Following the mayhem of MARRS1, this race weekend was meant to be a shakedown for my car, Fipper. Practice day was friday and, if the car checked out, I would run MARRS4 on Saturday and Sunday.
Session 1 started well enough, using my (very) old set of Hossier tires, with very low 1:30.x lap times. The new dummy light panel, installed by RP Performance worked well and provided me with a bit of reassurance that the engine was at not point about to blow up on me. The engine still seems a bit down on power but worked well.
Session 2 was my first time using my new FAST cooling shirt with my homemade cooling box and (steampunk) plumbing. That also worked well and really kept me cool and was really a good reward for the many trips to Home Depot to get the proper bits to get all the pipes connected. The potentiometer on the central panel seems wrong and does not seem to allow for the maximum water flow rate however and this is something I will need to sort out.
However, while the car was running well enough, and as I tried to take the left hander, uphill, turn 3 with a little less braking and more speed, the front right wheel hub broke off! This caused me to immediately loose all steering as a loud banging noise was accompanied by the view of my front right tire fall off the car and carrying on on it merry way while I jumped across the gravel pit. The car slid past the gravel pit and onto the slippery grass but I somehow kept it from running into the tire wall. It could have been worse and the only damage, aside from a lost hub, brake piston, caliper, disk and wheel, was a torn right fender (shredded by the wheel as it left he car). Watch the video here.
The car was quickly put back together but I had to skip one and a half test sessions while it was fixed and a new fender was attached to the car and the my new set of SM7 wheels were put on the car. Went out for three laps, after setting the tires to 26 pounds of pressure. Came back and measured pressures of 31 pound on all wheel except on the rear left one, which happens to be the brand new tire and the same rim where a new SM7 tire blew up during the first lap of the Quali race of MARSS1. Suspicion got the best of me and we found a leaking valve stem, likely the cause of the flat in MARSS1.
But things happen in three... so of course the next step was to find that one of the wheel lug nut was seized to the wheel stud and the stud was spinning in the hub itself. Unable to change the wheel, I had to skip the final test day session and call it a day and a weekend.
The plan is to know change all wheel hubs and nuts, as it is recommended to do regularly (and probably should have been done when I bought the car).
I am now looking forward to MARRS5 to see what will happen next... Stay tuned...
Screen shot of the in-car video showing the car skidding on three wheels while the driver side wheel carries on on its own.
Broken hub and missing wheel and disc brake... :-(
Damaged fender...
It took an hour or so to find the missing wheel in the shrubs, trees, thorns and poison ivy that are outside of Turn 3. Wearing shorts and sandals was not the best way to look for this wheel and it took a close look at the in car video footage to figure out where the wheel might be. Thanks to my friend Kai for helping out!
Closeup of the broken hub, still attached to the disc brake and the wheel.
New parts and bits being installed. Thanks Brian and RP!
Fender thrown away... Thankfully, this was the bad one to start with :-)