[Ron Earp]

I drove the track for the first time on Friday at the test day. It was raining most that day and about the best I could manage in the wet was a 1:38 or so. I don’t have rain tires and I went out on some shaved Toyo RA1s with some groves on their surface. They worked reasonably well and I didn’t go off track or hit anything. A later dry session got me down to a 1:30, but that was still far off of a race pace of 1:26 to 1:20.

On Saturday we had a morning qualifying session that was dry. I went out on some new Hoosiers and was able to break into a 1:26 with five laps on the tires before coming in to let them set up for the evening. New Hoosiers must be driven to be experienced, just a fantastic race tire where slicks are not allowed. I enjoyed the track. I got into the rhythm fairly quickly and built up speed on each lap. Maybe sleeping on my initial experience helped out.

Turn one is a really interesting experience at Roebling because you are coming off of an extremely long straight that has you topped out in fourth gear (in my Z) at 7000-7300 RPM. You stab the brakes at the 2-3 marker to set the car, turn in, and hang on. Point toward a late apex, do your braking at that point, then turn the wheel, stomp the gas, and get out of the 1-2 turn complex. Good stuff.

The turns after that are long sweepers too but the interesting thing is they should be taken flat out (or close to it) with your foot to the floor. Turn three is next, a left hander, and it is taken with a mid-entry line and late apex. You must stay left on exit because you’ll be braking heavily to set up for the right hander. Lots of action here as the track is tight and speeds high. Clearly I am not to the point of taken the turns flat out and my laps times show it. But I am learning. You definitely need to trust in the force, have big balls, or whatever it is you need to go fast.

After turn four and five you enter into a nice carousel that is a lot of fun. You can go low on entry for blocking of your buddy behind you. Or you can square it off with some braking, turn and stab some throttle. Or if in a well handling but low torque car you try and smoothly drift on through without a lot of speed variation. Exit to this leads to turn eight which is a type one corner – right onto the straight, so you need to get this one right for best speed. S/he who gets on the throttle earliest here and stays on it ends up winning the drag race down to turn one.

Just two weeks ago I put a new motor in the Z. Good parts and attention to detail in hopes this one would last a couple of seasons. I’m also building up a couple of extra spares since I have a friend who is building a 260z as well. Break in occurred at the track on the test day and everything had been going smoothly.

Sunday rolls around and it is race day. Our group is the first group after quiet hour from 11am to noon. So, we spent most of the morning cleaning up, checking things, and making sure everything is right. At 1040am, 20 minutes before quiet hour, Jeff fires up his TR8 and finds a stream of water running down the manifold valley. Uh oh. The manifold bleed housing is cracked at the base and is spraying water out at an alarming rate. He is devastated and figures he won’t be able to make the race at noon. I figured things might be over too because the housing was cracked badly.

But, we talked about it and I figured we had to be able to fix the problem. I sent him out for water and ice (water to fill the system up with, ice for our cool suits because it was extremely hot) and I starting taking the bleed out of the manifold. I tried to patch it up from the outside with JB Quik but a subsequent run at 10:55, five minutes to quiet hour, showed that didn’t work at all. So, I came up with plan B and took the manifold housing off so that I could get to the lower part of the bleed housing from the inside. 30 mins of trashing later I had applied a patch of JB Weld covered with silicone rubber to the underside of the bleed opening. This would prevent water from even getting to the cracked part, I hoped.

The problem was we couldn’t properly burp the system or test to see if it leaked. At noon there would be a call to grid and the race would start five minutes later. Jeff got back at 1145am with water and ice, we filled up the system, and at 1155am we both suited up for the race, sweating like pigs with our minds definitely not on racing. Noon rolls around, the group is called to grid and engines are fired.