Lined up and ready to go at Mid-Ohio Sports car course.

One Lap of America May 5 to May 12, 2007
Article provided by David Goodman.

Introduction & Car Preparation
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7 | Day 8

Introduction
This is my seventh running of the legendary One Lap of America (www.onelapofamerica.com). The one week long cross country endurance competition invented by Brock Yates, originator of the legendary Cannonball Run. In a nutshell 84 cars start at the Tire Rack in South Bend, Indiana, travel cross country to the following tracks on consecutive days and compete in time trials at those locations. The venues were: Autobahn Country Club in Joliet, Illinois; Mid-America Motorplex in Pacific Junction, Iowa; Miller Motorsports Park in Tooele, Utah; Pueblo Motorsports Park in Pueblo, Colorado; Hallet Road Racing Circuit, Hallet, Oklahoma, O’Reilly Raceway Park in Indianapolis, Indiana and finally Mid-Ohio Sportscar Complex in, well, in Mid-Ohio. 4900 miles later you wind up back at Tire Rack for a banquet and awards ceremony, vowing never, ever to do such a crazy thing again.

Car Preparation
I did very little to the car this preparation season besides repair some mechanical issues from last season and try to make the car more comfortable to take on the One Lap. The first issue was with the four speed 930 gearbox. It had been freezing in gear and on returning from Mont Tremblant last year the ring and pinion was making a horrendous howl. Sure enough, once I got it on the lift and drained the gear oil, I discovered three of the eight pinion teeth had broken off the pinion head. I’ve got to tell you that finding big hunks of metal in the drain pan can make you feel pretty lousy. I got the motor and transmission out of the car and disassembled the unit. The rebuild ended up taking forever. First of all it took an exceptionally long time to source the parts. The preferable choices would be to replace the 8:41 Ring and Pinion with another 8:41, or a more common 8:39 (stock ratio was 9:38). I called all over the US looking for either ratio but came up short. I finally found that a friend had a new 8:39 sitting in his basement that he bought years ago. The problem now was that no one in the US recognized the setup numbers or the manufacturer stamp, and the company it came from went out of business. It took another couple of weeks of calling around before someone finally deciphered the pinion depth setup. Over the next few weekends, my friend Chris Bennet and I rebuilt the gearbox and setup the new ring and pinion. Or at least I tried. Upon final reassembly, it was discovered that at one time in the life of this transmission, someone had accidentally swapped a 4.5 mm shim from the input shaft with a 3.5 mm shim on the pinion shaft. In plain English, every time I tried to bolt down the case the pinion shaft would seize. It took another couple of weeks before I discovered what the problem was, sourced the right parts and put it together for the final time. That thing was probably apart and back together a dozen times.

Another major issue at the end of last season turned out to be two faulty fuel injectors, one extremely lean and one extremely rich. For the uninitiated, too lean means that it does not provide enough fuel to the cylinder, too rich means that it delivers too much fuel to the cylinder. The end result was that the exhaust got so hot that it caught the back of the car on fire. Two new injectors, one rear bumper seal, some additional heat shielding, a liberal application of bondo on the fiberglass bumper and some paint solved that problem. I got lucky. That lean cylinder had the potential to severely damage the engine. We did a leak down test to make sure the lean cylinder was not damaged due to detonation, and thankfully it was not.

The remaining issues were relatively minor but important none the less. Both the front and rear windows leaked like a sieve. Last year in the rain, the windshield leaked so badly that water would spill down the dashboard, onto the roll bar and run (not drip) in a stream onto the center console. The rear leaked so badly that it would fill the rear seat well up with water. I made the mistake last year of leaving my helmet in the back and it too filled up. A tube and a half of common silicone did the trick; I pity the poor bastard that goes in there next, It’s going to take a whole day to clean that up. continue>