build diary

August 3, 2007: Back at Grand Junction Motor Speedway for the first time in a year, other than a few laps testing the Westfield.
It was immediately obvious that the engine wasn't happy, so my coworker Jeremy laid his hands upon the ECU programming and sorted things out nicely. He's good like that.

On the track, it was fun. Since it was just the FM employees and a couple of invited guests, we ran closer together than we usually do on this track. Specifically, Bill and I spent some time chasing each other around in the Westfield and the Seven. I was tentative at first because I was concerned about the tire, but then eventually decided to just run hard anyhow. Bill and I had a ball - the cars were pretty well matched, his extra torque helping out of corners while my extra horsepower helped out on the straights. The biggest difference was the big guts corner, the downhill off camber decreasing radius "straight" that goes into a 180 degree hairpin. If you can manage to keep your foot down all the way - 148 hp running for the top of third gear before braking hard in a short chute for the hairpin, you can make up a lot of space on someone who's a bit more conservative. If you're going to feather the throttle or brake any earlier, you have to do it quite a bit earlier due to a sharp kink in the corner. It really tests your commitment, and it's the best part of the track. Bill wasn't quite as committed as I was and didn't have quite as much horsepower so this was a significant difference. Still, we did take turns playing leader and making big slidy mistakes to let the other guy through. Great fun! Unfortunately, the Seven was running hot. Every other car there other than the Westfield was as well, and we'd just finished a bunch of work on that car. The track is tough on cooling, being relatively slow, high altitude and lots of full throttle. But still, the Seven's never had trouble before and it wasn't that hot. I was getting whiffs of coolant on my first lap or two, making me wonder if the radiator cap was failing. On my last session, I noticed the alternator light came on as I cooled down - that's odd.

Popping the hood off revealed the reason - the alternator belt was gone! It also drives the water pump. Hmm, very odd. Was it slipping earlier, is that why I was running hot? But it never squealed at all. A mystery, and one that will take some extra investigation. I'll test the cap before the Open House and also check out a bit of play in one of the rear wheels. The Seven's been seeing almost exclusively hard running of late, and so it's time for some race car levels of maintenance.

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