That Ruled.

(Look here for all my photos from 24 Hours of Lemons, Thunderhill, 2009.)

I had my best race yet and Snowspeeder ran like a champ for most of the race. The trip from Salt Lake was smooth sailing and got to enjoy the company of both Joe's Snowspeeder team and thh Knights Of The Round Track. This was among my favorite racing events.

Rain poured as we set up Friday, but skys cleared in the afternoon and we had great weather for the rest of the weekend.

During the race I accomplished my goal to keep the car on track and out of the penalty box. I probably deserved a couple flags for two wheels off and passing under yellow, but the workers either missed them or were too busy with more serious infractions. I felt great about my relaxed, defensive driving, and even managed to hold our team's fastest lap until Randal got his next turn.

Joe's car was pulling strong and the suspension felt perfect.

Mid-Sunday though, problems started. First we burned through our front brake pads and wrecked a caliper. Paul had a whole front hub/brake assembly for us and we were back out in minutes. Then Joe came in with a shaky wheel that turned out to be a rear axle snapped at the hub. The wheel was only held on by the brake caliper holding the rotor. I'm sure this was cracked back at an Altamont race and finally gave completely. Another spare from Paul again had us back on the track in minutes. Then we started overheating. We saw a lot of air under the cap and it looked like there must be a decent leak. We borrowed Eyesore Racing's weed-sprayer coolant injector and hooked it up the way we did in V-RAM at Buttonwillow, but this didn't help as much this time. Unfortunately by the time we recovered from our final overheat, the checker flag was flying and we were not allowed back on course to cross it. Dang!

Oh yeah, the officials noticed mid Saturday our transponder was not working. Shit. It would have been nice to have all of our lap data and to know how we actually placed. With a few hours of our most consistent driving unaccounted, we finished 78th or something. We'll try to figure how many laps to add and make a corrected guess at our actual finishing position.

We didn't get to pit by Team Eyesore this race, but we did have Snowspeeder, Knights, Killer Bee, and Free Range right in a row. It was also great to have the Nerd Herd MR2 and the Cannonball Bandits Corolla FX16 on the other side of us. As always all the teams I met were great.

A couple notable entries at this race: Team Diplomatic Immunity with a V12 Mercedes. They ruffled a lot of feathers with such a blatant cheater that was valued at $130000 when newish, but it was so over-the top I had to applaud them from bringing such a wrong car. They weren't very competitive so no harm done, and the organizers exercised the claiming clause to discourage anyone from trying to pull a stunt like that again.

Also there was another motorcycle powered econo-box (like the Geo Metro-Gnome project) and my fave at this race: A dinky Honda Z600 powered by a Magna V65 engine.

A GREAT race overall. Among the best.