Autobahn Performance who setup the suspension and balanced the car perfectly.

One Lap of America April 30 to May 7, 2005
Article provided by David Goodman.

Introduction | Pre Event Car Preparation | Ride to South Bend
Day Before Preparations | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4
Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7 | Day 8

Introduction
Another mad One Lap of America is upon us, the legendary road rally/track time trial event that pits not only human against human in high speed track competition but requires a high level of skill and endurance to even make it to the end of the event. Although this year we will stay on the eastern seaboard and cover a much tamer 3500 miles in one week, this year will be no walk in the park.

Pre Event Car Preparation
The winter of 2004/2005 was spent significantly upgrading the car with the following components:

• Elephant Racing Polybronze Bearings and rear monoballs
  rebuilt and revalved Bilstein shocks and struts
• TRE Motorsports fiberglass RSR rear bumper
• Frozen Rotors
• K27-7200 turbo
• HKS EVC V boost controller
• Andial Fuel Enrichment kit
• Andial Intercooler
• Thermotec turbo blanket

I am extremely pleased with the upgrades, the suspension feels very tight and responsive, the car is 200 lbs lighter, and according to the dyno, the new turbo and increased boost gave me a whopping 100 additional horsepower. Last week I had the car at NHIS for practice and it felt like a rocket.

This upgrade process was made possible by the generous input of time and performance components by my event sponsors for this year.

TRE Motorsports who supplied lots of tuning advice and a very high quality lightweight fiberglass bumper. Elephant Racing who supplied state of the art polybronze A arm and spring plate bearings as well as rear monoballs. Autobahn Performance who setup the suspension and balanced the car perfectly. YarrowSport who helped me dyno and tune the car. Frozen Rotors who supplied Cryogenically treated brake rotors that last seemingly forever.

TRE Motorsports who supplied lots of tuning advice.		Frozen Rotors who supplied Cryogenically treated brake rotors.

Ride to South Bend (Thursday April 28, 2005)
I left Massachusetts alone at 10:30 on Thursday facing an 875 mile drive to South Bend, Indiana. I was alone because my brother and co-driver Sam was attending the funeral of his wife Jen’s grandfather on Friday.

The plan was to drive as far as I could on Thursday and finish the rest of the drive on Friday. The ride to South Bend if you haven’t done it runs through all of New York, parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and finally Indiana. It is all done on the I90 and as I pulled onto the Mass pike the though of just starting that outrageous drive bummed me out a little. The ride to Albany was uneventful except for the toll takers off of exit B1 giving me a ration of crap about the extremely loud brakes. “They don’t have to sound good” I said, “just stop good”. This irked them even more because I’m sure they were thinking that anything that loud, with the potential to vibrate the fillings out of your head surely could not stop worth a damn. I answered the second barrage with a mach 2 launch out of the toll booth, making sure I maximized the time the wastegate did it’s job by venting raw exhaust directly to the atmosphere.

My friend Damon called me on my cell to let me know he had just hit the turnpike, and that he was stopping just north of Albany for fuel. Damon was towing his One Lap car, a Radical SR3 race car, on an open trailer behind a dilapidated Chevy station wagon. As I peered into the cockpit of the race car it confirmed what I suspected about Damon all along, that the dude was out of his mind. You see the One Lap this year covers over 3500 miles of street driving, and this car has as many amenities as a cardboard box on skid row. No heat, no A/C, no radio, and certainly no cup holder. If someone bet you $100 you couldn’t cram a bag of peanuts between them while they were in the car, you’d be out a C note.

Damon took off as I filled up, knowing that I would catch up shortly and as I finished up I ran into Tom Merrifield and Steve Ostrovitz in a One Lap decaled BMW M3. I introduced myself and shortly we were sailing down the pike in a convoy with a BMW 325i driven by Christo Tinkov and Eric Smith.

It was nice to have company, to take your mind off the endless driving, and I called them several times to alert them of speed traps that Damon was relaying back to me. For a short while I was able to convince them that I was clairvoyant and knew exactly where all the cops were at any given time. By the third fuel stop, about 500 miles into the trip, I was about ready to call it a day. Thankfully Tom had been chomping at the bit to drive my car so I tossed him the keys and happily let him take over. For the rest of the trip, he and Christo drove my car the last two legs, taking turns snapping off the throttle and blowing huge fireballs out of the wastegate.

Washed the car in the Tire Rack garage...		...and spent most of the day putting stickers on the car.

Day Before Preparations (Friday April 29, 2005)
Friday was fairly uneventful, I washed the car in the Tire Rack garage and spent most of the day putting stickers on the car. I talk to Glen Clarke and Louis Fran, three time vintage foreign winners and my main competition. I swear what we have going is like a nuclear arms race.

For all the work and competitive advantage I tried to achive, he raised the stakes as well. From what I could extract from him, he built a 3.2 short stroke motor with a MOTEC engine management system. He’s got a dual compartment fuel cell, which he can switch from pump gas to race gas, and a much improved suspension. We talked about the rest of the competition, two new entries in vintage foreign, a 1979 Maserati Merak SS and what we estimated to be a very powerful 1972 Pantera. As of this writing, the Maserati was having starting problems and someone told me they saw the Pantera getting loaded on a flatbed in Ohio.

Sam flew into Chicago, rented a car and drove it to South Bend where I picked him up at 9 PM at the airport rental car return. continue>