From October 2024 - So my track event at VIR on the weekend of the 10th & 11th was cancelled to the remnants of hurricane Debbie that hit the east coast. VIR themselves cancelled all events at the track that weekend. My registration for that event has been applied to September's event at Summit Point so that's my next track event. Before that though, I will be attending L'oe Show in Pottstown, PA again this coming weekend. I will be driving up Thursday afternoon and staying through the weekend! And then after that, I'll be hitting Sumospeed's Beach Bash, down in the Outer Banks, NC for another long weekend the weekend of September 14th.
Gonna start this post off with a recap of the past few events. I attended L'oe Show again for my second time. This is quickly becoming a world renowned gathering of VAG vehicles and is bringing out some top notch builds. All four days that I was up there, I saw nothing but sick cars and great vibes. I participated in the Die Hügelige Landschaft Fahren (The Hilly Countryside Drive) on Friday which was a great drive. I had my wife co-pilot for me and we only missed one turn . There's a insta360 video of that whole drive on my YouTube. I ended up meeting up with a cool photographer from Ohio who provided his services free of charge, we shot at three different locations throughout Saturday, a sample of his handy work is below.
After Lo'e Show, I once again hit the road and attended for the first time Sumospeed's Beach Bash, which takes place in Nags Head, NC. Unfortunately that ended up just a long weekend trip (drove down Friday afternoon and back Sunday morning), the initial plan was to go down Thursday morning and go back home Monday, but I had things going on with work that prevented that. The day of the show, Saturday, was decent, we got a quick rain shower which got the car filthy since it was super windy but here are a couple of photos of the car rolling into the event:
After those two events, I had another NASA HPDE weekend on September 21 & 22. The car had a fresh set of Toyo R88R's, an oil change, and brake bleed, along with the new auxiliary cooler ducting that I made a post about in August. The ducting definitely helped with getting air to the coolers as the car is in motion, and subsequently the oil temps were lower than in June, being about 260/270. That still isn't where I'd like to see them, but I'm not sure what else to do, short of changing out the coolers themselves for some aftermarket CSF ones, something I am not ready to do just yet.
I was planning on attending Fastivus and the Fortune Auto open house with the car, but as it seems is my luck with track events this year, I had something fail/break at the track in September. It seems I have become a victim of the Iroz billet main seal rubbing on the serpentine belt, causing the belt to fail and exit the chat. During session 3 of the track weekend, I all of a sudden got warning lights on my dash saying loss of coolant pressure, check coolant level, and that the car was overheating. I was able to safely pull the car off the track and turn it off (videos of this whole session will be going live on my YouTube in the next few days). I got towed back to the paddock and upon inspection the next day, I noticed that my serpentine belt was gone. I have yet to disassemble the car and confirm if the belt was rubbing on the main seal, but will update at the end of the month, when the car goes in to get the main seal swapped out and a new belt installed. I have done a coolant pressure test and confirmed that the coolant system holds pressure no problem, so that means that no coolant lines were taken out by the belt and that the reservoir is intact, so hopefully that means we can just refill and bleed that and be good to go. One positive thing that came out of that weekend was me taking and passing the test to move up to HPDE 3, so next season I'll be in that higher class, which means I will be one step closer to my goal of competing in time trials!
With all of that happening, it has essentially jump started my offseason changes. This winter we will finally be installing the 529 Innovations carbon roof, extending the cage to the front half of the car (with door bars), and installing the Nuke Performance air jacks. Along with these improvements, it is time to choose and install a new livery. I've been running the gold John Player Special inspired livery for two years, the same amount of time I ran the RedBull livery for, so this winter the car will be getting a new look. No decision has been made yet in terms of what the new look will be, but it will be inspired by a classic Audi livery. Along with the new livery, I will probably be changing the color of my wheel faces to match the new livery, and maybe i'll get around to measuring the wheels to finally be able to get some custom aero disks made.
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