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From: Alan <nuh-uh@nope.com>
Newsgroups: rec.autos.sport.f1
Subject: OT: My 2024 BCHMR Day 1 (for all my devoted followers)
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2024 10:18:25 -0700
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Well, it was great to get back on track.

With the help of the son of one of the previous owners of my previous 
car, two weekend days of work leading up to this past weekend put the 
car almost back together (although that "almost" came back to bite me a 
little bit). We went through the car—checked and bled the brakes and 
clutch, changed the engine oil and made sure everything was properly 
bolted, and when it was all done, we discovered that:

1. We needed new brake pads all around.

No problem! Our local race supplier, (shameless plug for Frank Micucci 
of driversedgeautosport.com) promised to have brake pads for me first 
thing Saturday morning and changing pads on a formula car such as mine 
is normally a 15 minute job at most.

2. The battery needed to be replaced. The car has an alternator, so it 
will run if started with a jump battery, but then you need someone to 
come to pre-grid to jump you again when the one minute signal is given, 
and if you should happen to kill the engine in a spin... ...well, not 
having a working battery makes for too many problems.

No problem! After much searching for a less expensive option than the 
Odyssey PC545 (now renamed ODS-AGM15L) which really was overkill for a 
car that wasn't running a total loss system (thanks to the Honda engine 
rule requiring that an alternator be included) and which was out of 
stock in the locations that had it for the best price, I found out that 
lithium-ion batteries have come down in price a lot, and I could get a 
200A (cranking amps) NOCO NLP5 for $127 from Amazon with free 2-day 
delivery. 1.5lb vs 11.4lb.

So all was looking good, except:

1. It appears that quality control at Hawk Performance isn't all it used 
to be, and when I went to install my new Hawk "Blue" pads into the LD20 
calipers... ...they wouldn't fit! At first, I assumed I hadn't retracted 
the caliper pistons far enough, but closer inspection showed that it was 
the overall width of the backing plate that was just marginally too big. 
It appears that the backing plates are punched out of sheet steel and 
the punching dies are starting to wear out.

Fortunately, in a racing paddock you have neighbours and my neighbour 
(and good friend) Marty Knoll (shameless plug for MK Technologies; maker 
of quality pit equipment for racing at almost every level) had a trailer 
with both an angle grinder, a vise, and electric power (note to self: 
add DeWalt cordless angle grinder to my tool arsenal), and so I was 
looking at the depressing prospect of spending perhaps 30-40 minutes 
grinding down the width of 8 pads so that they'd fit properly.

Even more fortunately, when I grabbed the first pad of the 8 to fit onto 
my car, I by chance grabbed the one that fit the worse of all of them. 
So the grinding ended up taking only 15 minutes or so. But still, that's 
a 15 minute job that ended up being 30-40 minutes; maybe even a few more 
as I discovered I'd run out of the cotter pins that we use to hold the 
pads in place and I had to round up some new ones.

2. And I'd forgotten just what a pain it was to get beneath the cover 
that reveals both the battery and the car's ECU and actually change the 
battery. It was clear that it was worth removing one of the front 
suspension's coil-over dampers to gain better access. And then...

....I hadn't reckoned with the fact that the new battery was a lot 
shorter from terminal to terminal than the Odyssey I was replacing. The 
Odyssey was 5.56" between terminals and the NLP5 from NOCO was only 4.5" 
long overall. Fortunately, the NOCO had enough different options for 
connecting the main leads that I was able to use the connection from the 
side of the battery to make everything fit.

So with both of those jobs running long (and with a 20 minute forced 
hiatus in the time before the first session for the drivers meeting), I 
ended up missing the practice/qualifying session for the combined open 
wheel and sports racers group. Honestly, not a big deal, but it did mean 
that I would have to bed my brakes on the pace lap for the first race 
(which was pretty easy as I was starting from the back and I wasn't 
changing compounds anyway).

So, first race (and all of these sessions are short in vintage racing—15 
minutes) I started from the back of the pack, hung back enough that I 
could do "lunges" forward followed by hard braking to get enough heat 
into the pads and rotors, and when the green flag dropped, I quickly got 
by all the Formula Vees, the very slowest of the Formula Fs and worked 
my way past Erle and Keith and was hoping that the race would last long 
enough that I could close up on the single FC in the field and take the 
outright victory (he was a novice, and I'd already noticed on the 
practice day Friday that he wasn't yet running good enough lines, so 
there was probably a chance). No luck. I don't have times yet, but first 
in FF, second overall and I was probably 2-3 seconds faster than the 
next fasted FF even running on two year old used tires.

Next race, my best time in Race 1 meant that I was gridded 2nd next to 
the FC, so I figured I was in with a chance of winning outright. As the 
race started, I found it pretty easy to keep up with him on the first 
lap—not really a surprise, but I think it surprised him and so after 
keeping pace with him for all of lap 1 and most of lap 2, he eased off a 
little in turn 9 of that lap and let me by. Talking to him afterwards, 
he confirmed what I thought at the time: he wanted to watch my lines for 
a while and figure out how a 1.5l Formula F Honda with maybe 118 
horsepower could keep up with his 145hp Pinto-engined FC. And for the 
next however-many laps of the race we did that. And he learned that if 
you want to be fast, you have to use ALL the road.

I'll post a video shortly and you can see for yourself how much room he 
leaves on corner exit.

But for the last 3 laps of the race, he clearly felt that he'd learned 
enough, and I sensed that he was going to try and get back past me for 
the win. And that's when he learned that being faster and getting past 
someone are two very different things.

Unless you have so much greater power and speed on the straights (and 
assuming you drive a line that lets you unleash that speed and power at 
the corner that exits onto the straight), you're going to have to pass 
in a braking zone at the end of the straight. And suddenly, I wasn't 
driving a line that used all the width of the track—entering from wide 
and exiting from wide. Suddenly, I was braking for each corner where 
there was a realistic opportunity to pass from the MIDDLE of the track. 
For three laps, I defended each time he was in a position to make a 
late-braking pass attempt.

The first time I did it in turn 1 of the ante-penultimate lap, he tried 
to late-brake and go around the outside of me, and that is almost never 
a winning strategy unless you're trying it in the first of two linked 
corners. Then outside becomes inside in the second corner...

....but then of course, you'd defend that differently. 😎

So for three laps, I frustrated all his attempts to get around me, and I 
took the outright race win.

Tomorrow would tell a different story, but we'll get to that.