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The miata (last years reigning champion) lost a motor, we're working overnight to put in a new one so we can stay in the running for points with that car. Karlo Nick and John are busting ass. Nick and I drove to I dont even know what city a few hours out for a head gasket while Joel Karlo and John pulled the motor

I just jumped online to get the software to tune the ECU with Nick...
 
wow, your car is amazing! This thread really motivates me to continue putting more and more into my car. Good luck with the entire season!!!
 
As a fund raiser, you should make shirts available for $10 to $20 over what you paid and offer them to people that want to support your effort. Just a thought.
 
ok peepz, heres some pix from our race weekend..



on the way to Buttonwillow (3-27-09 12:30am)

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arrived @ Buttonwillow by 4:30 am, but waited till the track opens @ 6 am.


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3-27-09 was an open track day and we spent the whole day testing the car at the track.

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RTA SEASON OPENER RESULTS!!!
trophy:
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A pic of the car from the pro photogs at the track:
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First I have to say thank you to a LOT of people: If you helped out and didnt list you, please let me know ASAP I'm tired and very sorry if I forgot something important!! Please guys read through this list because without this list right here none of this would have happened. aSome of them gave so much to this race effort, their schoolwork, wives, kids and jobs suffered. This didnt happen by luck it happened by sheer determination.

Matt Andrews shoes on fire!! talk about a drive! wow I still can't believe my POS went that fast!
KBR Performance my #1 sponsor: For *years* of hard work that resurrected the car when I was ready to give up!
NITTO tires: Alan and the guys over there. Thanks for making such an awesome street class tire 1.28Gs sustained!
Nick Salyer, NS Fab: A good friend and probably the smartest guy I know for the electrical, fab and other work!
LG Motorsports, Jeff, Louis and everyone else thank you for all the support and advice!
Angry Panda Fab: That 100% custom body work, these guys stayed up late nights for like a month! I've gone through a lot of body shops and I'll be holding onto this one!!!
Bret Collmer: A good friend who came through in a pinch and busted out work on that car like nobodies business, bret was with me duking it out for 2 weeks to make this event. Without him and his friend Joel coming through on the last day, we definitely would not have made it. It was too much work for one man I seriously would have lost it without you Bret.
Team NABR: The brotherhood, thank you for everything I've learned.
Wheeldude.com Our wheel sponsor: For awesome customer service
YoshiFab: the chassis was critical, bang up job on the cage!
Robispec: Trackside support and suspension technical!
The guys on DSMTuners: for cheering me on!

in case your wondering, about the buddy club sticker they did not sponsor me directly, they sponsor the whole class so we run their banners on all the street class cars.


The story:


Monday morning I looked in the mirror, for the first time a couple weeks and realized I needed to shave pretty bad but i had gotten all the grease washed off. I had a few patches of hair sticking straight up and realized that I had run out of the sticky goop I put in my hair about a month ago, I should consider purchasing some more. Hoping to have time for that this week, along with a decent meal and sleeping in my own bed! is it worth it? Oh hell yah! I live for this! If I didn't race cars, I wouldn't know who I am.

I arrived at Buttonwillow 5:00pm thurs. Got a chance to catch up on some work and get six whole hours of sleep. Karlo (KBR Performance) and his friend Joel came to help at the race and showed up at 4:30am driving over night from the bay area.

Matt's flight was delayed and had problems with his ride from the airport so he made it in late without getting much sleep (SORRY FOR ACCIDENTALLY CALLING YOU AT 4:30am MATT!)

We got out for some practice runs friday at the speed ventures event, friday, the day before official RTA practice. There were two major problems, the car was intermittently sputtering and it was quickly becoming clear that we had some kind of a cooling system issue. We start fixing things and sending Matt back out. We keep finding small problems (like a bad thermostat) and fixing them but the issues still persist. After some hours and deliberation we try re-torqueing the head studs, and they turn! the studs had stretched or the head had lifted at some point but thinking through events we believe it was some time ago, not any time recently. That or the reuse of the head gasket (that isnt supposed to be reused!) which we did in a bind to make a land speed race a couple years ago. So we decide to leave the car alone for the rest of the day and skip saturday practice to save whatever we have left of the gasket. After some more test driving with nick I finally figure out the sputtering is fuel starvation. My gas gauge wasn't working right and the car is consuming WAY more fuel per lap than I had expected so we were hitting starvation point quickly which was compounded by the DSM pickup location being exactly the opposite of where you need it on a clockwise track. The swirl pot is high on the agenda for next race. This will take a lot of weight out of the car as well since we can run with a lot less fuel.

Saturday practice:

Eclipse is skipping practice day, so we focus on the Miata. Matt comes down the straight then the rear gets all funny and he goes off in the sand in turn 1 and not going anywhere. Man, I hate moments like that, John saw the car lock up the rears and matt corrected but it just shot right off, hes sitting there in the dirt and nobody knows why... your mind starts racing and your hoping he just came in too hot or something but I've never seen him make a mistake like that, somethings wrong and you know it.

The safety car finally brings him back around and we start diagnosing, Matt pulls the data, the car lost oil pressure before the front straight and was on 0 oil pressure all the way down. The rear locked up when the motor started dragging. Matt tried to clutch in and catch it but ended up off in the dirt. Once we saw that data that the oil pressure was gone, I knew there wasnt anything else we could do the motor was toast. Matt looked like he was stressing at this point and we all knew what it means. We can't afford to run more than 4 events. You MUST run 4 events to have a shot at the title. We won last year with the car and have real shot at this year as well. But if we don't race tomorrow, we lose our shot.

We come up with a plan and divide up into teams

Team A: Nick and myself: a quest to locate and retrieve needed parts in stock at any parts store or dealership within a 4 hour radius of where we are
Team B: John, Karlo (KBR Performance) and Joel: start pulling the motor
Team C: Matt: locate and arrange transport for an engine

We call the local parts stores, no good, nobody has a Miata head gasket in stock. Nick and I jump in the Supra and start driving to Bakersfield about an hour away. Nick takes my laptop gets on the internet to start locating and calling parts stores while I'm driving. This fails because we cant get enough sprint internet or mobile phone signal to make progress its crawling and then the connection dies (this place is the middle of nowhere). We get to bakersfield and find an Autozone, Napa and get a Kragen by phone.

side note: Funny story about the autozone. The guy at the counter says "some other racers came in here looking for NSX parts!" I'm guessing not many NSX rolling around this neighborhood (as a tumbleweed blows across the front door of the place, not kidding!). Nick and I look at eachother, thats gotta be Mikey's team (Factor X). "Oh yah, what were they buying?" the guys eyes get big "EEEVVEERRYYYYYTHHIINNGG, they bought almost the whole store" hahahah. That just about made my day

Finally we have luck! The head gasket is in stock another 1.5 hours away at an autozone. Back on the road we pick up the head gasket and get back to the track, the motor is out, new motor is arriving at 7pm with Robispec. We pick the motor up from where robi is eating dinner (picking a long block up out of an EVO X trunk by hand was interesting! How the hell did the robispec guys get that in there!!) and I think it was around 9pm the guys Nick, John, Karlo and Joel start on the long block assembly. There were a lot of difficulties, everyone falls asleep around 2am (I went out at midnight) when the long block is assembled we need to use someone's lift and they are asleep at this point. Around 11pm, Robi and I discussed that we should force matt to go to bed, we need him fresh to drive. Thanks for asserting the authority on that one robi!

Sunday morning comes around, the guys crawl out of bed and nick is all strung out on energy drinks. Karlo pulls the truck and motor over to where the lift was (thanks to the guys at GOTO racing for the lift!). Matt is running behind on getting to the track so I go to the drivers meeting to sit in and wait for him, luckily the meeting started a bit late and he only missed a couple minutes.

Get this, I walk back from the drivers meeting and I kid you not! The MOTOR WAS READY TO FIRE UP. They were just buttoning up a few small details. I dont know what record time is for dropping an engine into a miata but thats got to be up there! I BOW DOWN to the guys for that one WOW! John, Karlo, Nick and Joel, wow!

Matt's car is now running on a bone stock motor so the power is now limited severely 240hp, down about 200 from before.

Time to qualify Eclipse is up first. Karlo and I cross ourselves as the Eclipse pulls away on the outlap. He comes across to start hotlap and people are making comments as the car goes down the straight going VERY fast. Matt says he never even shifts down to 2nd just leaves it in 3rd! We run a qualifying time of 2:05.8 which put us on pole!

The other ex land speed car Lucas Oil Civic driven by Richard Holdener (he writes books on honda engine building) qualifies just a HUNDREDTH behind us. They are looking pretty confident with that too. A little background on those guys they are in the Bonneville 200 club, the car is the "worlds fastest civic" I think it was 207mph they did a couple years back at speedweek. The car was looking good and so was the driver. The times were SO close.

They let the cars go we are out in front of the Honda and once we see Matt getting on it for our single lap of fire I see the gap just growing. My stomach was churning at this point I think I crossed myself a few more times and mutter something bout the head gasket holding together...

We see matt come around and I look at jasons stopwatch as he comes out of the final corner. 1:58 NO WAY
I look confused at jason
NO WAY NO WAY holy $#$#!!! I have to remind jason hes timing haha he looks back triggers late and we get a 2:04 flat. We start jumping around and going crazy yelling and freaking out in pit lane, people were probably wondering what our deal was haha.

Matt's cooling the car down for the inlap its already getting very hot and I jump in to drive back to the pits and I am signaled to go to impound. Thats a VERY good sign. The top 3 times get sent to impound and held, where they check your catalyst temps (street class) and make sure you didn't pull any funny business with the car. My car was personally inspected by someone who i think was pretty high up at redline because apparently there's been a lot of hemming and hawing about the car being "within an inch of every rule". yahhh baby!! Everything was actually well within rule spec and comfortable margin. I read that rule book religiously, no more getting bumped around in classes for me after what happened in land speed! I'm going to be able to recite that rule book pretty soon!

The times get posted and we are WAY out front for 1st in the class, 2:03.8! Next competitor Clint Boisdeau is almost 4 seconds behind. Holdener could not repeat his qualifying time I wonder if they were having some problems with the car. That thing sounds nuts.

Dust and wind start picking up as the day wears on, we need the time to hold. We've run the only lap we got, just a single lap and we need it to hold out all day. I keep praying for track conditions to get bad. Clint is telling me that theres a dark horse out there, the Playstation /Yokohama sponsored Mazda 3 that ran a blistering fast time but is on the list without a driver or class or anything just listed as a number. saying it ran a 2:01 or something but had his run DQd for some reason. This is looming. Clint runs again and I wish him luck (if I could pick someone to lose to it would be Clint, what a great guy he picked up our driver from the airport in an emergency friday night and took him to the track). Let me know if you ever need my help Clint! Clint ended up 3rd.

Heres a little background on that Playstation Mazda. That car is hardened steel and has seen a lot of track time. You can just tell by the way it moves its extremely well refined. Matt tells me that Billy worked with Mazda directly to get that car dialed in and dialed it certainly is! You gotta think we're in street FWD and I was running a time that most of the street RWD field was slower than my FWD eclipse. 7th place on down. So that mazdaspeed's times would have put it in 3rd place for street RWD! and 4th or 5th for S-AWD. Thats unbelievably fast. Look at the pace of development here the top buttonwillow time for my class has now jumped SIX seconds faster than it was at the end of last season. SIX SECONDS!! Their driver is Dino Tadokawa. Its definitely a Japanese name but I don't know if he's american or not.

In the last session of the day the playstation/yokohama mazda manages a stupid fast 2:00.5! wow!!! my hat goes off to them for that run. Unbelivable. If a S-FWD breaks the 2 minute barrier that will be an incredible day. Just in 2006 we won super lap battle in S-RWD with the supra on a 2:02.xx with competition like the Falken tires RX7 arriving in a huge big rig. Time attack is getting very fast! Those RWD cars a bad machines too, corvettes, mustangs, 370Z, Miata, IS300 with 2JZ, RX7, BMW you name it we beat out a lot of cars!

I am back to the drawing board with a lot of work to do, but know this much. We are happy to win second place but we are not resting with that. I get a 3 week much needed break while the body shop finishes up the paint work but after that I'm back in this game and ready to rock so we will be working hard to get the car faster with out sights set on that Mazda I think this is going to be a real battle.

We still got 3rd with the miata in spite of basically no brakes and down 200hp

Here are some pics I took, sorry I didnt have time to take many pics!

the eclipse crew:
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Karlo and John disassembling Matt's longblock

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my internet connection getting stolen so that people can try to keep their jobs happy was a common occurrence in this pit!
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Joel stripping the dead long block
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Nick sorting out some fitment issues transferring stuff to the new motor
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I'll post more pics later when I arrive back home and get a breather!
 
I just wanna say i showed this thread to a friend and he is no longer selling his GS-T spyder LOL. Not that his has anything on you but he didnt believe that FWD vert cars could be good lap cars. I have tried for along time to convience him otherwise and now thanks to you have succeded.
 
Yup there were many DSM haters saying that these cars couldnt handle. Yah we have a few things from the factory that are total crap and have to be sorted out but I believe the potential is there!
 
I was really thinking about switching teams and going with a different platform, but after seeing this I think Im gonna be hanging on to the Ole GS-T for awhile. GREAT JOB! Im very happy for you, there's no telling what this will do for the DSM community. Im really digging that hood btw! (I wonder why you had such a hard time making it fit right, mine wasnt great, but at least the vents are in the center)That DSM looks wicked, all go with just a enough show. It's just awesome to see a Dsm push through to the next level so to say. I can't wait to see where this goes. And again, awesome job and best of luck!
 
moar pix! this one from last Saturday 3-28-09. we did not run the car the whole day since we wanted to save the car for Sunday, despite all the problems that the car encountered, we were still determined to finish the race.. and we did by finishing 2nd place.... not bad for a first time road course competition.

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snowborder714 said:
Wow, do they like photographing at angles.

So many photos that could have been better :toobad:


How much longer until the car's exterior is finished Drew?
Click to expand...

about 2-3 weeks for the paint then vinyl I wont do till the paint cures for a while.

Dallas J said:
Yeah, a few degree's angle for emphasis is good but 45*s is annoying :ohdamn:
Click to expand...

here you go! hahah
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