3 Hour Sundowner Tales of Unexpected Goodluck and Perseverence
05-23-06, 10:08 AM
#1
Rotary Freak
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3 Hour Sundowner Tales of Unexpected Goodluck and Perseverence
Well, as some of you know we ran the 3 Hour Sundowner Enduro at Mosport last Saturday. Before getting into the story, I want to thank Dave Salt who crewchiefed in his usual way (with patience and smarts), Shane Lei (Balzz) who was our fueling guy and offered his car to do a parts run, Carl Robson (2K2 Miata) who helped trace down some wiring issues we had and Marc warren who assisted everyone in getting the job done.
Back to the story. Showed up at the track early Saturday morning. Ran the car through Tech. No issues for the first time in 4 years. Great!!!! Hoped it would be an omen for the day. The car fired up and ran pretty well, but had to set the idle again after it refused to idle below 2500 rpm.
Got dressed for the first practice session, fired up the car and drove it down the pitlane at the mandated 60 kmh. Cleared the pitlane and walked the throttle in second gear. Spun the rear tires all the way through second and even spun for about 10 feet in third. Whoo Hoo monster power (actually very cold tires, but lets spin it the fun way) ran hard into turn 2 and it started cutting out again. Long time readers will recall that this was my issue last fall as well. WTF???? I had replaced almost everything since then. It shouldn't be happening again.
Burbled back to the pits and had a talk with Dave. Turns out he found that the Fuel pump cut-out switch was broken and he hardwired it straight up and we tried to go again. Now the car wouldn't even start. We pushed it back to the pit area and tried to find out what was wrong. It took about 90 minutes but we traced the problem to a bad leading coil ignitor. Called Al at the ever helpful Scarboro Mazda and he had one in his spares. Balzz and I drove straight there picked up the coil and ran back to Mosport.
Got there just in time to miss qualifying. Installed the coil and the car started right up and ran very well. So we spent the time getting the pit area and support equipment set up for the Enduro. Keep in mind that I haven't even had a lap in the car yet and my 2 co-drivers haven't even driven the car. What the heck, lets just "giv' er" in the race and we will be okay.
Race Time - Pulled out on to the mock grid and they slotted me ahead of the Spec Miata's as I was more than likely capable of going 6 seconds a lap faster and the organizers didn't want any issues on the first lap. I got the 5 minute board and fired the car up. No issues, a mental thumbs up! Ran around behind the pace car and warmed up the brakes and gearbox. Was that a misfire? Nah its running fine....
Green flag, made a strong moved to the outside, then dove to the inside...yeah baby 3 cars. Ran up to Turn 2 and got 1 more car. Passed 2 cars around the outside of 3 passed 1 more in the run to 4 and 1 more under braking for 5. WOW I am in 10th place. Put the power down coming out of 5 and cough...cough ...sputter.... waaaaaaaa....cough...sputter.....waaa.... WTF....not again. Pulled into the pits and had Dave look at the car again. Couldn't tell if anything was wrong so I decided to go out again and I hoped it was just water in the tank that would clear itself out. after 2 laps of coughing and sputtering I found out that if I just eased into the throttle and didn't use more than half to three quarters throttle it would work okay. Got rolling again and worked on getting my times down. Passed a ton of cars but everytime I tried to really lug the motor or fling it through a corner it would start to cough and sputter and I had to go back to easy part throttle.
Changed drivers at the first pit stop and John Bondar got in. He had the same issues I had and kept coming back into the pits to have us check out the car. We dropped down about 10 laps during these stops, add that to the 3 laps during my stop and we were already toast. So I finally convinced John to just drive the car really easy for a few laps and it would ease up. John did this and got he car running okay.
John came in and we switched to Joe Indovina for the final leg. Joe understood what he had to do and lived through the few laps of sputtering until it cleared up. Then Joe drove the car rather gently to the finish.
WOW we made it. 3 Hours and the car was still running. No dents, the brakes looked great and we only used 2 1/2 litres of oil (most of it dripping out of a minor oil pan weep).
Anyways we finished 4th in class, 16th overall out of 24 cars and a fastest lap of a 1:42.3.
Looked the car over on Monday and finally determined the issue. The intake manifold has a massive air leak between the uim and the lim that only manifests itself when hot. When cold its sealed and everything runs well. After it gets hot it warps and loosens up and causes the engine to run very lean. This causes the computor to alternate between limp mode and full rich and basically run really wacky. Don't know if the ecu is okay, but we are now going to take the engine upgrades one step at a time until we get it right.
1) Replace intake with a known quantity.
2) Replace ECU with known stock Mazda ECU.
3) Install programable Megasquirt.
4) Install throttle bodies.
and only after all of this is done and working very well will I install the new motor.
Until next time.....
Eric
Back to the story. Showed up at the track early Saturday morning. Ran the car through Tech. No issues for the first time in 4 years. Great!!!! Hoped it would be an omen for the day. The car fired up and ran pretty well, but had to set the idle again after it refused to idle below 2500 rpm.
Got dressed for the first practice session, fired up the car and drove it down the pitlane at the mandated 60 kmh. Cleared the pitlane and walked the throttle in second gear. Spun the rear tires all the way through second and even spun for about 10 feet in third. Whoo Hoo monster power (actually very cold tires, but lets spin it the fun way) ran hard into turn 2 and it started cutting out again. Long time readers will recall that this was my issue last fall as well. WTF???? I had replaced almost everything since then. It shouldn't be happening again.
Burbled back to the pits and had a talk with Dave. Turns out he found that the Fuel pump cut-out switch was broken and he hardwired it straight up and we tried to go again. Now the car wouldn't even start. We pushed it back to the pit area and tried to find out what was wrong. It took about 90 minutes but we traced the problem to a bad leading coil ignitor. Called Al at the ever helpful Scarboro Mazda and he had one in his spares. Balzz and I drove straight there picked up the coil and ran back to Mosport.
Got there just in time to miss qualifying. Installed the coil and the car started right up and ran very well. So we spent the time getting the pit area and support equipment set up for the Enduro. Keep in mind that I haven't even had a lap in the car yet and my 2 co-drivers haven't even driven the car. What the heck, lets just "giv' er" in the race and we will be okay.
Race Time - Pulled out on to the mock grid and they slotted me ahead of the Spec Miata's as I was more than likely capable of going 6 seconds a lap faster and the organizers didn't want any issues on the first lap. I got the 5 minute board and fired the car up. No issues, a mental thumbs up! Ran around behind the pace car and warmed up the brakes and gearbox. Was that a misfire? Nah its running fine....
Green flag, made a strong moved to the outside, then dove to the inside...yeah baby 3 cars. Ran up to Turn 2 and got 1 more car. Passed 2 cars around the outside of 3 passed 1 more in the run to 4 and 1 more under braking for 5. WOW I am in 10th place. Put the power down coming out of 5 and cough...cough ...sputter.... waaaaaaaa....cough...sputter.....waaa.... WTF....not again. Pulled into the pits and had Dave look at the car again. Couldn't tell if anything was wrong so I decided to go out again and I hoped it was just water in the tank that would clear itself out. after 2 laps of coughing and sputtering I found out that if I just eased into the throttle and didn't use more than half to three quarters throttle it would work okay. Got rolling again and worked on getting my times down. Passed a ton of cars but everytime I tried to really lug the motor or fling it through a corner it would start to cough and sputter and I had to go back to easy part throttle.
Changed drivers at the first pit stop and John Bondar got in. He had the same issues I had and kept coming back into the pits to have us check out the car. We dropped down about 10 laps during these stops, add that to the 3 laps during my stop and we were already toast. So I finally convinced John to just drive the car really easy for a few laps and it would ease up. John did this and got he car running okay.
John came in and we switched to Joe Indovina for the final leg. Joe understood what he had to do and lived through the few laps of sputtering until it cleared up. Then Joe drove the car rather gently to the finish.
WOW we made it. 3 Hours and the car was still running. No dents, the brakes looked great and we only used 2 1/2 litres of oil (most of it dripping out of a minor oil pan weep).
Anyways we finished 4th in class, 16th overall out of 24 cars and a fastest lap of a 1:42.3.
Looked the car over on Monday and finally determined the issue. The intake manifold has a massive air leak between the uim and the lim that only manifests itself when hot. When cold its sealed and everything runs well. After it gets hot it warps and loosens up and causes the engine to run very lean. This causes the computor to alternate between limp mode and full rich and basically run really wacky. Don't know if the ecu is okay, but we are now going to take the engine upgrades one step at a time until we get it right.
1) Replace intake with a known quantity.
2) Replace ECU with known stock Mazda ECU.
3) Install programable Megasquirt.
4) Install throttle bodies.
and only after all of this is done and working very well will I install the new motor.
Until next time.....
Eric
Last edited by 23Racer; 05-23-06 at 10:12 AM.
05-23-06, 10:16 AM
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Had a good time being a part of all the action though that firesuit was...well, snug! Thanks for the experience and let me know anytime you need a lacky. It was fun running out to pitwall to watch the car take the chequered flag just like on TV! GO TEAM NUMMELIN!
05-23-06, 07:00 PM
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Originally Posted by dufourmike
I went to the sundowner too, but there was no racing going on
Too bad there's so few of us that understand this statement. I hope it was a good night.
The race was cold, the day was long, but in the end it somehow worked out.
If the car were running better i'm sure we could have achieved a top 4 overall.
Big thanks to Eric and Dave for inviting us to help out it was an interesting day for sure.
Shane you were a stud in that suit
See you at the next race..
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