23Racer

We had the first race of the year last Sunday at Shannonville. It was a Support race to the Canadian Touring cars Championship Event, so the entry list was full with over 38 cars. After a beautiful week of weather and a Saturday that had a high of 32 degrees C and sunny, Sunday was frigid with air temps of about 7 and a steady light to heavy rain all day. For me, I went out in Practice and had fun chasing down and passing a full race 996 generation Porsche 911. The crewchief came over after the session and asked me what was in the car and I said,"A 2.5L V6 NA baby". He just blinked and walked away. The Cougar was working well and I was doing well. Started outside pole, got ahead of the Pole car going in to the first turn and tried to pull away. The track was getting a bit wet at that point and I was on slicks, so I was only able to hold on for one and a half laps in the lead. Normally in the hairpin I am chugging at about 2500 in second gear and the car barely makes it around the corner under power. This 1 time no, I spun my front tires hard coming out of the hairpin and it was enough to let the second place car past. I will blame the tires, as I couldn’t have made a mistake, LOL. I was also concerned about water temps as I could barely get them above 145 degrees F, but my oil temps were at 210 degrees. I used the throttle very gently as to not load the motor hard and hurt it. We ran very close, in 1st and 2nd, nose to tail for a few more laps. Then my team mate spun in the last lefthander before the Start Finish straight and the race was red flagged. We all came into the pits with me in second place.

We waited 5 minutes and got the signal to pull back out on to the track. We warmed up the tires again came down the front straight and got the green flag. I tried the same move as I did at the start and the leader covered this time and we both tried to go into Corner 2 on Pro Track tight to the left side. This meant we were slower than usual and I had to almost come to a stop, so the 3rd, 4th and 5th place cars all passed me. I caught up to the M3 and passed him back before the hairpin and we all tore down the Fabi Straight. What we didn't know was a backmarker car blew an oil line and dropped a large amount of oil in the first of the ess turns and when we came up to the oil, there were no flags and our lead group of cars all hit the mixture of oil and water and 4 out of the 5 of us spun at once. I ended up at full lock and full throttle in 3rd gear in a big slide, but then realized I was going to hit the guy I was racing with for 1st place smack in the nose with my driver’s door. So I pushed in the clutch, straightened the wheel and let the car spin around enough to miss him. I ended up way out on an escape road and by the time I had the car turned around I had dropped back to 5th. I managed to pass 1 car before the finish and ended up in 4th.

The conditions got worse from there and temps dropped to about 7 degrees and even rainier. Flat out terrible, the car was running like a bag of $#&! as the fuel didn't want to vapourize at those temps and I really didn't want to hurt the motor so I parked the car for the day.

Terrible weather, not so good of a day on track. I really need to step up the car’s power. I am down about 30 hp from where I need to be. I also need to put the Quaife box back in to the car as the box is worth 2 seconds a lap by itself. Its always something…. If I had a choice, I would have rather been in Florida in the sun as it was a truly miserable day.

Good thing was that I picked up 6 Continental slicks from one of the CTCC Teams, so I have some more very good race tires going forward.

Eric