Yesterday I was at a Toyota dealership doing some work and I heard a noise that sounded something like somebody trying to set the advance timing on a Club Spec Miata. Well, it wasn’t a Miata but a Nissan pickup truck that had been traded as a “clunker”. 20 seconds later it sounded like one of the pistons had become detached from a connecting rod. Then, mercifully, it stopped.
This is what happens when the Feds finally get around to paying a dealer for a “cash for clunkers” transaction. I think the substance that went into the crank case shortly before the Nissan’s demise is called sodium silicate – its use was prescribed in the 100 plus page description of how the program would work (or not, in some cases). I believe we are about 20 days removed from the end of the program and there are more vehicles waiting for destruction after this one… 10 days, my ass.
Anyway, when the automotive equivalent of Jack Kevorkian showed up with a second Nissan (a Pathfinder) I took out my phone to make a little video.
I think that this has some potential as a 24 Hours of Lemons “penalty”…
There are not words sufficient to describe how cool it is that a bunch of guys that like racing were able to pull something like this off. Seriously, they are 99.9 percent of the way to a functioning racing facility.
Being from Hood River it seems that we are among the closest active racing residents to this new facility – that makes it even cooler for us. So Sunday, Garth Levin, Jonny Davies and I visited Oregon Raceway Park for the first time since we had attended a tour in November of 2006, shortly after they had cut the original path through the fields that now contain the race track.
This is going to be a challenging place to race. It seems that first they will run races in the clockwise direction, but the track was conceived with the notion that it could be run counter clockwise, as well. I think it looks much better clockwise than counter. My biggest concern is turn 1 in the counter direction – it will be fast and scary, and it doesn’t get really scary until you leave the track. There is a nice place to land the medivac helicopter near where the cars will finally finish crashing, though. I think it will be a while before this track races in that direction. Everything else I’m worried about looks like it could be handled by mid-week.
Jonny Davies was the driver on Sunday – he is one of the finest amateur race drivers in the country. I was in attendance to collect data and help with the car – the same car that I’ve been racing this year and was used in the 12 Hours of the Cascades and 25 Hours of Thunderhill last fall. Garth came along to fix anything I broke while working on the car.
We use the AiM data acquisition system in all of the cars and I also gathered some video, and for one session taped a small Garmin GPS device to the dash. Here are some interesting factoids from his second session in the clockwise direction:
Top speed (clockwise) – 98.8 mph
Best Lap Time (clockwise) – 2:04.671
Elevation Gain / Loss – approx 400 ft
To put things into perspective, Pacific Raceways, the track with the most elevation gain and loss in the Northwest, has about 140 ft change per lap. According to our little GPS unit (with a slow sampling rate), ORP is somewhere around 400 ft in just over the same distance!!!
It is a shame that there will not be a race at ORP this year. It was on the ICSCC schedule up until last week, and then it seems a new interpretation of some rules ended the fun. For sure, there are still some safety issues to work out. But, in racing anything is possible as long as everybody pulls in the same direction – for some reason they aren’t.
Again, I can’t say how impressed I am by this group of people that did what many thought was impossible. This is an awesome accomplishment and the sooner ORP is raced on the quicker the issues of amenities and safety will be addressed, and the facility expanded.
