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Photo Gallery: http://vorshlag.smugmug.com/Racing-Events/ECR-040613/
Left: world famous top fuel drag racer Eddie Hill was racing in an Ariel Atom. Right: Mark Boothe in his Grand Sport C6, a NASA TT1 driver
So this day had a LOT better weather, with cool temps and sunny skies. Perfect "Spring in Texas" weather, without the hail storms. There were a lot more cars at this event, both from from the mulligan entries two weeks earlier as well as a few more entrants that heard about the now more regular "ECR run events", with The Two Brians in charge of running the day.
Amy was quick along with a handful of others in Red group this time, putting in some fast-ish ~2 minute flat laps on these godawful tires. She complained bitterly about the twitchiness of the car, wondering "What new parts are on it
now?!" And while we rarely give here the same parts set-up twice (always trying new things!) the issues sounded like they were from the "flipped" Kumhos. Well I needed to see how bad they were, so I stole the keys and one of her track sessions...
My 1:58 lap was a handful with the tires flipped and HORRIFIC traffic
The video above shows a lot of bad habits in the first few laps, both from a "rolling roadblock" driver in front of a train of faster cars, and from some frustrated drivers held up behind him, myself included. This was in the Advanced group now, so supposedly not full of noobs. There was a GTR driver blocking a line of cars 9 deep for 3+ laps. Poor Eddie Hill was stuck behind him the longest, and I got held up in the train behind Eddie's Arial. Problem was neither the Atom nor our Mustang had enough
extra power to pull by this modified GTR on the straights, but OMFG we were both held up badly in the corners. Guy was braking 300-500 feet early, coasting through the corners, then blasting out and blocking us on the straights. At this event we were supposed to wait for a point-by to pass, but this guy's arm was apparently broken, and his mirrors were blocked.
So after a lap and a half of of this nonsense I gave up - I only had one session to run the car that day and I really wanted to push for one lap - to try to see how much the tires were affecting the car's performance, if any. Eventually the guy nearly spun off track into Turn 4, where Eddie pointed me by, and into Turn 6 I passed him in his ridiculously early braking procedure. Apparently he had almost the entire Advanced group ready to kill him by day's end, so I wasn't alone. "Time for the Green group, pal"...
As I say many times in the video, the tires felt terrible beyond words. Flipping these Kumho's inside-out made for super twitchy car under braking, and mid-corner the car would swing wildly from under- to oversteer. So yea, don't ever flip a Kumho V710 inside-out! This isn't always the case on asymmetric marked tires, but Kumho MEANT it. Lesson learned - always try to learn something when we are at the track, even if it is a little thing about a certain tire brand's "mounting limitations".
Amy was back in the car for sessions 3 and 4 and having a good time. Her parents and her uncle arrived mid-day and were cheering here on and watching her drive on track. For the 4th session she asked and was allowed to take a passenger, her out-of-town uncle (above), who was all smiles in the right seat. She went out to take some ~8/10ths laps in the final Red session, and somewhere in Turn 2 on her first hot lap something broke...
Click for in-car video of the transmission going "BOOM!"
As you can hear in the video above, Amy knew something broke in the transmission and she even figured out that the other gears still worked and managed to get the car back around to the pits. Once she got back I took it for a quick spin around the paddock and realized that, yep, 3rd gear was GONE. All other gears worked and the transmission functioned silently, just minus one gear. Hmm....
It was the end of the day and we drove it into the trailer for a diagnosis back at Vorshlag. This ECR track day was still a lot of fun, with good cool weather and some quick-ish laps, other than the traffic in my session and the whole "trans go boom" issue.
Some Repair Work + Upgrades
So I'm not going to talk about the transmission repair, other than "the entire 3rd gear was blue" and it failed due to heat, not poor shifting or a bent shift fork, like I had assumed (many others have broken shift forks in these cars). It was fixed within 5 days, and I will leave it at that.
Now how it failed is still unusual. Amy and I are not ham-fisted, speed shifting Neanderthals... we both shift smoothly and quickly, but delicately. Three fingers to pull the shift ball back, a light palm to push upwards in the pattern, ala: the Bob Bonderaunt school/book/instruction. She and I both noted a little "snick" from the 2-3 upshift in a few early laps that day, but that was the only pre-failure warning; this and the wonky inside-out tire twitchiness were the only out of the ordinary things with the car at ECR that day. The trans fluid was at the proper level and is checked regularly, and is synthetic.
Again, we were told it was
heat that fatigued the gear, and 3rd gear was a different shade than all of the rest - which were inspected and given a clean bill of health (Ford is awesome, by the way). We took 4 sessions in the car that day (and only completed 3 of them) and the ambient temps barely got to 70°F, but we
think the damage was cumulative and from previous heavy heat days. We have used Redline synthetic fluids in this Getrag MT-82 from day one and it amassed 17,000 miles before 3rd let go. We had the OEM shifter and few issues shifting, unless the transmission was loaded up under power, when the body-mounted shifter was easy to mis-align with the transmission. No, we don't have pictures of the old parts, and I didn't see them. I won't and can't speak further on the transmission repair.
Red Mustang in for a check-up after TWS. Note the impact (tire klag? rock?) that the LF fog light grill took
Sure, we have put a lot of track and autocross miles on this car in the past 3 years and some sort of driveline failure was bound to happen, I guess. We still have a 100% stock engine, cooling system, and clutch. The rear axle has had heat issues already (melted axle seals, burned up stock differentials) as have the brakes (we've quit replacing the caliper dust shields, which I can melt and/or catch on fire in one session... sometimes in one
lap). The Tremec TR-6060 has provisions for an internal pump and external cooler, which the World Challenge and other endurance racers utilize, and this is something we are exploring for the Getrag, to prevent this from happening again. We will have to use an external pump, though.
Joe D from Tremec is also working with us to get a Tremec T56 Magnum 6-spd swap kit together for 5.0L S197 Mustangs, which a lot of people would like to see. There have been a few swaps but this will be a more comprehensive swap, with a driveshaft, clutch/pp, and proper shifter. The TR-6060 is a body-mounted shifter but the T56 Magnum is a direct mounted shifter, so driveline-to-body movements won't cause a mis-alignment. We are doing the T56 swap on his 2013 Boss302 Leguna Seca very soon - I will show the swap in this thread once it is complete, of course.
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