Scott and Miq's Excellent Adventure
When last we left Our Heroes, the little red Sprite was
spitting coolant in the paddock at Laguna Seca after having
been left on pre-grid (under starter's deceptive orders)
for too long and overheating. This is what comes of
letting a car with a 12.5:1 CR (electric fan notwithstanding)
sit in hot weather for 35 minutes while the directors of
the club decided whether to send another batch of cars out
on track or send out for pizza.
But that was the weekend of the 17th. By the 24th, we were
ready to tackle the repair job. Miq had picked up a pair of
copper competition gaskets at the All-British Swap Meet the
day after Laguna Seca (one to keep as a spare -- and at
something like $12, a real bargain), so I brought over
my fancy-schmancy torque wrench and we set about ripping
the head off the Sprite.
We did almost everything right: cleaned it all up, didn't
scratch the head or block, and cleaned up all the coolant
when it spilled into the cylinder bores. ("Hey, do you suppose
we could get this coolant out if we ran the electric water
pump?" "Great idea! I'll hold the bucket under the hose!"
"Okay, hit the switch!" GURGLE GURGLE WHIR WHIR "Turn it off!
Turn it off!") We torqued the head down right (though one
of the smaller studs, the ones that hold the rocker shaft
down, got stripped so we blew all of three cents -- marked
down from four -- on a new one. Hell, at that price, we
got a spare!) and Miq installed the choke cable he'd bought
at the BC show. As a final step, we adjusted all the valves
and checked the oil -- none of the schmutz that says you've
poured a quart of coolant into the oil (more on that later).
Everything buttoned up just correctly, Miq clambered into the
cockpit and flipped the switches. His finger hovered over the
START button... I crossed my fingers, he pulled the choke out
and -- crank WHAM Ka-vroom vroom vroom vroom vroom...
"It worked!" First time out. We grinned like idiots and slapped
hands as the high-compression 1275 (overbored .060 according to
the forging marks on the flat-top pistons) rattled the tools on
the back of the garage. Then we noticed the garage starting
to fill with steam. (I am, with difficulty, restraining myself
from making a comment about a certain new Formula Vee owner.)
We shut off the car and rolled it, trailer and all, out into
the driveway. I checked the oil again and sure enough, there
was the coolant-oil emulsion. I remembered a piece of basic
tech I'd learned a long time ago about draining oil that had
been contaminated, so we agreed to let the oil stand overnight
so that the coolant would condense in the bottom of the pan.
I brought over five quarts of Castrol 20W-50 the next morning;
Miq had most of the old oil drained, and bits of greenish goo
floated languidly in the surface of the oil. We poured the old
oil into recycling containers, retorqued the cylinder head once
more for good measure, then filled the car with the Castrol.
Note: Cool 20W-50 Castrol drains slowly enough that it will
pour out the breather tube mounted in the side of an A-series
head (assuming you put the aftermarket breather on the side of
the valve cover like these people did, of course).
It was getting late, so we loaded the car onto the trailer and
hot-footed it to Sacramento. "I think this is probably the
fastest this Sprite has ever gone," Miq said, commenting on
his Cougar's ability to tow a 1500-pound car and trailer at
90 mph with ease. I kept reminding myself how hard I'd tugged
on the tie-downs and watched for enforcement.
We got there, registered, signed up for a work group and watched
Lisa Kenas win ESL! Congrats Lisa! Glad to know that someone
is keeping up the Fahrvergnuegen while I'm off with my first
love, silly antiquated British cars. Josh took second in ES to
the perennial winner, Bob Frogner. Assuming my usual delta
between Frogner's times and mine, I would have been third or
fourth, but I tried not to think about that...
I got to work the timer when Barry Goldine set FTD twice, then it
was time to get the Sprite teched and (coincidentally) see if we
fixed it permanently. We rolled it off the trailer and Miq hit
the starter button. It started as easily as it had the day before,
only no white smoke! The overnight condensation trick worked!
We passed tech easily -- if you've seen this car, you know how
clean it looks. If you haven't seen it, it's almost show quality.
The people who put it together did a terrific job on almost
everything -- except they used a *fiber head gasket* on a car with
a 12.5:1 CR! Sheesh. (What other corners did they cut, I wonder?)
So it was finally our turn to run. We got to the pre-grid and drew
a fair amount of attention, especially from the fellow with the
yellow-and-white Mini also running DP. We rumbled on up to the grid,
Miq put it in the multiple-drivers lane, and he got ready to take
off.
Well, the car was real slow -- mainly because you don't go very
fast if the wheels just spin. Miq finally let off the gas enough
to get hooked up and then shot down the first straight. Slowly
into the first turn, squirting down the right-hand section, you
could see he was taking it easy with the car. On his second lap
(we had two two-lap runs on this course), Miq spun it going into
the first turn! He got it started (we'd had to push-start it
going from grid to the starting line) and came in with a time
only about 30 seconds off the leader...
So I went out, thought it was dying, realized I'd had the fuel
pump switched off (duh...) and gave it a little gas. Bang! It
rapped my head on the roll bar as it shot forward. I shifted
into second, bang again! and I took the turn. I accelerated
out of the turn -- why is it backfiring so much? Later I
figured that it was reaching the preset shift point on the
tach and cutting out the ignition. Damn, that rear end is
*short*. With no spin, I was still about 15 seconds off the
pace.
We went out again, and Miq beat my first time in the car and
didn't spin. "This car needs third gear," he said. "I'm in
third all the way around the course except here, where you're
coming up for the start-finish line I'm shifting into second
-- at the right before the left, not at the left or you'll
spin! Then I shift into third once I get past the first turn
where I spun the first time." Thus armed, I went out and took
four seconds off my previous lap. But the car was handling
oddly. I was just beginning to get the feel for what it would
be like to get this thing up to its limits, which are awesome;
I get a little of the rhythm of driving it, but in hard right-
handers I noticed it was spinning its inside wheel. A locked
diff shouldn't do that... I ended up being ten seconds behind
the leader, who curiously enough was also in a Spridget. But
his Spridget was one he'd had for fifteen years. "And that
fifteen years all boils down to ten seconds on course," I
said. "That's why ten seconds seems so long, I guess."
We pulled it off course, retrieved my numbers and rolled it
back to the trailer. Tests later indicated that we'd snapped
the left half-shaft -- that is, squirting the gas made the
right rear wheel spin but not the left. Damn. And these were
supposed to be the competition axles, too...
We packed the car on the trailer with the help of a couple of
other folks and drove the long ride back to Sunnyvale (with
late-Sunday traffic, twice as long to get home as to get to
the race). As I wiped the sweat out of my eyes, I thought
to myself, Racing is work.
But what's it like to drive? Well, I need to think about it,
but I'm pretty sure I'm going to spend my race-tire money on
a pair of competition axles for a Sprite... The high point
of this weekend was working on the car and making it run (which
is why british-cars gets the message too), but having a race
car that can spin its tires in third gear is simply too much
fun to give up.
Oh, and one more thing. All last night I was chuckling over
the Gary Larson cartoon that shows the two bears sitting in
a rusted-out car in the middle of the forest. One of them is
saying to the other, "If we could get this thing started, we
could chase down mule deer, pick up babes... man, we'd be the
grizzlies from hell." With that thought in mind, I leave you
as --
--Scott Fisher
Team.net/"Grizzlies from Hell" Racing
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