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Harbor Mill,
Sept 18, 2008.
It's been a while since the last update,
but here it is:
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Got to
scrutineering on Sept 13, the helmets were not an issue
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Spent way
to much time putting decals on the car at the St. John's
curling club.
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Went for
an odometer check - right at the start line for the
prologue, a local stopped and said you have a leak - this is
where the fun really began!
The Alfa was
pouring gasoline all over the road! At first we thought it
was a fuel hose that came loose, OK tighten it up, and get going.
Seemed good. Go to the gas station, fill it up check the
tire pressures and the fuel was coming out like a river!
We discovered that the copper (or brass) tube that is pressed
into the aluminum housing of the fuel pump had come out!
Having driven 1300 miles without a problem, here we were in St
John's with a disabled car just before the start of the event! After considering having it
towed, Jeff and I put together a quick fix with baling wire and
got back to our hotel.
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I caught Pino (the mechanic for my
car) in Indianapolis after he had watched the Moto GP.
He suggested
a fix with JB Weld that we were able to implement on Sunday
night after completing the prologue with the wire and some wood keeping
things together! Checking the fix on Monday morning before the
beginning of the first stage everything was great!
Needless to say, we got very little sleep because we wanted to
get to the car early in the morning to test the fix.
This event
has been challenging to say the least! Jeff and I (Jeff
more than me) have put a lot of time into figuring out how to do
the calculations for the event. I know time distance speed
stuff should not be that difficult, but we have had to do everything late into the evening,
with Jeff doing the split calcs during the day on the Palm
Pilot. Between the fuel pump issues and the calculations I
don't think we have gotten more than 5 hours of sleep a night
since Saturday!
The other
rookie mistake was trying to do everything by the quartz clock
which meant doing a lot of math at the start line - I won't get
into the details, but today we switched to a much easier system
of using a stop watch rather than the quartz clock.
The event
itself has been great, some really fun drives like the course in
Gander where we had the car in 4 wheel drifts around some
corners!
We have a few
samples of in car video at the following links
Links to
other reports:
Sept 11
Sept 12
Sept 18
Sept 23
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