TeamUBR

The 2010 season is kicking off with some excitement.  We made the trip for a one day test at Putnam Park to see what all the winter work did for the car.  The results are very promising; the car is very predictable and more importantly very tunable.  Jim was able to make small changes to the setup to help the car off the corners and was able to dial some of the push out of the car as well.  Some of the smaller improvements work great as well, the radios were a big help to get real time information from Jim and I could give him feedback from the track to plan our next change.  The Traqmate data system was also very helpful to really analyze each lap and help find more speed.

The end o f the test was equally exciting but not in a good way.  Coming off turn 4 at Putnam, a high speed left hander, the car was a little loose, but not in a evil bad way.  This was typical to previous laps but apparently was about 6 inches closer to the outside edge of the track.  The car slipped off, then hooked and shot straight across the track.  The ground wasn’t all that smooth; the splitter caught a bump ripped it off the car along with the bumper and some other minor parts. The car came to a halt in a knee deep swap of mud and water.  Clearly a driver error, but a lesson learned for the race next month.

Jim worked all week; Cheryl ordered a few parts, with express shipping, and who would have guessed by Friday we were on track at our first points event at Gateway.  However it seemed that all that mud and water was not good for the power steering pump it failed just few laps into our first practice on Friday.  Jim jumped back into action put on a replacement, it also failed, but the next one was the charm.

The Gateway event turned out to be a significant milestone for Team UBR’s record book, our first race win, and a new track record.  The field was small just two cars in AI, but a win is a win in the history books and allows us to lead the points going into the season’s second event.

This weekend demonstrates just how much of a team sport this racing thing really is, many thanks to Jim for all his hard work, to Cheryl for chasing down parts exploring shipping options.  All this work made for a very fun weekend and a great start to the season.

Team UBR will be adding something new this season. Racing in 2 NASA Divisions. In addition to making a run for the season championship for NASA- Midwest American Iron, we will also being competing as part of Barnett Racing in the American Iron Challenge Series- East (last years American Iron East Coast Champoinship Series) Mark will be team driving one of Barnette’s S197 Mustang GT’s at 3 historic tracks in this “series with in a series”

Black- Test days          Blue - NASA Midwest Event          Red-  American Iron Challenge Series- East

• April 10th- Putnam Park, Mt. Meridian, IN
• April 17-18- Gateway, Madison, IL
• May 14-16- Putnam Park, Mt. Meridian, IN (combination NASA Midwest and AICS-E)
• June 19-20- Road Atlanta, Brazelton, GA
• July 17-18- Autobahn, Joliet, IL
• July 24-25- Virginia International Raceway, Alton, VA
• August 14-15, Mid-Ohio, Lexington, OH
• August 21-22, Gingerman, South Haven, MI
• September 16-19, NASA Nationals, Miller Motorsports Park, Tooele, UT
• October 8-10, Putnam Park, Mt Meridian, IN

Check back during race weekends for race reports and after the race for qualifying and race results.

The team manager (Cheryl) and the UPS driver are getting to know each other pretty well. Since it’s the off season, we made a list of “projects” to make the car better, faster and more reliable. New projects mean, new parts, and we’ve been getting all kinds of  goodies delivered in the last week. Here’s a list of some of the “improvements” we will be making before our first race in April:

• Rear suspension upgrade- DONE!
• Accu-sump install
• Front splitter- this one will be cool looking but should also help pin the front down as well as the wing did for the rear.
• Adjustable rear sway bar
• Adjustable end links- front sway bar
• New spindles so we can finally mount the BrakeMan brakes correctly
• Traqmate install- Sharing Anderson-Anderson Racing’s Traqmate last season showed us the value in having our own. 
• 2 way radio install- Being able to relay real time info to Mark on track should help us go faster and be safer.
• Smoke head light covers- Because they look neater than the plastic lenses we put on after the Autobahn incident.
• Finish the rear suspension clean up- primer/paint new roll cage bars, boot to seal the 3rd link bar, cover all the holes we burned or cut through the pan. Reinstall the master kill switch and button up the wiring we had to move.
• Scale, dyno and get tech’d.
• Test, test, test

The web site/blog space was down for awhile but that didn’t stop Team UBR from accomplishing some off season work on the car. We had a very successful final race of the season at Putnam Park where Mark had his best qualifying (2nd) and best finish (3rd) in the teams short history. We would post a picture of the trophy but it was too small to show on a computer screen.

2009 was a difficult season. Too many DNS’s and DNF’s due to mechanical and crash problems. Completing with our best race of the season helped get us excited for some off season planning. With the frustrating mechanical issues this year, our first thoughts were to replace the car. It’s hard to push at 110% when you don’t have confidence in the equipment. A new car would be an unknown and starting from scratch on setup but throwing more effort into a car that we weren’t sure would ever be right seemed wrong too. We decided to keep an eye on the race car market until the first of the year. If no good cars were available by New Years, we would decide what we could do to our current car to make it more reliable and fast.

January 1 came and went with no great cars on the market. At least no great cars for a reasonable price. Many of the handeling issues and some of the reliablity problems were related to the rear suspension. We have had ongoing questions and issues with the torque arm setup and haven’t been able to get much help from the manufacturer. Chris Grizwold, AIX National Champ and NASA Midwest AI/X series director had offered to help us replace the rear suspension with a simpler, more reliable setup. Good news is Chris has a huge shop, the right tools and a rear end already setup for the new suspension. The bad news is Chris lives in Wisconsin and we were going there in January.

Below are some pics of our trip to Chris’ and the fabrication and install of our new 3 link rear setup. This should give us much more adjustability and reliability in the rear suspension.

Team UBR made the long trip to nationals, and the crew (Jim) worked hard all week long.  Our efforts helped us finish the two qualifiy races with a 12th place finish both days.  This earned us a tenth place starting position for Sundays big race.  The sad news is we won’t get to make the start due to engine problems.

We had a little lifter noise at the start of Friday’s race that as you might guess was not so little by the end of the race.  We worked on it late into the night, but will not be able to get it raceable by Sunday.

The week has been long strem of problems, but the crew (Jim) had done a great job keeping the car running.

Things started on Tuesday with a power steering hose failure after rubbing on the fan.  We couldn’t get a new hose quickly so the shop repaired it with a metal connector.  Later in the day the car starts to make loud noise, we discover a suspension part had a broken weld.  We managed to find some one in the pits that would weld it back on for us.  Racers are great.

Wed, didn’t get better the repaired powersteering hose managed to still rub on the fan despite several tie wraps to hold it in place.  This time the fan lost several blades.  New fan on order for arrival on Thursday.  Being a race car it will run without a fan.  Later in the day the Power Steering pump fails, off to the parts store and the local Ford dealer.

Thursday, we run the first session with the bad fan, things seem to be working well.  Jim puts in the new fan, car runs great.  We start to think our problems may be over the week.

Friday, starts off good enough we put on some fresh tires and go out for first session.  Once again the car is making some bad sounds, this time we have front hub failure.  Lucky us the part store has one in stock.  We go get it put it on in time for next session.  One the way out for the race we notice a little bit of lifter noise.  By end of race much much worse, after working until midnight we realize there is just no way to get it fixed at the track.  Bolts, gaskets are just not avaiable on short notice.

So while our hard work would have earned us a 10th place start we spent the day Saturday relaxing watching some of the races.  Confirmed our worse fears from Friday night.  Sunday we will pack up, stay to watch our good friends race and then head for home.