crash
04-11-2011, 10:04 AM
Well, it was a bit of a tough weekend for the FFR cars. I'll leave Karen's challanges for her to post, but will say that the FFR Coupe was going real good for most of the race. Unfortunately, I got to see the tail lights of the Coupe after it passed me during the race many more times than I would have liked!
The FFR PDG GTM had an issue with gear selection that I believe either was due to linkage issues on the car side of things, or something in the box that wasn't caught when the PDG team inspected the inards after the 25 Hour incident. Gears themselves were fine, but I just couldn't get the gears to stay engaged on the down shifts and the box started doing some pretty bad sounding things, so after coming in and spending about 8 minutes in the cold pits trying to get the linkage changed to see if there was any improvement, which there wasn't, we decided to just get it into a gear and keep making laps to get as many points as possible.
Really frustrating, and the only gear the box wanted to stay in consistently was 5th, so that was the gear used for about 2.5 hours!...non-stop. I was hoping to be able to stay in 4th, but that didn't happen. Was doing low 2 minute laps, but with Troy in the truck turning about 5-6 seconds a lap or more faster than us, we just couldn't keep up, even with the increased fuel milage and no need to stop for the entire three hours for fuel.
On the plus side, I got to drive the track with NO horsepower, and learned a couple things...from the Miatas! I poked around behind a couple of them for a few laps while they showed me how they maximized rolling through the corners, and this actually helped considerably in getting the lap times to where they were. Not exactly what we had planned for me to be doing, but sometimes you have to adjust and "go with the flow".
Engine ran better than ever, and brakes, tires, aero were all good. New body looked good and worked even better...Thanks Dave Smith and FFR!
Ended up 4th in class and now about 20 points out of the lead for first place.
Thanks to all that came out to help/support Team PDG. It was a pleasure meeting you and I'm sorry the show wasn't better, but this is how racing goes. It doesn't take much to turn a good weekend into a mediocre one or worse.
The event was still fun, and a learning experience, so not a complete waste by any means. Hopefully we'll have better luck next time, and...
SEE YOU AT THE RACES!!
The FFR PDG GTM had an issue with gear selection that I believe either was due to linkage issues on the car side of things, or something in the box that wasn't caught when the PDG team inspected the inards after the 25 Hour incident. Gears themselves were fine, but I just couldn't get the gears to stay engaged on the down shifts and the box started doing some pretty bad sounding things, so after coming in and spending about 8 minutes in the cold pits trying to get the linkage changed to see if there was any improvement, which there wasn't, we decided to just get it into a gear and keep making laps to get as many points as possible.
Really frustrating, and the only gear the box wanted to stay in consistently was 5th, so that was the gear used for about 2.5 hours!...non-stop. I was hoping to be able to stay in 4th, but that didn't happen. Was doing low 2 minute laps, but with Troy in the truck turning about 5-6 seconds a lap or more faster than us, we just couldn't keep up, even with the increased fuel milage and no need to stop for the entire three hours for fuel.
On the plus side, I got to drive the track with NO horsepower, and learned a couple things...from the Miatas! I poked around behind a couple of them for a few laps while they showed me how they maximized rolling through the corners, and this actually helped considerably in getting the lap times to where they were. Not exactly what we had planned for me to be doing, but sometimes you have to adjust and "go with the flow".
Engine ran better than ever, and brakes, tires, aero were all good. New body looked good and worked even better...Thanks Dave Smith and FFR!
Ended up 4th in class and now about 20 points out of the lead for first place.
Thanks to all that came out to help/support Team PDG. It was a pleasure meeting you and I'm sorry the show wasn't better, but this is how racing goes. It doesn't take much to turn a good weekend into a mediocre one or worse.
The event was still fun, and a learning experience, so not a complete waste by any means. Hopefully we'll have better luck next time, and...
SEE YOU AT THE RACES!!