2008-06-16 10:27:00
So much has happened since my last blog entry that I haven’t had time to do this update. Nor much enthusiasm, because mostly what happened is I blew a head gasket at the Rose Cup at Portland International Raceway on June 1.
Sometimes these things are just unavoidable. Although they’re always avoidable.
Like my old racedriving mentor Doc Bundy used to say, “I don’t care if you’re runnin’ down the backstraight at Daytona and your car gets struck by lightning, it’s your fault. It’s your fault for bein’ where the lightning wanted to land.”
Pat Boyle and I were still thrashing to get the car ready, on the Thursday morning that practice for the Rose Cup began. A prudent car owner would have scratched his entry. But no, not me. Late that night, I drove down to Portland from the shop, Pat’s Autosport in Auburn, Washington. Pat towed the car down to the track on Friday afternoon, still unfinished. We had had a misfire from the moment we first fired the new IROC Series engine. Pat was baffled, and we hoped there might be someone at the track who could help find the problem.
So we’re in the paddock with the Bandit, way down at the end because everyone else had been there for two days. We were standing around and scratching our heads and listening to the engine pop and backfire, and that someone appears. “Just call me the Masked Marauder,” he says. It’s two weeks later as I write this, and he’s now my new guru. I'll just call him MM here.
In about three minutes, MM finds the misfire. It was a wiring anomaly he was intimately familiar with, in the new MSD ignition system. Karen McCoy, everyone’s sweetheart because she’s so helpful, found the SCCA technical inspector, Todd Butler, who came down to our paddock spot and stamped his approval on the Bandit at 6:30 in the evening, even though tech inspection had shut down at 6:00.
Qualifying for the Rose Cup had been that afternoon. My friend Neil Shelton was on the pole with his Porsche 962, while seven-time winner and my hero Monte Shelton, Neil’s father, was eighth in his trusty Porsche 934, called “Ol’ Blue.” Here's a photo of both cars, during qualifying. All the great photos in this blog were taken by Jeffrey Zurschmeide.
Meanwhile, the Bandit had still never turned a wheel on the track.
As the sun set on the paddock, I drove the Bandit around in circles, just to make sure it ran. I turned it in the grass, and cut the left front tire—not enough fender clearance. We used a floor jack to bend up the fender support.
On Saturday morning, before we started the engine, I floored the throttle pedal, and it stuck there—the linkage was binding on the underside of the aluminum dished air cleaner. Another warning sign, duh. I guess I should consider myself lucky. If it hadn’t stuck there, it would have stuck on the track, and God only knows what the consequences might have been. We removed the air cleaner and rushed to the grid for the final practice session.
It was the third clearance issue that got us.
I think it was on my second lap on the track. When I cranked the steering wheel hard to the left in the chicane, the steering arm evidently tapped against a steel tube that spliced the snaking radiator hose, separated it, and all the water gushed out. I never knew it. The water temp gauge never showed that the engine was overheating, because there was no water to take the temperature of. In this photo you can see the splice that parted.
A couple laps later, on the front straight, the engine went bang and clankety-clank, and I shut it down. That afternoon we pushed it up under Monte Shelton’s tent, where it became a show car and crowd pleaser, nestled against the Shelton Porsche 962 for the rest of the weekend. I put on my best "That’s-Racing" face, talked to a lot of great people, and signed a few copies of "Fast Guys, Rich Guys, and Idiots."
On Sunday I cheered Neil on to victory in the Rose Cup, as Monte ran most of the race in third or fourth, dropping to 10th in the final few laps with his own misfire. It was a great race between Neil’s Porsche and a fast and beautiful Corvette Trans-Am car driven by Todd Harris, who owns the Pro Drive racing school at PIR. Neil is a great, smooth, driver, and it was his first win in the Rose Cup, making the family proud and the fans happy. Paul Buker covered the event in The Oregonian, here’s the link to his blog. Scroll down, and you’ll find the Bandit’s sad story in there too. http://blog.oregonlive.com/sportsupdates/motorsports/
There’s a moral to this story. Never go to the races with an untested, unsorted car, because trouble is sure to follow. It’s my own cardinal rule. I broke it because we had worked so hard to get there at all, and because I wanted so badly to race in the Rose Cup.
It’s two weeks later as I write this. We didn’t know the extent of the engine damage during that time, because I wasn’t sure who to take the engine to, but I’ve since found the right shop. We pulled the engine on Thursday, and on Friday they took it apart and found no melted pistons (or worse); it was only a blown head gasket. Huge relief! So now we’re thrashing again, to make the Historic Stock Car races at Pacific Raceways near Seattle on July 5, and PIR on July 12. For the Bandit, these two races are what it’s all about.
ALL GREAT PHOTOS BY JEFFREY ZURSCHMEIDE
Sam Moses
Previous Blogs:
1958
2008-05-17 07:30:30
I couldn't believe it when I got my copy of Vintage Motorsport magazine and read my father's name, from a race he ran in 1958. I had to write the editor, Randy Riggs (whom I've known since 1972, when he was an editor at Cycle World magazine and I...
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Engine and Tranny Go In
2008-05-14 12:32:25
Weekends are long in racing. For example, I just spent a four- or five-day weekend working on the Bandit. There was a moment there, when Pat Boyle and I were working 12 hours a day to get the engine and transmission installed, that I thought: I...
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Challenges, not Problems
2008-05-13 12:59:39
Thanks mostly to Barbara Signore, the engine arrived in April, weighing 750 pounds in its crate. The car was in the trailer (moved from my yard to the driveway when the snow melted), and the engine was in the garage;...
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Scored an Engine!
2008-03-10 06:31:05
On Saturday morning March 8, I was in a hotel room in Laguna Beach with the ocean crashing just outside my third-floor balcony. I could see the horizon through the wide-open sliding-glass door, but my eyes were glued to my laptop screen. I was...
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The Latest Bandit Story
2008-02-16 18:22:52
This piece will appear in the April issue of BMW Roundel magazine, a sidebar to my story about driving a BMW M Coupe to sixth overall with Doug Mill and car owner Mike Helton, in the Four Hours of Pacific Raceways.
At 5:45 in...
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In Search of One Good Motor
2008-02-16 17:36:59
In the final chapter of “Fast Guys, Rich Guys, and Idiots,” the Bandit blows two engines in one day at Daytona. One of them was a 550-horsepower motor that came out of the shop of the legendary Junior Johnson, Tom Wolfe’s...
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