The Charlotte Motor Speedway track administrator accidentally
double-booked the track. After several hours of negotiations yesterday, the race series administration announced they were going to change our race around.
Instead of racing from 8a-6p, our race would be moved to 8pm-2am. Since
that's cutting our 10hr race down to 6hr, they've compensated us by
giving us a partial refund, and arranged a 2nd race in November
that's 10hr and will be free for those registered for this race.
Although I'm too old to be staying up until 2-3am, at leastb) I'm about to drive a race car under the full lights at CMS
Second switch:
The stinkin' kill switch. As it turns out, our beast of a Z31 is very hard to kill. Getting our car's wiring straightened out has lagged behind some of our other efforts. Chump rules require a kill switch be installed that acts as a master power cutoff for the vehicle. Our team has worked on that a bit the last week, but progress has been painful. A late night Thursday night didn't produce a working kill switch. We need to cut both ignition and car power. Just taking the battery out of the circuit won't kill the car since it continues to run off the alternator.
Friday morning, we showed the car off to Husqvarna's marketing department, and then around noon we went over to Eric's to try to finish off the items needed to pass tech. Gates opened at 11am, and tech was to be open from 12-5p. According to the rules, if the car didn't pass tech by 5pm, our team had to leave to go to the driver's meeting, and we would have to tech Sat morning, taking lap penalties while we waited. So we were very "motivated" to get this stuff wrapped up.
12pm passed by. 1pm passed by. 2pm passed by. 3pm passed by. We were kind of getting a little nervous. Finally, Travis and Duncan and Eric applied their brilliant intellects and powers of deductive reasoning and came up with a crazy solution (that seems to work). Jason, sensing a disturbance in the force, swung by Eric's house on his way up from Columbia and helped electrocute Duncan just before we finished. So we got the car to the track by maybe 3:30 or so.
We tech'd our personal safety gear, then put the car in the (long) line for tech inspection. It immediately sprang a leak from a hose, which we had to tweak. You know you've done a heck of a job on the wiring, when the inspector asks you to open your hood and sees the craziness and says "What happened here?"
Other than the nasty (hilarious) comments, we passed tech without any issues.
Photos and more updates coming later.
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