MARRS 5 came and went. Took part of the Practice Day on Friday, waking up early and getting to the track before 8am. Worked on my cool suit electrical connection, removing many iffy electrical cables and replacing them with something cleaner. Also replaced the potentiometer in the console control panel with a proper FAST timer. The timer is nice and works nicely. It comes with a funky Handerson connector and I had to hunt one down on Thursday but found a pair so that the installation could be as clean as possible. Also mount a new RAM mount on the center console to hold my phone while driving. All of that work, including switching tires for some new (old) takeoff tires, checking oil, cleaning windshield, torquing wheels, etc... too a couple of hours. I therefore had to skip a couple of test sessions. It was a light day and we only ran two run groups on Friday so there were plenty of driving sessions, 20 minutes apart.
The car ran fine in the afternoon and the electrical glitches seem gone. Car felt somehow less responsive than I remembered the old engine did. RP did not have time to dyno the car so I have no idea how many HP the engine is producing but it seems that it is a lot less than the 115-120 that the car had last year with the old head. I am hoping that this is caused by the car not really having been tuned up but we will only find out once I can get things set up to get the car really properly checked out. Last time I saw the car being dyno-ed, during the MARRS 4 weekend, the car was making less than 105 HP. I was told that it was because the tires were shot but I am not sure I believe that is the whole problem. During Practice Day, Flipper was hardly any faster that the RP 71 rental, which is an SSM and not an SM. I also seemed to only be able to keep up with SSM cars. But the car ran and I was rather happy about that. This was the most track time I had in over 6 months.
Saturday came and it was time for the Qualification and the Qualifying Run. My fears about the car being sluggish (or the driver) were confirmed as my times were not great, even after switching to a new set of Hossiers. The new tires gained me 0.5s or so but I was still really off the pace and qualified 18 our of 21 for Sunday's Race with a lap time of 1:30.5.
Obviously, with a car (or a driver) this uncompetitive I had to adjust my attitude for the big race on Sunday. I started on the grid being car 17 and was determined to make the best of it and see if I could at least have a race against the SSM cars running (slow) in the SM group.
The race was a lot of fun and I had to fight like hell, made several mistakes, but ended up driving the car faster and consistently. I learned to drive a slow car faster and in a way it was more rewarding than driving a fast car slow. The race video is available here and you can see that there was quite a lot of fighting back and forth for the 18 laps of the race with two other cars. I ended up 14 out of 21 in a pretty fast group, which made me moderately happy.
What is next? I need to figure out what is going on with the car and why SSM cars can pull away from me in a straight with no drafting....
The entire video of the race, which include the driver's view from Car 17 too can be found here.