Felling good about this next pass, we drive up to the line and get ready for today's first hit (second qualifier). Burnout goes great, stage the car and light the first bulb no problem. Then, from the crowd behind me we hear "SHUT IT OFF, SHUT IT OFF" so we do. I see a dinner plate size puddle under the front of the car and we push it back. It looks like condensation for a catch can maybe so we start the car up and see somersetting still leaking, we open the hood to find 100 lbs of fuel pressure (alcohol) spraying out the front of the fuel rail about 2"s away from the drivers side header. Are you kidding me??? NO, not at all. While the track was clueless to what they almost just let us go down the tack with, the fans behind us saved the day. While I was pretty disappointed that we had to pass up the 2nd qualifier there is no doubt in my mind that the car would have caught fire going down the track with as much fuel was spraying under the hood. After towing the car back we needed a game plan to fix this thing. We took the car apart and found the front of the fuel rail was about .025 out of square and the oring pushed out of the fitting in the front of the rail. We tried replacing the oring but had no luck sealing it and I didn't want to take any chances. We hoped on the golf cart and were off to look for help. I stopped over to see our friend Frank Solridge as I know they keep a Tig welder on the trailer, just so happens they didn't have the adapter to plug it into their generator. They sent us down to Bruder Brothers pit and much to our surprise Rich Bruder stopped what he was doing ( they qualified #1 in X275 this weekend so you can imagine how busy they were) and welded my fuel rail up in their trailer. I had to force him to take a few dollars for helping me out, maybe a case of beer he could buy with what he would take. These are the most stand up dudes in racing, I'm nobody to them and they offered to bail us out no questions asked! Car is fixed at this point and ready for our last round, this doesn't happen until almost midnight. That round went like the first round and we got the car to go 20' under power before blowing the tires off. All in all, our performance on the track was less than stellar, we did learn a few things and were able to overcome quite a few obstacles all of which will help us be better prepared for our next outing. Big thanks to @TOOLOW91 for pitching in this weekend and hanging out! @srtthis thanks for hooking us up with Marc, lending your insight and providing some grub. I can't wait to see both of you back at the track!

Next update will be about the food but my finners be tired