Think Racing

Successfully unsuccessful

Well, to avoid a lot of the nasty details, this past weekend I did my scheduled test day to ensure that we worked out the bugs prior to our July SCCA race.

It did not go very well. Well, actually depending on how you look at it, it also went very well. But what I thought was going to be simple arrive and drive, turned out to be a three lap fiasco, followed by a full morning and afternoon of tuning, tweaking and then ultimately throwing in the towel.

One very important issue was solved - tire rub. However, three issues popped up - distributor or coil is shot (being sent off to Jeff S. for repair as I type and I don't currently have a spare), exhaust needs to be tweaked (I cooked the pain off part of the rear valence because of a poor design on my part) and engine oil cooling (the oil temp gauge is pegged at 300 degrees - should be around 210 - thanks to poor air venting). All easily fixable, but requires time.

The end result is that I in no way can solve for all of these issues in the 1 1/2 weeks leading up to the Road Atlanta race and to try would most certainly result in a complete waste of resources. I know that this is not uncommon, but because I am new, I am learning this along the way. It is a brand new car that requires tweaking and adjusting until the sweet spot is found. At that point, it will run. Unfortunately, we are just not there yet.

I did have a great time though despite the disappointment and have to say thanks to a number of forum member's from http://www.mgexperience.net/ who were there to help and offer support.

Thanks to Hap, Kevin Hart and Torsten for your efforts, expertise and time. We all wanted to see the car run and for one of those three laps, it did pretty darn good. Also thanks to Jeff Schlemmer who took our call on the weekend for ignition advice.

I have since withdrawn from the Road Atlanta race and will circle up with the calendar to determine next steps. I have a few people thinking through fixes and next steps including my dad who is already designing a box to provide the air needed to the cooler.

The development continues - and so will the posts.