Boating in a car

Since I have yet to see another car in this position I thought I should post this pic, also it highlights our very clean undercarriage packaging. It's off to Hockenheim tomorrow for the competition so it may be a while until the next post. On the 1st we went out for our first day of testing. It was a good day for sure. We learned cast iron rotors, which is what everyone else uses because of the material's properties, don't work for our small brakes...they shatter in the first 15 seconds.

The rest of the day went well, our car was faster than the BA, the university hosting us, both with our fastest driver and their fastest driver in our car. Our driver had a bit of trouble keeping the back end in check even pulling a double doughnut around the pyramid of cones on. We broke the shifter arm also but were able to get it back together. On the way back I got to drive one of the BA student's 70's Opel Kadet, verz similar to the Datsun 510 and to my BMW 2002, except with a 55hp 1.2L engine...wasn't the fastest, still fun.

Sunday brings a strange German rule, apparently you can't drive a vehicle over 7k gross kilograms unless you are delivering food, so we had to transfer everything to a smaller transport truck. The weather was supposed to be bad, a change from the near 100 degrees of the day before. We got out and set everything up only to have the BA shear an axle shaft, they were done for the day and drove home. Once we got a few problems sorted it started to rain...hard. It sucked to be the drivers but we did get some valuable testing. Since we had never driven in the rain before we got to test out our modified rain tires and it turns out our drivers were only about 5% slower and hit 90% fewer cones making them significantly faster. It eventually stopped raining and started to dry out just as the police came and shut us down. Now, we had permission to drive there from 8am-6pm but Germans (according to the ones hosting us) like to complain and it was sunday afternoon. No biggie though, they were really nice about it.

Monday was another day of testing, this time out at an airfield instead of sponsor's parking lots. Both cars were having some trouble as always, the BA more than us after their radiator started leaking then a diff mount broke. It rained again and even though this course was much more open than the previous ones and over twice as long we were still posting 5-7 second faster times over a minute+ lap time. Unfortunately we can't get the proper honda oil over here and we destroyed the rod bearing and now have to drop our spare motor in. Although we have been faster on every track set up by the BA thus far, their car sounds amazing...just amazing. I almost want a 4cyl engine next year just for the sound, I'm not sure but I believe they don't have traction control and if they did the lap times would be closer for sure.