Race Day 1 @ Brainerd Intl. Raceway

We arrived at BIR fairly early...enough to get a few practice laps in w/ the Slow Pokes group. The noises from the motor were disturbing, we also discovered that the car really doesn't like having it shut off via the emergency kill switch (the ECU takes a while to refigure out what is going on). It was also discovered that car fuel starves around 1/2 a tank. We debated long and hard about swapping the motor w/ the spare that night. Being lazy and generally distraught we decided to run it until she blows...each driver gets 1/2 hour in the car and keep it below 4000rpms.

Race day 1: sent Jeff out on worn out Falken Azenis, no issues, decent lap times, then the rain came so we switched to our Dunlops Direzzas (full treaded new summer tires)....after three drivers w/ the car still going strong, and us in 12th place, we moved the self imposed rev-limiter to 5000rpms and an hour stint. I went out for a 1hr 25min session, my laps times got down to 2min 4secs a lap...somehow we worked ourselves up to 5th place, out of 24 cars starting! However when I came in for my pit stop & driver change the passenger side output cup was still attached to the axle but came out of the transmission and was puking tranny fluid in the hot pits! We also discovered that one of the motor mount bolts were loose! 47 minutes later we got the car jury-rigged it back together (Ryan H. I owe you a beer & food!), and sent Bob back out on track w/ instructions to only use 4th gear, figuring the tranny was for sure to blow! Amazingly Bob did 8 more laps like this...our position fell to 11th place, but we still took the checker!

After the race we changed oil (cuz we decided that if it has run this long she is going to keep running, no sparkles were found, the magnetic drain plug was nearly clean), fixed the down pipe collector that broke and was trying to free itself, tested the transmission for leaks...drained it looking for sparkles....and said pssshhh, fill it full of fresh fluid and see what happens. Attempted to fix the rear brakes, as the passenger side rear was doing almost nothing (about half what the driver side was).