7 days before the big race!

[Cobra 61]

The 25 hours of Thunderhill is once again just one week away! The GTM got a new paint job, new motor and gearbox. Crash came down last week and put a new muffler system in place. Jim has been working crazy, getting all the new wiring complete. It is mandatory to have cell phone in the car this year. We have been working hard on cutting down on our pit times, taking driver change advice from Davy, Crash designing tire cones to speed up tire changing, and a new fresh air system as requested by new comer, Steve Lisa. Tis year we will be running on Yokohama race slicks. Earlier testing yielded some good numbers for this race. We are excited to give them Hell! There are 15 cars in our class among 60 entries. Once again, the GTM driver lineup makes the top profile team to watch. this lineup includes Al Unser Jr, Davy Jones, Kurt Bush, Ivan Bellarosa, Dominic Cicero, Paul Edwards, and Anthony Lazzaro.

This year, we are proud to represent the following:

Factory Five Racing
Mendeola Powertrains
MyRaceShop.com
Hooked on Driving
Baja Design
TelTac
Yokohama Tires
America's Tire
Tie Caddy "Plastic Tie Organizer"
RM Contractor and Racing
The Holland Group
Yvonne Migliori
Students at Venture Academy (they worked on a lot of building and signage)
Chase Chevrolet
Auto Industrial Paint
Framier West
Thunderhill Raceway Park

The race will be telecast on Endurance radio starting on Friday and in association will be live streamed so you can watch the race from the comfort of your home!

See you at the races!
Richard
Team Prototype Development Group

[jkrueger]

good luck!

[Fraser D]

Good luck guys!

[Kempo]

Good luck guys!!!

[Kalstar]

Details on new engine set up?

[carbon fiber]

That's an impressive driver list. Good luck!

[crash]

Just to clarify, the list Richard has there are the top names that will be at the event. Our drivers will be...

Davy Jones
Paul Edwards
Steve Lisa
Mike Holland

As Richard mentioned, the race will be radio broadcast live, and possibly live web cast at this site... http://www.speedcasttv.com/nasa/

I don't know for sure if the webcast is a done deal, but there will also be an NBC Sports broadcast sometime in January-February that we will post a link to as soon as we have it.

[claybags]

Quite a line up in the GTM camp!!! Good luck!
Cheers, Jeff

[crash]

Some other notables that will be at this race...

Aaron Pfadt
Mike Skeen
Burt Frisselle
Brian Frisselle
Lance Boicelli
Randy Pobst
Brandon Kraus

[kabacj]

Some other notables that will be at this race...

Aaron Pfadt
Mike Skeen
Burt Frisselle
Brian Frisselle
Lance Boicelli
Randy Pobst
Brandon Kraus

Sounds like fun Crash. Please be sure to post the live video stream as soon as you can. Riding along is awesome. Team thunder valley had a nice ustream one year that was like I was in the car.

Should be a great race. And maybe even nice weather?

[crash]

We are keeping our fingers crossed for no rain, but the weather man seems to be calling for rain on Friday. Qualifying in the rain would be a challenge for everyone. We probably have one of the most capable teams for running in the rain, but all kinds of crap usually happens during qualifying anyway. Add in rain and it could get real ugly.

[kabacj]

We are keeping our fingers crossed for no rain, but the weather man seems to be calling for rain on Friday. Qualifying in the rain would be a challenge for everyone. We probably have one of the most capable teams for running in the rain, but all kinds of crap usually happens during qualifying anyway. Add in rain and it could get real ugly.

Yeah qualifying in the rain is an issue. At least you have many laps in wet slippery conditions to know the best setup if needed.

I think in the past you guys were less focused on putting down a fast qualifying time. Any chance you will show up with a set of super soft rains to grab a front row starting spot?

[crash]

We have at least 5 sets of rain tires for varying conditions all mounted up and ready to go. We are ready for the rain. I can tell you that when it rains the 4 wheel drive Subarus and traction control equipped Porsches are very hard to beat. As of right now the Subarus have not shown up and there is only one Porsche, so things would actually probably be in our favor if it rains. The problem is that everyone goes balls out in qualifying and with 60+ cars some of them usually end up getting totaled in qualifying. It is for this reason that we do not run many laps during qualifying. Rain will only make this situation worse.

[Taz Rules]

Give 'em hell!

Remember, we love racing because sports like baseball, basketball and golf only require one ball!

[crash]

Got this email this AM if anyone is interested...


Attention racers: RacerConnect, our official classifieds partner, will be live video streaming on the web for the NASA 25 Hours of Thunderhill presented by Hawk Performance at Thunderhill Raceway Park December 6th & 7th!

RacerConnect will be providing strategically placed cameras streaming live video to catch the action so family, friends and fans can watch from home.

Planned coverage includes streaming video of the Start/Finish line, pit lane action, a roaming paddock camera and even a couple of IR/NightVision cameras trackside so you can watch the race throughout the night.

Live timing & scoring and an announcer commentary feed will also be available at http://live.racerconnect.com

It is rumored that some of the race teams plan to be streaming in-car video the entire race using RacerConnect's recently announced RaceCast! service.

Please share this info with your teams, friends, and family so they can follow along. If you use our hashtags in your social media posts we will do our best to share all the good stories through our social media. #nasaproracing #nasa25hour

Let’s Go Racing With NASA, Hawk Performance and RacerConnect!

RacerConnect Live! http://live.racerconnect.com
RacerConnect Classifieds http://classifieds.racerconnect.com

See you at the track!

[kabacj]

Awesome info Crash.

Thanks!

[Taz Rules]

Tried logging into the links for streaming (Had to register first, btw)
Live streaming audio is basically inaudible, and the track looks deserted. That can't be right, the cameras must be caught on a freeze frame or something.
Also, live timing and scoring is just a gray screen. Nothing.

Too bad, I wanted to follow this race. This is a disappointment.

Anyone have some live commentary? How is PDG doing?

[RumRunner]

Ash,

Race starts at 11:00am PST. You're still an hour early!

-Michael

[Martin]

Wonder what problems they had early on. Midnight here in the UK, and they are 50th (50 laps behind), but capable of running times to put them in the top 6 overall.

Doesn't look like they are running at the moment.

Martin

[Martin]

Looks like they are back running. 66 laps down, slow times, but probably just testing that whatever they had to fix is fixed.

Good to see them back out there. The SLC is in second overall, 2 laps down, but capable of 1:43 laps.

Martin

[Cobra 61]

Qualified in heavy rain at P31. Paul started the race and got up to 9th in a few laps. Gaining ground on the lead group, the car was doing great, Then the center of the clutch disc sheared off. We installed a new one and noticed the rear upper ball joints were not going to make it. We changed the control arms, and back out on the track. An hour later, the center spun out of the second disc. The drill once again, remove and replace. This time we changed the flywheel and gearbox. Out on the track, but had no clutch dis-engagement. Had to run the rest of the race in 4th gear. Later on, a solenoid that controls the fuel system to both cells malfunctioned and filled on tank completely and overflowed fuel everywhere. And into the brake ducts. We had to disable one tank and clean all the fuel out of the brake fan system. The car ran and drove very weel and all had a great racing time!

[kabacj]

Hey Richard,

Glad to hear that you guys were able to battle through the part failures and keep the GTM going to finish the 25 hour. Excellent job!

Swapping all those parts at the track under green flag conditions is FAR from easy.

Endurance Radio had some good commentary during the race to keep us all informed regarding who was where and the conditions on the track. I sure am glad it stopped raining. Racing under those conditions for 25 hours would have been terrible.


One of these days I’m going to get out there to see the race in person. However, every year following the race from home is a little better . Between racer connect video, endurance radio, and the race monitor app I had pretty good information. It's nothing like being there however.

John

[crash]

In the shadow of giants.

We had mapped out that we wanted to run about 1:56-1:57 lap times this year. Well, that plan was out the window pretty quickly. Paul Edwards was running 52s, 53s without much trouble at all and we kept trying to get him to slow down a bit. The car, as we had it setup this weekend was definitely, by far, the fastest car we have ever run. No question that sub 50s were in the cards if we needed the speed.

After the clutch was "welded up", Paul actually managed to turn a 1:51 lap time...in nothing but 4th gear!

Davy and I were both running in the 1:55-1:57 window in only 4th gear, so you can see just how conservative we were planning on running this race.

Indeed, Paul Edwards is a giant when it comes to making a car go fast.

All these parts are the same ones we had run previously in test sessions, just new versions of the same design, so the theory is either a bad batch of new parts, or something significant changed that we didn't know about such as some sort of interference or other part failure.

It will be interesting to see what things look like when we pull them apart, but it appears, aside from the clutch, that there really was no major damage. Apart from one small crack in the left rear where a Miata ran into the back of me in the rain, the body is untouched and ready for next seasons action.

[kabacj]

After the clutch was "welded up", Paul actually managed to turn a 1:51 lap time...in nothing but 4th gear!

Davy and I were both running in the 1:55-1:57 window in only 4th gear, so you can see just how conservative we were planning on running this race.

Indeed, Paul Edwards is a giant when it comes to making a car go fast.

All these parts are the same ones we had run previously in test sessions, just new versions of the same design, so the theory is either a bad batch of new parts, or something significant changed that we didn't know about such as some sort of interference or other part failure.

It will be interesting to see what things look like when we pull them apart, but it appears, aside from the clutch, that there really was no major damage. Apart from one small crack in the left rear where a Miata ran into the back of me in the rain, the body is untouched and ready for next seasons action.



Iv never driven thunderhill , but not having 3rd most likely would make turning fast laps in traffic quite an exercise in commitment. I could see the closing speeds on the live feed. Not hitting people is an achievement in itself.

Weird situation with the clutch. We know it's a tight fit for the sequential and a new twin disk. Not sure what you guys used. It will be interesting to hear about what you guys find as the root cause off the clutch problem.

I know how hard it is to get things working again at the track under pressure . Especially when you are tired. I have to hand it to you guys.

I don't endurance race, but I work all night sleep for two hours and go race quite often. It's way harder then I expected.

How did the tire changes go? Did my wheel offset spacers do any laps?

John

[crash]

Yes we did use the wheel spacers, but not as originally intended. My idea was to put spacers permanently mounted on all the wheels. Unfortunately there seems to have been an error made at CCW as far as some of our centers on the three piece wheels, so we could only use three sets of our 5 sets of rears. Got to roll with the punches. I modified the spacers significantly to quicken wheel changes and it seemed to work very well. We have some more items to try during this season that should increase efficiencies again, but the Yokohama tires, even in a super soft compound, lasted incredibly well. We got over 7 hours of run time on them and they had plenty of rubber and grip left. If you like the Hoosiers, you owe it to yourself to try a set of the Yokohamas. Even with smaller rears the grip and tread wear has been really great. Give Troy or Bob a call at 949-589-5394. They are a little more expensive, but because of the decreased wear and seemingly no timing out issues on the compound, they actually end up being cheaper to run.

[Fraser D]

Some photos from the race

http://headonphotos.net/gallery/NASA/NASA2514/4/index2.html

[Fraser D]

I great Pic of #4 along with some other cars from the event
http://lifeblasters.com/2015/25797/scenes-from-the-25-hours-of-thunderhill/

[crash]

Sorry guys. I have been very busy at work and have not been able to get to the video editing. Also we have hundreds of pictures from this years 25, but they are all high resolution and must be resized before posting. Simply haven't had the time. :(