The car is a 1979 Porsche 930. This is the turbocharged version of the 911. Autobahn Performance has provided us technical support, suspension setup, maintenance and repair.

Welcome to the One Lap of America!
Article provided by David Goodman and Keith Ibarguen.

Introduction | The Car | Packing and Preparation | Travel to Indiana
Wrapping up Loose Ends | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4
Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7 | Day 8 | Day 9

The One Lap is an endurance road rally combined with scored track events, that brings it’s participants to some of the premier racetracks in the country. It also confirms the likely already known premise that the people who run the OLOA are more than a little bit crazy.

So with this web site, you can track the progress of a couple of loons with three years of experience with this event. My name is Keith Ibarguen, and the team captain and car owner is Dave Goodman. We have been lucky enough to be teamed up with Rick Hetherington and his team at Autobahn Performance, and have had a relationship with Rick for each of the three years we have competed. Rick has provided us technical support, suspension setup, maintenance and repair, and an unlimited number of answers to roadside problems. Rick has also been a tireless supporter of the team and has on more than one occasion lifted the spirits of us when we thought things were not looking up.

We will be updating this site with the daily results of competition throughout the week and will be adding pictures and descriptions where possible, so check back frequently. We will also provide explanations of what is happening with scoring and other rules as necessary so if you aren’t familiar with the event, hang tight, it should become clearer as we go.

Before April 27, 2004 - The Car and Stuff Done to the Car over the Winter.
The car is a 1979 Porsche 930. This is the turbocharged version of the 911, and at the time was the fastest production car in the world. Since 1979, there have been very few cars produced that have the performance numbers of the 930, so this platform was chosen for its heritage as well as a relatively reasonable entry price and a virtually unlimited number of upgrade options. We have taken advantage of this and modified the car as much as possible without changing the basic spirit of the car. The car is still primarily driven on the highway, and from the beginning we have done everything possible to make changes that could be easily reversed to bring the car back to bone stock.

With Rick’s help, we made changes to the suspension by adding adjustable sway bars and heavier torsion bars. We added a bolt-on roll cage, Recaro Seats, harnesses and a set of Fikse wheels which gave us a much larger contact patch from stock. Breaks and engine are stock, with minor tweaks to new racing pads that squeal like crazy on the highway, and frozen cross-drilled rotors.

This year, Autobahn rebuilt the transmission, and Dave repaired some oil leaks, and did some other minor tweaks to the car that made it a bit more enjoyable to spend close to 7000 miles in.

April 27, 2004 - Packing and Preparation.
The race is upon us and we actually have the time to get stuff in order a day early. A quick trip through the tool box, and our tool kit is together. We decided to keep the tools, and the overall amount of stuff, to a minimum since in years past we over packed badly. It seems strange but apparently we have learned a thing or two in the past years about organization since in about a half an hour we were all set with tools.

April 28, 2004 - Travel to South Bend Indiana.
One hell of a way to start an event that has close to 6000 miles of driving in it. Since the car gets about 15 miles to the gallon on the highway, we get about 275 to 300 miles a tank. We decided years back that we switch drivers after each tank, so each of us drove twice on the trip out. The car is running very well though we are looking at running highway temperatures of about 150. Not exactly proper operating temperature, though understandable for a car that has about a square mile of oil cooling surface area spread among three very large oil coolers. Dave suspects a stuck open thermostat so we are looking to swap that ou