Wet Skid Pad Runoff. At the TireRack, they have a skid pad that is covered by sprinklers.

Introduction | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4
Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7 | Day 8 | Day 9

Day 1 of Competition - April 30, 2004
Well, we successfully completed the first event of One Lap 2004. We finished the event about 6:45 EST which was called the Wet Skid Pad Runoff. At the TireRack, they have a skid pad that is covered by sprinklers. For those who don’t know, a skid pad is basically a circle of pavement that is about 250’ in diameter. The idea is to go around the circle as fast as possible without sliding the car off. Obviously, the faster you get around the circle, the better. By timing the cars around the circle, they can determine pretty accurately how many Gs the car is pulling. Gs are a measurement of force that is relative to the force of gravity at sea level. 1G is equivalent to the pull of the earth on an object. If you swing an object (like a rock on a string) there is a force that tries to break the string. That force is the same force that tries to cause a car to fly off the outside of a corner. Modern, high performance cars can generally pull 1G laterally, which when experienced can be a pretty unbelievable amount of force. Most daily driving barely reaches .5Gs or one half the force of gravity.

Today, the highest number we saw was just over 1G laterally. Now that might not seem like much since that is what many cars like Vettes and Porsches do, but that was in the RAIN. Today, that was done in a Viper. We didn’t quite have the numbers that the Viper had, but we did pretty good at about .72 or somewhere in there. We disconnected the front sway bars to try to get a bit more bite in the front and allow the car to be driven by the throttle, but as it turned out the car started to plow at about 40 MPH and so I let it plow a bit and just left it there, keeping the throttle steady so as not to get into the boost of the turbo.
After the run, I packet all our clothes and gear, while Dave reconnected the sway bar and adjusted the clutch to pickup a bit earlier. We waited a few minutes for George and Steve and hit the road. Right now it is about midnight EST and we are just getting on to Route 70 toward Tulsa. At the time of this writing, we are only about 260 miles into the leg, with about 400 more to go. At our last stop, Dave taped up the front oil cooler that is located in the air dam. Now the car is running at about 170 degrees which makes David very happy indeed.

TireRack is an absolutely enormous warehouse, it is a family owned and operated company.		As with all the previous One Laps we tend to eat like crap.

As with all the previous One Laps we tend to eat like crap. We started out pretty well, but have had to revert to fast food and beef jerky, mixed with Starbucks Iced coffee and wasabi peas. Power meals! It is really difficult to eat well when the only places you stop are Mobil On The Runs and Philips 66 stations. I have no idea how long-haul truckers do this year after year. It has to be brutal to the GI system. We only do it for a week, and it takes a few days to get back on track with eating right.

We traveled all night following the route book, taking I80/90 West from South Bend to Highway 57 South, then 70 West to Topeka. Leaving Indiana was miserable since it rained torrents and it seemed every road in every state was under construction and terribly bumpy. There were two occasions that I thought we had damaged wheels, but it turned out to be just really hard hits with pot holes. Throughout the leg, it felt that every time we would lift the throttle the car would pull to the left. It was subtle, but noticeable. I had written it off to the limited slip or tram-lining yet I asked David about it and he had noticed it as well. Maybe a quirk of the tires since the Pirellis we ran last year did something similar. Other than the weather, the run to Topeka was very comfortable. We did about 80 the entire way, only slowing down for road construction. The truckers seemed to keep out of our way, so we were able to make pretty good time.

We arrived around 4:00AM at the Ramada of North Topeka, which turned out to be a pretty good hotel for $60 a night. Dave wanted to get a good look at the track the next morning, so we programmed our phones to go off in 2 ½ hours from the arrival time. By the time we had checked in, that turned out to be about 2 hours of sleep.

Day 2 of Competition - May 1, 2004
We arrived at Heartland Park which is a pretty nice facility for racing. Heartland has plenty of parking, large grandstands, a drag track and a very entertaining road course. The weather is cloudy but holding out, however the rain didn’t hold out last night and there is standing water on the track. The water will probably dry by the time Dave goes out however it still could be greasy.

Dave and I walked the track, going over the line he would take around a course that has some pretty technical sections and some sections that are pretty straight forward but the entire track is pretty fast. Dave was pretty nervous which is a good thing, since the 930 does demand a pretty healthy amount of respect, regardless of how much experience you have in it. When we came back, I adjusted the tire pressures to 30 front and 34 rear. When I did this, I found out why the car pulled left all night last night. The front left tire had 22 lbs in it, the front right had 30, the rear left had about 37 and the rear right had 31. Geezz. No wonder it was all over the road when you changed the load on those tires.

I watched the front runners go first while Dave staged the car in pit lane. It is always impressive just how fast the front runners are. Ron Adee has become friends with David and he is always very fun to watch because he has interesting cars, and is definitely the best driver I have ever ridden with. Not only that, he won the entire event last year in a Corvette that was charged with Nitrous. He is amazingly fast for a person who doesn’t do this stuff professionally. This year he is running the event in a NASCAR-like tube framed truck that he and his team designed and built themselves. This truck has about 700HP.

After waiting for what always seems to be longer than it is, Dave is ready to go. The car launches pretty well, and he does his recon lap following a BMW M5 to work out the line. Dave staged at start/finish and went out strong. He made one hot lap and on the front straight going into the second, he went to shift from second to third and third was not there. As it turns out, fourth wasn’t either. Dave finished the run with only two gears, and had to match revs to get the car into second.

We did the obligatory check of the linkages and clutch to see if something had become disconnected, but that didn’t help third and fourth at all. We dumped the gear oil and checked the magnet on the drain plug to see if there were any shards of metal, but there weren’t any. We took off the linkage and tried to actuate the transmission by hand but had no luck. The gear oil that came out was a strange color with lots of shiny specks floating around in it, but still no hunks of metal. At that point, we started our quest for help. We needed to get the transmission out of the car so we could have someone work on it, but then what? Where would we take the transmission? We started asking around for help and I found an employee of Heartland named Chris. While I worked with Christ to get someone local on a Saturday with the equipment and time to help, Dave worked on the Internet and phone to get the parts for the gearbox, or a replacement in the Topeka area. Chris and I went to the Heartland offices to get to a faster Internet connection and a phonebook. We didn’t have any luck at all.

Finally, after having no luck at all with the phone or the various chat lists, we asked Dave Murray, the Porsche GT3 driver if he knew anyone in the area that might be able to help. He directed us to Brian Cosine (not sure of the spelling) and he helped us with getting hooked up with a shop in Boulder Colorado called PowerHaus. Boulder is convenient since that is in the general direction of the rest of the Lappers, and it is apparently the best shop in the country for early year 911 transmission parts and rebuilds. Roger Brown, the owner of PowerHaus said he would do what he could on a Sunday to get us back up and on the road by the end of the day. This is what One Lap is all about. Crazy phone calls to people who are a bit crazy themselves, and every one of them more than willing to pull out all the stops to make something happen. The only problem was how to get the car from Topeka to Boulder. That was when we asked the help of more of the Heartland people. Jeff Engross and Bernie Smitchlawn (I know I blew both their names) helped get us hooked up with a trailer and a truck to take us to Colorado. We went back and forth between us driving, and one of the Heartland guys driving. Then once we thought we had it figured out, it turned out the trailer we were going to use was covered with hay. It would really be crappy if we got half way to Boulder and a wheel fell off some rusty farm trailer.

Bernie thought he could hook us up with a rental trailer and truck, since he knew the Penske rental owner. The owner initially balked, but Bernie said to him, “look, these boys need help, so god dammit, go down there and open the shop for them.” We eventually ended up with a 15’ 6 wheel box truck and two axle car trailer – thankfully with automatic brakes. While David went for the truck, I packed up the car in preparation for it to go on the trailer. While packing, Dave called and said he has been “round the barn” on this one, since when he arrived at the rental, the person insisted the truck and the trailer were at Forbes Field, right next to the track. Dave went to get the truck and trailer, and only the trailer was at Forbes. So he called the guy and he said the truck was at a different location across from the rental shop. So Dave went back to the rental place and low-and-behold, the truck was there all along. After grabbing the truck, Dave went back to Forbes and hitched on the trailer and returned to Heartland Park.

We drove the car up on to the trailer, after Mike, the director of Heartland facilities, found some loose pieces of aluminum grandstand seat to use as a pre-ramps. Apparently these car trailers aren’t built to have cars with only 2” ground clearance loaded on them. Mike, by the way, needs special thanks since he trucked Dave all over Topeka searching out this truck. Thanks Mike.

Once the car was strapped down, Dave took the helm and we headed to Boulder. Steve and George waited all this time for the trailer to arrive and followed us west until they had to break away to Colorado Springs. We continued on to Boulder, which is just north-west of Denver. The truck-trailer combination towed extremely well. It seemed the big GMC didn’t even know the car was back there. As it turned out, we made about the same time we would have had we been without the truck. Funny thing, as we were working on the motor a bit later, Dave pointed to the max 45 MPH sticker on the inside of the tongue. I suppose 45 is acceptable since we were comfortable at almost twice that. We arrived at about 4:00AM at PowerHausII and since this place is in the back of a single story building with little parking, we had to do some fancy maneuvering with the truck and trailer to get the car into position where the engine could be dropped. continue>