Well I have a very interesting first session today on VIR full. To cut to the chase, at the end of the long back straight I blew through the braking zone, going off straight and ended up lightly kissing the tire wall (driver is fine).

I know - <*yawn*> who hasn't gone off b/c you pushed the envelope to hard and got in too deep. And that is exactly what I initially thought - right about the time I come to rest at the tire wall, looked up and said to myself, "How the f*** did I get here??!!"

But wait! The plot thickens...

Back at the tire wall, the damage to the car didn't seem that bad at all, so I turned the key and she fired right back up - no steam, no smoke, good idle. But not all is well - I grab the wheel and to my surprise, it is now spinning loosely in my hands. It is no longer connected to anything.

It appears the reason that I went off is not that I cooked the braking zone, but rather I couldn't turn.

And the reason I couldn't turn? Well after the nice man with the tow truck gave me a ride back the paddock I had a chance to look under the hood and found out that the aluminium pinion casing on my manual steering rack had shattered. I have never heard of this failure mode before - has anyone else had a rack fail in this way?

The bright side is the the damage is mainly cosmetic and thanks to a neighbor of mine who has a large heated garage with a 2-post life (and nothing important to do on a Saturday night) I will hopefully be back on the track tomorrow morning. :-)

Have a good night all.

-b

 

Glad you are ok.

Any indication or symptoms from the rack beforehand? How old is the rack?

 

Nothing that I could identify that would make me think of the rack itself.

It was a stock manual rack from a 86. I do not know its history.

 

That's scary it makes me wonder what's going to break next. We need to be careful out there in our old jalopies cause that's a weird and scary failure

 

Well, no, but now I'm going to be a bit paranoid about the small amount of play that my (depowered) rack has, and I'm thinking that putting a pump on my engine and a non-depowered rack will ease the hammering that the gears are surely getting from my personal brand of steering abuse.

 

weird. at least the FC rack is easy to change.... i think you can just remove it, even the undercover can stay on

 

Almost. We had to remove the pan (for several reasons) but you can leave the tie-rod ends attached the the spindles, disconnect the rack and pull the whole thing out sideways through the driver's side wheel well without actually removing the tires.

Of course this is on the track car which may have a little more open space than a more stock-ish vehicle.

In this case the biggest pain was pulling the spare rack off of one of my donor chassis.

 

To end on a good note, I was out there today for all three sessions, with the car not looking too much different than in the above picture. Lots of people I had not met before came by and told me that they were really happy to see that we managed to get it sorted and back on the track.

And even with no splitter and all the aerodynamic "tweaks" that you see, I still somehow managed to take 3 seconds off my best lap time (now 2:23.4). Look out Fritz, I am coming after you!!



-b

 

Glad you were able to get back out there and NICE lap time. I'll be checking my mirrors

 

Glad you and the car are ok Bill! That's a scary failure in a scary spot.

 

Strange.

 

Update - survived the yule-pocalypse and finally got a chance to head out to the garage and spend some quality time with the FC. Pulled the nose and the fenders to find out what I was in for repair-wise.

The fender is toast and the headlight cover is marginal, but I have spares for both. I think that the nose may be repairable. The splitter/lip is in three sections and will need to be replaced.

The good news is that about 80% of the underlying chassis damage is to the sheet metal ahead of the radiator cross bar in front of the headlight mount panel. IIRC the corresponding panels on my spare roller are in good shape and it should just be a manner of swapping them over. The remaining damage should be reparable with the judicious application of a BFH along with some heat.

The nose repair is the unknown at this point. I figured that I could use a heat gun to soften it a bit and work it back to its old shape. There are a couple tears on the edges of the inlet ducts, as well as some tear outs around the bottom edge where the splitter was attached. Does anyone have any ideas or recommendations for repairing the rubberized nose material? I was thinking about a flexible epoxy combined with some sort of backing material. Thoughts?

Also, if anyone has a line on a splitter for an FC (S5) I would appreciate a pointer.

Thanks, and have a great New Year.

-b

 

wow....never seen that before. Good thing you were at that place on the track...could have been much worse if you were in a tighter section. Glad you were OK

 

for the bumper, have a look through this, http://foxed.ca/rx7manual/manuals/85...al%20Small.pdf

as i recall a lot of it is fixing the plastics.

 

Nice pointer, thanks!