ChampCar -- Pitt Race race report

[greg1647545532]

I've talked some about my ChumpCar (now ChampCar) experience here before -- tl;dr, my friends and I bought a former Lemons car for $2200 (with trailer!) and proceeded to spend 3 races blowing the turd up over and over again before eventually being told we would no longer be welcome at future Chump events unless we completely redid the garbage roll cage that was in it. So my cousin went rogue and bought an E36, it took us 6 years to finally get it together and enter another race. And we finished one!

 

 

Full disclosure since this comes up a lot, this is now a $15,000 car and it's still a turd. Racing is expensive, even if you come in last in the slowest racing series you can find.

 

I figured out that every successful ChampCar team follows the same formula of 4 guys --

1) A wealthy financier

2) The wealthy financier's slightly less wealthy friend who is still willing to pay way too much to race a turd

3) An ace mechanic

4) A hotshot driver

 

In our case, our wealthy financier and his friend aren't that wealthy, our ace mechanic never worked on BMWs before, and I'm our "hotshot" driver, so... we're starting on the back foot in all areas.

 

On Saturday, despite doing 4 superfluous pit stops just to get used to cycling drivers, we somehow managed to come in 31st (out of 74) overall, 11th (out of 29) in class, just due to attrition and staying running.

 

On Sunday we completely burned out the clutch with 1 hour to go.

 

Anyway, here's some pictures:

 

 

 

We only got 20 minutes of track time on the test-n-tune Friday due to a leaky output seal in the differential. This seal is a special order for every parts store, including BMW parts departments, so we would not have even started the first race if we hadn't happened to be garaging next to another E36 team with a very generous group of guys and a spare differential. They donated a seal to us, along with all of the screwy BMW specific tools we needed to change it. I cannot overstate how fucked we would have been, time and time again, if those guys hadn't been there. The racing community is the best.

 

 

 

 

One thing we did learn from our 20 minutes of testing was that we couldn't hear a goddamn bit of exhaust note from the bone stock exhaust. After literally 2 hours of arguing, I snuck under the car and solved the problem. If it's stupid and it works, is it really stupid?

 

 

 

Sunrise at Pitt Race.

 

 

 

Last minute checks on Saturday morning. Note our stupid-ass 18" style BBSes that came on the car. I hate those wheels, I think 3 of them are bent.

 

 

 

 

 

Nerves were high waiting for the race to start.

 

 

 

My cousin after taking the checker. You can see the Safety 3rd guys in the background there, they're the ones who donated diff parts to us.

 

 

 

 

During post race inspection, we found this. I guess the pads sometimes get hung up on the caliper bracket. Never seen that before. Glad it was an 8 hour race and not a 9 hour race.

[greg1647545532]

 

We saved these wheels for day 2 because the tires were technically illegal. Slight rain off and on but overall not a bad day weather-wise.

 

 

 

Little bit of damage on the left rear from day one, couple of our drivers were extremely rusty.

 

 

 

By the time I got in the car the clutch was all but gone and I could only manage about 6 or 7 laps before I got stuck at the bottom of Pitt's big hill and had to get dragged off the track. But as you can see I was still happy with the weekend.

 

 

 

Thanks for reading!

[BuckeyeROC]

Man, that is awesome! Bucket list stuff right there, congrats!

[10phone2]

greg great stuff. sounds like a blast.

[craig71188]

Wish I'd of known you were there. A bunch of central Ohio regulars were pitted by the "usual" pit out drive - Motorcars (VW Golf), Auto Body Specialists (RX-7) and the Hounddogs E36 (my ride for the weekend). We had a great run Saturday (3rd in class / 7th overall, but couldn't get the cautions to fall right on Sunday and wound up 18th O/A and I think 11th(?) in class.

 

It's only taken 3-4 years and a good bit of trial and error to get a very limited mod E36 to be reliable and fast.... We have gone from struggling to finish both races, to consistent Top 20 overall, to pretty regular Top 10 finishes. Still working on a class win or overall podium position, but now that we have reliability, we are working on plans for next year.

 

PM me sometime, we should chat.

 

BTW, the car looks good!

[Smokey]

Looks like lots of fun Greg, thanks for sharing. After racing karts for a year it’s really easy to see how car racing expenses could escalate very quickly.

[cruizin01]

How awesome. I love Pittrace. Im sure actually racing there would be even more fun than the HPDE's Ive done there.

 

I tell myself I would love to go "racing" but Im sure I dont want to invest the money and time to actually do it. But props to you and your friends. We watched some spec e30 racing at MidO a few weeks ago and you could tell how much those guys love doing what they do.

[coltboostin]

E36 is great chump car.

 

Great work! i will be in Gainesville next week for the granddaddy- the "2000 Challenge"

[greg1647545532]

Wish I'd of known you were there. A bunch of central Ohio regulars were pitted by the "usual" pit out drive - Motorcars (VW Golf), Auto Body Specialists (RX-7) and the Hounddogs E36 (my ride for the weekend). We had a great run Saturday (3rd in class / 7th overall, but couldn't get the cautions to fall right on Sunday and wound up 18th O/A and I think 11th(?) in class.

 

It's only taken 3-4 years and a good bit of trial and error to get a very limited mod E36 to be reliable and fast.... We have gone from struggling to finish both races, to consistent Top 20 overall, to pretty regular Top 10 finishes. Still working on a class win or overall podium position, but now that we have reliability, we are working on plans for next year.

 

PM me sometime, we should chat.

 

BTW, the car looks good!

 

Damn, wish I would have known. I knew the AutoBody Specialists RX-7 was going to be there because I talked to someone named Tim at C&C a few months back, but I only popped over there briefly and only because I was looking for an OBD scanner (spoiler, teams that run carbs don't typically have OBD scanners). Even though the event went "well" for us we still spent pretty much every minute of daylight in the garage working on the car, so I didn't have much time to socialize.

 

I figured the HoundDog E36 was Columbus related but I hadn't seen it before. I used you guys to benchmark our performance, not that we were anywhere in the same league but I needed a way to see where we'd be if we got serious about pit stops and driver changes, and your team seemed like a pretty consistent, non-cheaty E36 to judge against.

 

I told the team that now, having finished a race, I don't really want to come back and shoot for "last but finished" again. We never even got that far with our old Prelude so I figure, now we're at that point, I want to start streamlining the process and shoot for something like you describe, top 20 or something. But it's tough, we immediately got down to "what needs fixed, what needs upgraded" and I was like, whoa whoa whoa guys, that's $5k in work, let's settle down here. Stupid racing drugs.

[C-Mart]

Keep it up. I started endurance racing last year and my only regret is not starting sooner.