Video from Arse-Sweat June 2012 - 24hr @ Buttonwillow

Finally I have compressed and uploaded one of the videos from our last race. It was the best one that we had. It is of my teammate Justin driving from daylight into the night at the Full 24 hour race - Arse-Sweat-Apalooza @ Buttonwillow raceway June 2012.

It is about an hour long, sorry I did not take the time to trim it down. Enjoy!



(if you are on a mobile device and can not see the video go to the bottom of the page and click "View Web Version")

Safety Upgrades - 10/13/2012

With the ever evolving safety rules in LeMons racing and a few major crashes that occurred this year leading to "Proper Enforcement" of the rules; we had to make some upgrades.

While reading over the LeMons forums I found a thread about cars that failed tech at recent races that had passed earlier in the year. They are failing as a reaction of stiffer rules due to crashes this year since our last race. Though safety is a good thing, it would have been very annoying to show up at our next race thinking we are set for the same 2012 rules from our last two races this year. There was no notification from the LeMons organization about this, so lucky for me I read the forums often. Anyways.. I sent the Evil One (John the head safety tech in LeMons) some pics and asked about it, he replied,

I would prefer to see square tubing or angle iron over the perforated shelving angle that you have in there.
In a 70 mph collision that cell will exert somewhere around 4000 lbs of force on the metal you have there.... Is it ready for that?

If you can flex the top of that seat backwards, it will fail. Grab it and put back, if it gives much, it'll need to be braced. Most single shoulder harness hole seats fail this test.

Um no... our fuel mounting is not ready for that. The first upgrade was bracing for the Fuel Cell so we don't catch fire when the Spitwad gets punted by some knucklehead who came in too hot sending us rolling end over end through the dirt. Seen bellow, it is simply an angle iron halo around the top of the cell that is braced to the vehicle. I have to admit when I took the cell out and looked at our original mounting I did not feel so good about it. I feel better about it now.



The second was the need to brace the head rest of the racing seat if it flexes, so I grabbed it and pulled and yes ours does give, so we needed a brace. I guess in an accident someones head rest folded back at a 90 degree angle which is probably not so good for the neck. Some teams made some fancy braces but I just kindly asked my pops to weld up a pipe behind the headrest which does the trick.



Good thing my pops had a windshield being installed on the RX7 and was available to help. I can't fabricate or weld worth a damn and my other teammate was just returning from a work trip and was out of commission.

After this work was finished I found myself thinking more about safety. A complete rookie to car racing is racing the Spitfire soon and she needs to be safe. Time to reinspect the 5 point harness mounts, the seat mounts, put larger washers on the fuel cell straps, and go over the car and tighten things down. Then maybe I can move on to the fun stuff like the shocks and the shift light. Oh and I need to finish mounting the windshield mesh.



There is always more work to be done, parts to order, and oh yeah GoPro HD Hero 2s have gone on sale $199.99 for the outdoor bundle. Gotta get me one of those so we can get video from both cars!

Work Days 10/5 and 10/6

So my Pops helped me get the tow hook ups done on the truck and I took it for a test town run. It tows pretty well and should get the Spitwad to a few races.

My friend and teammate, Justin, came over and helped me out. We got the oil cooler back on and ran the motor a bit to get the cobwebs out. This will be the 5th race on this motor. It just keeps running, and I hope it will for another race weekend.



We then got the new mesh windscreen built and opened up the motor that failed at the 24 hour race. The fly wheel mounting bolts sheared right off. The motor it still good but it will take some work to get this back in running shape. So we will have to bring one of our other motors as a spare for the December race.