Friday night the RV was packed up, the car was strapped to the trailer, and all I needed to do was get a good night’s sleep before heading to Scott’s Bottom and get back to racing. Even though that’s supposed to be fun, I could barely sleep next to this growing sense of dread and nervousness. At 4am sleep could no longer hold me, so I fired up the old 454, hooked up the trailer, and set off. When I arrived at the farm, I got the car unloaded and set up the RV:
While I didn’t know it at the time, that was foreshadowing the weekend I was about to have: Freaking Beautiful!
The weekend was to be two entirely separate points events like the regional two-days usually are but this time there was a twist: Instead of Sunday being a short session, we were going to run a full second day. With 11 runs on Saturday and 10 on Sunday, the car was about to get punished.
The car just ran great both days. The whole idle situation is really irritating, but other than that it was fine. On Saturday one of the vacuum caps that had dry rotted popped off and then Sunday I de-beaded a tire, but neither of those affected my lap times or caused me to miss a run. The motor mounts held up great:
I got out driven by a little bit under a half-second per lap on both days so I had to settle for a couple of P2 results, but when it was all over on Sunday afternoon I crawled out of the car and jumped on the roof to celebrate. While I do still want to get it back into the garage and up in the air to do a thorough inspection, preliminary indications are that the motor mount problems are finally whipped.
