I almost thought I'd never see a checkered flag with my RF-94 F1000 but it finally happened at Barber. It wasn't pretty, but I finally made it over the hump. I finished in 2nd place behind a very fast Ben Cooper (who was in first overall for a few laps). I surely would've finished behind the faster cars of Glenn Cooper and Chris McNitt (new owner of Sean O'Connell's car), except they didn't see checkered flags themselves this weekend.
I was a couple of seconds off a decent pace, but that was due mostly to a very rusty driver and a car that hasn't had any chassis fine tuning at all yet. My high point was a great race start, going from 9th to 5th overall and staying there for a couple of laps. Chris was within sight but pulled into the pits after a few laps with high temps. After that, I was content to wave people past and not risk my first ever FB finish.
Sounds easy enough, right? It was, until I was caught by surprise in the braking zone when I thought it wasn't yet time to brake. I had to swerve to miss Rosella in her FC, and went into a spin. Unfortunately, I bumped into her, broke my diffuser and caused her to spin. I felt terrible but was greatly relieved to see her get back up to speed quickly. We were both able to get going again, with me dragging diffuser remains. Later in impound I was extremely happy to hear she got the FC win. I'm sure that helped me avoid the wrath of an innocent race-incident victim.
That was Saturday. My car wasn't hurt bad enough to keep me from running on Sunday, but I expected the car to be a little slower with a half diffuser. During qualifying I was within a second of my best time. Even better news was my oil and water temps were pretty good in spite of very hot ambient temps. Well, my highest oil temp was around 255 F, water temps around 220 F. In the FB world, that's pretty good, and I have thoughts about making them better.
Unfortunately, halfway through Sunday's qualifying session I felt my engine start to tighten up. It was a surprise becasue oil pressure and temps had been good. I shut it down, coasted into the grass to be towed in. Afterwards, the engine would not turn over, so I loaded up early.
Today I had a chance to look at the data. Temps looked good and steady. So did oil pressure up until something happened. On the straight the oil pressure dropped suddenly from 45 psi to zero. I don't know the cause yet, but I can only imagine something like a broken oil pump part. The engine continued to run for 1-2 seconds with no oil pressure before I noticed the problem. I guess I'm pretty lucky not to have thrown a rod.
I'm hoping and expecting that it will be repaired in time for the ARRC.