Reno highlights

Step away from the Sprite for a weekend. Ahhhhh.
No, we're still not fortified enough to dive back into Pujo! for a while yet, wives are enjoying this small respite of actually seeing our husbands during daylight hours, except for Scott. He's been hiding in the basement for weeks assembling a "best of" video from our hours and hours of in-car footage. Recently, he finally emerged, blinking in the sunlight, and shared this with the rest of us.

Enjoy.

24 Hours of LeMons Reno-Fernley Scrapes and Spins

This features 2 quick minutes of the fun stuff our drivers got to see (and even participate in) behind the wheel.

Good Morning America!

So Good Morning America was at Reno all weekend, filming a segment on the whole race. We got some good interview time, we may even be in the segment. Look for the guy in the gorilla suit. ;) Sorry for the short notice, though, it airs tomorrow (Saturday) morning, check your local listings, but usually about 7AM.

:::Saturday morning update/edit::: for those that missed it, the link is
http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=7714415
and we did get our air time, this very shot above! :)

Shock and awwwww....

What an incredible weekend. A year after we started this project, we finally got to experience the 24 Hours of LeMons. We met some really cool people, had some really good competition and Pujo! miraculously survived the entire race. Not without incident, but he'll be fixed up and ready for another LeMons event in no time.

On Friday during the practice our oil cooler lines proved to be too short and were loosened up by the engine torqueing. Pujo! left about a quart of oil on the track and we started scrambling to fix the problem. Fortunately NAPA in Fernley is geared towards farm vehicles and built us a couple of 8AN hydralic line extentions to make sure we had enough slack in the oil lines to prevent them being pulled on by the engine again. Pujo! really needs his oil cooler. This engine quickly heats up to fusion temperatures if it has to rely on the factory cooling system. Once the oil cooler was sorted out we could run the engine as hard as we wanted and the temp gauges never climbed into the danger zone at all.

Saturday had its share of downtime too. The shift linkage broke during Doug's session and we had to lock wire one of the push-pull rod back onto its lever. This took about 20 minutes to diagnose and repair. Doug went back out on track and was black flagged about 40 minutes later for passing under yellow. This apparently used up our Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card we bribed the judges for and we didn't have to do any of the embarrassing punishments, but we did have to replace Doug with another driver. Alan had an altercation with a Mustang during his session and got the DMV punishment. He had to wait around while one of the judges located the proper forms to fill out and slowly made his way over to us. We took turns filling out the 4 obnoxiously complex forms and were in the penalty box for about 25 or 30 minutes. The Mustang driver denied running into Alan initially then argued with the judge about the it being "unfair" that he was being punished for something that was "obviously" not his fault at all. The judge deemed him a whiner and ordered him to eat a jar of baby food, then he had to go get his entire team and return to the penalty box. I'm not sure what they did to them but I later saw the same Mustang on the track with a pig welded to the roof and a rat welded to the hood.

Sunday was a little more interesting in the breakdown department. During Alan's session first thing in the morning the shifter arm for 3rd gear jammed up and couldn't be unjammed. We actually bent some of the linkage trying to get the transmission out of 3rd. After about 40ish minutes of trying to fix the problem we threw our hands in the air and said, "Hell with this, just drive it in third." And we did. For the next 4 hours. No shifting. No neutral. 3rd gear only. And do you know what? Pujo! was brilliant. That car toughed it out and finished the race. 33rd overall with nearly 2 hours spent off the track for various issues. Looking at the results showed that we set one of the 5 fastest laps of the day with a broken transmission. I believe that if we had spent the whole time on the track, we might have finished in the top ten.

Even I originally thought that racing a Peugeot in an endurance race was a bit of a joke. I certainly don't think that now. What a brilliant car. It did everything we asked of it and more. It shrugged off an impact with a much heavier Mustang (we heard the hit all the way over in the pits) and has very little damage to show for it. It spent 4 hours with its transmission jammed in 3rd and didn't complain, it actually sped up. I'll be proud to pilot this car in another LeMons race. I know the other Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys will be too.

The competition started early with the CESM. Alan and Scott are seen here playing iPhone air hockey in the tow rig on the way.

*&%$#@*!!!! Shift %$#@#$ linkage!!! Owww! @#$&*$!! I broke a nail!!

Would you believe this little scuff...

...Was caused by this titanic chunk of American iron?

'Nuff said.

1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th and reverse are for sissies!

"Hey guys! I'm waving this thing around and a Peugeot just drove under it! Are they skiing in hell, or what??"

To finish 33rd, first one must finish. And that's a victory in itself.

We're home.

As I feared, we had no internet connection at the lovely Lazy Inn in Fernley, NV. Ah well. I tried once to get into the blog via my cell phone, but as it's Sprint instead of one of *your* fancy iPhones, I couldn't even get to a sign-in page to post, and as verbose as we Cheese Eaters tend to be, I imagine that thumbing our daily novels would have gotten old quickly.

So, for those of you sitting on the end of your seats, we actually finished the race. Yes, really. Plenty of drama, a few breaks, one penalty, but we finished with 171 laps, in the top third overall. Full details will be posted by the many drivers, over the next week or so as we decompress, there are many many stories to share.

I'll leave you with this.

Here we go!

No photo at the moment, it's officially Oh-Dark-Thirty. (yes, 4:30 in the morning) and we're off to miss one of the most historic events in history today. I can't sleep.
Yes, you read that right, I said "miss." It's Memorial Day Weekend in Seattle, and there's no rain in the forecast for Monday. They say it rains here all the time, but locals know that isn't true. You can, however, count on rain on Memorial Day and the Fourth of July pretty regularly.
So anyway, here we are at Monkey Central,sometime later today our crew will arrive to finish loading the truck with suitcases, beer, easy-up tents and other necessities, and we'll be off just as soon as we can. I am bringing the laptop with me in the hopes of providing (how did Karina put it?) amusing anecdotes from trackside, or at least summaries in the evenings. No guarantees. Heck, based on what happened last December, there's probably an official Nevada State Gambling line on the odds we'll even make it to Reno!
But, the car is on the trailer, we have the hotel address and directions to the track, and the glamorous part of the adventure begins today. Wish us luck!

We're Goin' for Broken!

We've been accepted into Goin' for Broken in May! With any luck, we'll actually make it to the event in one piece. Hopefully it'll stop snowing by then. We have a new tow vehicle, Aunt Faye, to replace our dearly departed Aunt Bea and I'd rather not risk her health on an icy road to Reno.

Speaking of snow, we were snowed out of a Bremerton Sports Car Club autocross last Sunday (3/15/09, beware the ides of March)fortunately we got a look at the WDOT traffic cams before we bothered leaving the driveway. It was snowing hard at my house, but it wasn't sticking. Bremerton on the other hand got 3 1/2 inches in about an hour and a half. Does Bing Crosby dream of a White St. Patricks day?

It begins again...

I registered us for Going for Broken in Reno in May yesterday. 5 months should be sufficient to fix our busted up pug.

Brent and Scott actually made it to Arse-Freeze-Apalooza and were offered a ride in the Dead Smurfs Miata. Many thanks to those guys for adopting our orphaned Monkeys. Sadly they didn't have a chance to win because of an enormous lap penalty. 1200 laps. Wow. Only one car got more and that was only because the owners of the offending Acura demanded it.

Anyway, time for us to dig into Pujo! and see exactly what the damage is. I drove it home but it was obvious it didn't escape unscathed. The suspension definitely suffered. It was noticed on the way home that none of the tires were actually pointing in the same direction. Plenty of negative camber on the drivers front, but the passenger front was showing significant positive camber. The passenger rear for some reason is an inch lower than the drivers rear.

Whatever the diagnosis is, we'll get Pujo! back on his feet.

And then, hopefully, win the index of effluency in Reno. :-)