continued from above
The wheel bearing noise was getting loud in session #1 and sounded like it might be the right front tire, and not the right rear as I had thought? We came in after our 20 minute session and I took a look - tire pressures went up to where they should be but the RF wheel bearing felt tight when I rocked the RF wheel, while it was in the air. I took Amy out with me in A1 session #2 and we didn't make it 100 yards before we knew something was WAY wrong; came right back in after one lap for a better look.
Click the video below and you can hear the loud
WAH! WAH! WAH! noises above the wind noise, but it was VERY apparent in the car that something was BAD wrong with the TIRE now. Steering wheel was shuddering like mad - and it wasn't the electronic gremlins this time, it was the tire. Sure enough, the RF tire had grown about 3" in diameter on one part of the inside shoulder; it was grossly out of round. This happened during the half hour of down time
after I had re-checked hot tire pressures and wiggled the RF wheel bearing immediately after session #1. WTF? Costas :" Oh yea, that tire has popped some cords".
Click either pic above for in-car video and hear the RF tire doing its death howl
The tread looked fine but the carcass of that Hoosier was toast; luckily I had a back-up plan and brought along a pair "vintage" 305/30/18 Hoosier A3S5 autocross tires with a DOT stamping date of 2005... so that's like 7 year old tires. I had used these early on with the E36 LS1 Alpha car, so they were good
back then... but "then" was around 2007. Amy and I pulled the Right Front and one Rear wheel off, took them to the MSR "Office Shop", and they swapped on the 305s for us (sure wish I had my Taylor Dunn track vehicle up and running at this point! That was a lot of walking around with wheels and tires). We put these 305s on the back and moved two of the better 275s up front for a non-square set-up. Not ideal, but it was what I had for spare R compound tires in the trailer. Went out in session 2 with Amy riding along again (mistake!). Here's that highlight video...
Click for video from my A1 Session #3...mistakes and all
So I had one warm up lap where I took it pretty easy, trying to scrub the rear tires in - they really
did have some OLD rubber that needed to go away. Come around for my first hot lap and got sideways under braking and had a quick off and on. I managed to steer around the curbing and saved the splitter from curbing crash testing, but Amy was still
pissed. This was her daily driver, she bemoaned, and "you are never tracking my car again!". Well, crap... so I took it easy for the rest of session #3 but still managed to go 2.2 seconds quicker with the old 305mm rears,
running a best lap of 1:47.26 lap. The rear was still a bit loose in high speed corners but it was clear that the car responded quickly after having
a wider rear tire... All of you that think I'm crazy for wanting more than a 275mm tire, well, I beg to differ.
I do wish we had found a trunk in time to make a wing mount (I have a 68" wide CF APR GTC-300 wing sitting here waiting to be mounted to
something), as I think it could have gone much quicker with some rear down force.
Left: The RF tire #2 gave its life to the MSR-H gods. Right: The 305 looked right at home
So we came in after she said she had "had enough", checked the tires and found another RF tire that had been destroyed. WTF?! There was only one corner on the track where you really load the RF going clockwise, but it was the fastest turn there. Was it a combination of a bad wheel bearing and this corner? Too much negative camber? Something else? We checked the RF wheel bearing again (it now had some serious resistance when spun - took a lot of force to turn the hub by hand; not good), and the camber (-3°, right where it should be). I think we're done for the day... not going to kill a 3rd tire to maybe squeak out another second or two, if I'm lucky. The higher powered cars at TX2K12 were far quicker than I was going to get to today - Costas GT-1 car had the top spot but some race prepped big power GTRs, a couple of Vipers and Z06s, and a Supra were all several seconds faster than the Mustang. I wasn't going to make the Top 5 Time Trial shootout, so Amy and I mounted the 18x9s and RS-3 Hankooks for the upcoming National Tour on Saturday and loaded up the car.
Costas had a pretty good day - his GT-1 car ran great in 3 sessions, putting in more trouble-free laps all day than I've seen that car do in the last few events combined, where I saw it run. He was pushing the car harder each session but taking it pretty easy; he had a small deficit going into the Time Trial but was confident the car had more time in it. Sure, he had an off in session #1 on some older/harder tires, but we gave him sufficient quantities of grief. GT1 Lawn Service, "We cut your grass fast!". It was on FB before he had even un-belted; by the time he had his helmet off there were 3 more "captions" for that pic.
So his GT-1 car, 3 GTRs and a Viper went out for the Time Trial Shootout at the end of the day. 3 hot laps later a GTR was on top - wish we would have had used his helmet/pit radios so he would have known to push it on lap#3. There was some potential blocking by the first place car but he didn't mind and still had a great day - anytime you get to bust off a lot of trouble-free laps in a GT-1 car on 14" wide slicks, its a good day.
Click the above left picture for the Time Trial Shoot-out Compilation Video
After we left the MSR-H site we went and ate some kickass Mexican food at Los Cucos, then made it back to our hotel and crashed. We had another busy 3 days ahead of us....
...Texas National Tour continued in part 2, tomorrow...