MP’s employees had a great time at the 24 hours of Lemons at MSR in Angleton Texas Oct 1/2nd 2011.
Our car was fast, it handled great, however we had a number of setbacks that held us back, and one that was serious enough we had to call it quits about 2 hours into racing on sunday.
Problems we had:
– Our drivers side rear spring came off of the perch, lodged itself on the lip and rubbed a huge gouge into our tire. Thank heavens the tire didnt blow on the track.
– Our front brakes were nuked after Charles set a team record of 2:00 on the track (best time on the track was 1:55) and the pads were destroyed, backing plate warped and the passenger side caliper piston cracked in half.
In this photo, you can tell that the rotors are purple. These rotors were put through hell and even after about 10 minutes of cooling it seemed as if they were probably 500-600 degrees!
New pads versus high speed repetitive hardcore braking pads
Even Hawk brake pads can glaze if you abuse them enough
Brake pads are not supposed to be warped like this
None of the problems above were serious enough for us to quit or give up, but the next problem we encountered was big enough that we had to give up on Sunday at about noon.
– One of our drivers – Ryan had spun out on the track, and was blackflagged. Once he came into the pits to be harassed by the judges they smelled fuel and we had to push our car back to our pit. Once we did that we found something amazing. The timing belt had walked to the drivers side, cut through the plastic cover, and then had SEVERED OUR FUEL LINE!!
We didnt have spare timing components /belts so we were’nt prepared to replace all of the timing components and we had to quit at that point.
We have’nt had a chance to find out what happened to our timing belt and what made it walk so far off course. It will be interesting to find out what happened.
Overall, we had a great time, our employees Ryan, Vincent, Will which never had any road race experience got a really good feel for it and really enjoyed themselves as well.
Photo of our scrubbed tires:
