- 04/27/2016
- 4 Min Read
- By: Michael Hurczyn
American Endurance Racing at WGI - Team FCP Euro Weekend Recap
FCP Euro competed in its first endurance race last weekend. This was also the first race for the team, and the car. "It's about the journey, not the destination" as the saying goes, and this is our story.
Well, we learned a lot about preparation and logistics, and the gargantuan effort required to pull this type of event off. It is no small task to make a race car last for two 9-hour races. A single 9-hour race is more wear on the car than most track cars see in 1-3 years. I replaced every common wear component and did some premature routine-maintenance on the motor before the race. I did it all in three weeks for a race I knew about for more than three months. Anyone been there before?
A lot of those three weeks is a blur, especially the last week where the car needed to be ready for a shake-down at a BMW CCA driver's school at Lime Rock. On the Wednesday, I stayed up to 4:00 am setting the crank-scraper in place.
Friday night, I was up until 2:00 am finishing up the graphics.
At some point during all of this, my wife snapped this pic. When I saw it, I finally understood why everyone was telling me that I look exhausted!
Getting to Watkins Glen takes about 5 hours from my house. Christian Chandler has a nice enclosed trailer and dually, so he towed the car, tools, spares, and equipment. Ben McGilliard towed my pop-up camper and I drove out my street e30 as a "parts" car.
On the way to the track, I suddenly realized I forgot the spare wheel bearings I had purchased a few weeks before. I called my wife and was going to ask her to ship them, but then figured I'd try to call Gareth Foley and see if I bought another set, they could ship it. They have free shipping after all, and If I don't use them, I can always return them! I wanted to ensure their arrival so I spent the $20 on getting them shipped next day. Gareth got them out, sent me tracking info, and we got the special delivery before lunch the next day.
Ben took his role as crew chief very seriously. We thought we would need about 60-70 gallons of fuel for the entire 9-hour race, so Ben bought a big, red plastic 55-gallon drum to use for fuel. We also bought some quick fill Jaz No-Glug 7 Gallon jugs for refueling. It may seem trivial, but measuring fuel, transferring to various receptacles, and filling the car are serious jobs. If the car runs out of fuel, that's a not good for the motor or our race. If you spill fuel in the pits because you miscalculated what was left in the tank, that's not good either. We ended up using only about 58.5 gallons over the course of nine hours on Saturday, but about two of those hours were spent under caution so that saved us the balance of the fuel.
I really don't know what we would have done without Ben. He worked his butt off all weekend and is like an "E30 Rain Man." There was an issue with the tach that kept popping fuses. We had a fancy $500 circuit tester kit that showed a short right above the steering column. Ben had the instrument cluster out in 5 minutes and we were pulling off 27 year-old sticky cloth tape to try and find possible a cut or frayed wire. No such luck. Ben somehow remembered that the red/green instrument wiring also goes to the a few other spots in the car including the trunk light. We started investigating all possible spots and when we got to the trunk light, we noticed an open butt-splice that was probably coming into contact with with the metal trunk lid. Cut the wire, taped the end, and problem solved!
So, on to Saturday's race. We qualified 43rd on the grid due to a rainy and cold Friday qualifying session. We needed to get some last minute loose ends buttoned up early Saturday morning, but we made the grid on time and were all very excited and taking pictures.
About five minutes before the cars are ready to roll off, I realized I had made a bad rookie mistake. The timing transponder was sitting inside the trailer on the charger. Shit! I sprinted back to the trailer, grabbed the transponder, but couldn't find the locking pin. It must still be in the car I thought to myself. I got to the car and no pin. We tried to use tie-wraps, but it wasn't going to work well enough for me to risk a $500 transponder. The car went back to the paddock and since I still couldn't find the pin, I used a spring from my c-clamp pliers and bent the end. The car got back out but we had to start at the back of the grid in 66th place, however were able to stay on the lead lap, so while bad, not that bad.
AER rules stipulate that each team need to make five 3-minute pit stops. That divides the race into equal 90 minute stints. Since we weren't sure how long the car could last on fuel, and how long our drivers would last, we decide to just do one hour stints and so we would do eight total stops. We didn't have an in car radio system (anyone want to sponsor one?), so we just relied on a small digital clock taped to the steering column to judge stint time, and hand signals from the pits. Even with all of that adversity, we did really well. The stops, refueling, and driver changes went smoothly.
The race started late and the stints weren't all exact, so with only 1:20 to go, I decided to let Eric Twiste just finish out the race. Normally that would be more exciting, but one of the other E30's spun off into the tires in the long right-hander after the Bus Stop. It made a real mess of the tire wall and the corner workers didn't exactly hurry to fix it so the entire last 1:20 was run under yellow.
We ended up finishing in 4th in class and 30th overall! The car ran flawlessly for nine whole hours!! All we did was put fuel in, checked the tire pressures twice, and dumped some oil in about half way through. It was one of the most satisfying feelings to see the car cross the line after putting in over 100 hours in the weeks leading up to the race.
Saturday night we got the car up on jack stands to go over everything, put a wrench on all nuts and bolts to make sure nothing came loose, and change the oil and brakes.
We used Redline 20w-50 in the engine and took a sample to send to Blackstone Labs for analysis.
The PFC 08 break pads were awesome, and we could have probably gotten another nine hours out of them.
The E30's are self-preserving rust protection from the transmission fluid that spits out from the breather vent, so I topped of the Redline MTL.
The Dunlop Direzza DZII held up really well. We found some chunking on the left front so we replaced that tire, but other than that, we could probably run 2 more races on them.
On Sunday, we tried to be a little more aggressive with the strategy and decided to run 90 minute stints. We figured the car could easily go that long on fuel, so why not try to improve our finishing position. We started 45th on the grid because for day two, AER gridded the cars in class order starting with Class 5 on down.
I started the race since I didn't get the last stint in on Saturday. It was so much fun! We moved up from 45th to 29th and first in class after the first 80 minutes! On my in-lap, I heard a bang and the then the car stalled out while pulling hard in 4th gear through the esses.
I was able to be towed back to the paddock so we could diagnose and possibly fix the car. We pulled the valve cover and one of the exhaust valve wasn't retracted and the rocker moved freely. During a compression test, there wasn't any, so that was it. One of the exhaust valves somehow decide to drop down and high-five a piston ending our race.
The in-car video is pretty exciting. Here is a short clip after a yellow flag restart before the motor goes. I was able to pass 5 cars before start/finish when they threw the green flag!
I guess that's racing. Some highs. Some lows. I now have some work to do before the next race in Palmer June 17-19. We'll be pulling the head early next week, so keep an eye out for that write up.
A huge thank you to the entire FCP team, our other drivers and crew, and everyone that supported us through out the weekend!
