El Mirage - July
2012
The lakester is running. Not complete, by a long shot, but
running. I hauled it out to SoCal for the July meet at El
Mirage, mostly so I could go through tech inspection to
make sure there would be no surprises at Speed Week next
month.
SCTA recommends that special construction vehicles be
pre-inspected wherever possible, I suppose because there
are so many things that could be done wrong. Russ Eyres
built this chassis, however, and he has been building and
racing landspeed cars for a long time; I thought there
probably would be no problems. But ... better to be safe
than sorry.
Russ and I took the car up to Kiwi Steve's Hot Rod shop in
Brea, CA for this pre-inspection. Steve did an extremely
thorough check of the car and left us with a page of notes
for things to check, things to fix (thankfully, not too
many), and things to think about. We left the trailer at
Steve's to run up to Burbank and retrieve my fire bottles
that my high school friend, Fred Stewart, had picked up for
me after they were hydro-tested and re-filled. Back to Brea
to hook up the trailer and then back to San Diego.
After a day of fixing and checking things, we drove up to
El Mirage on Friday. The lakebed is open to anyone to do
more-or-less anything so we planned to do some private
testing. We weren't the only ones, by the way! After
installing the fire bottles and checking everything over, I
made three careful passes in the car. The first one was
through first and second gears, not too fast, stopping with
the brakes. This run showed that the car went straight,
didn't move around much, and would stop. The second pass, I
went a bit faster -- maybe 100 mph -- and pulled the chute.
At this low speed, the chute didn't give much of a tug on
the car and I had to get out to verify that it had
blossomed.
The third run, I ran it up to
about 135 and, again, stopped using the brakes. I guess you
could call this my easy break-in for the disc brakes, as
recommended by Wilwood! Also, I got a good start on the 500
mile break-in period on the TKO-600 transmission.
Saturday was pit setup and tech inspection. For some
reason, I was extremely nervous waiting for tech
inspection. Turns out everything went smoothly, the main
issue was stickers on the side of the car pointing out
where the electrical cutoff was. Yeah! Speed Week is a go!
My lineup number was 130, indicative of not having run at
El Mirage all year. (Russ and Eric Eyres HAVE run this
year, doing very well, and their lineup number was 5!) We
had decided, because the shifter was not 100% effective in
the 1-2 shifts (see the lakester build page), to push off
and start in 2nd gear. This sounded like a good idea at the
time so that's what we did. Justin Baas was in charge of
getting me into second to start off and Charles Rogers from
the SDRC pushed me off in his souped-up 4WD Ford diesel
pickup. I let in the clutch when I thought I was going fast
enough ... and it bogged down! OMG -- I thought I must be
in fourth instead of second. Damn Justin, anyway! So I
shifted to third and lugged down to a 145 mph run. The
chute did tug me this time and the run was otherwise just
fine.
Came back to the pits to repack the chute and to give
Justin a hard time about his ineptness. Several other SDRC
friends offered to 'help' Justin find second gear on the
next run.
Up at the line, I was strapped in and waiting when Justin
spotted an attractive young lady standing near the starting
line. He opportuned her into posing with the car, which she
graciously did. Justin took a couple of shots with his
camera and then, just for me, one with his phone that he
sent home to my wife! What a pal. Problem was, I could
hardly even SEE this young lady. My view of the world was
through the opening in the helmet. The head and neck
restraint ensured I couldn't turn my head. I was strapped
down and my hands were restrained by the wrist restraints.
The first time I actually saw her was when I got home and
opened my email! She is, indeed, very pretty. And mighty
nice to a bunch of gearhead guys.
Did pretty much the same thing
on run #2. And, much to my chagrin, the engine lugged just
like before. This time I stayed in it and, surprise, it WAS
in second gear. I shifted short at 7000 rpm into 3rd and
went through the cones at 164 mph. Much better. Especially
considering that I had my Bonneville gears in. Justin and
Les and Ben met me at the end of the run -- they had to
leave to get Les back for a photo shoot of his 34 coupe for
a magazine article! So I had the opportunity to admit that
Justin had been right all along and I had been wrong. And
here it is in print ...
Car is back home, cleaning up and working on my list of
things to do. Next stop, Speed Week 2012!