Day III – Tearing Up the Track (and maybe our car)

Last night our team “Smoky and the Bandit” finished up number three in standing for total points.
Today Fireballers headed out to the MSR Houston race track located in Angelton, Texas. During the nine day Trasncontential Fireball Rally, we have two track events, with the next being in Las Vegas Nevada.
MSR Houston is a private motorcycle and automotive race track offering advanced drivers training, track usage, race car development, and other necessities for to the racing enthusiast.
To compete in the Fireball track events, drivers must have prior track experience with certification and their cars must pass a pre track inspection.
Co Driver “The Veil Guy” received his training and certification from the NHRA while he was a drag strip enthusiast. I received my training at Bob Bondurant’s racing school at Firebird Lake in Phoenix, certified in executive protection and high performance driving.
We started the morning off with a driver safety meeting with the rules and layout of the racetrack explained.
We were then broke down into three groups; drivers with professional racing experience, drivers with prior Cannonball or Fireball racing experience, and the novice class consisting of drivers without race track experience.
Bob was scheduled for the morning group, while I was scheduled for the afternoon group.
There were a number of classes of such as; high performance, luxury, pickup truck, mid size and mussel car. Each class was then broken into groups not exceeding five cars.
Each group then had two practice runs with a track official leading the way driving the track’s line through the tight turns and corners. After the practice run we then briefed with track officials to discuss our final run.
The point run consisted of one warm lap, three race laps and then one cool down lap. Track times would not be released till later that night on the Fireballer website.
During the morning run, I stood in the pit crew area measuring speeds of the contestants in the short straight away with my Kustom Pro Laser. Speeds passing this area ran from a low of 55 to the high of 91 with the average speed around 74 mph.
I figured that if both Bob and I could feel comfortable getting the car up to at least 78 in this area, we would have a good chance of finishing the day with a higher point average.
During Bob’s run I clocked his speed at 76 in this area twice, putting us a little higher then average. However when Bob came off the track he seemed concerned about the car’s performance saying that he felt a strange vibration coming from the transmission and heard some grinding. The car was parked, allowing the engine to cool down for my afternoon run.
During my run during the warm-up and the first lap the car seemed to handle nicely and I passed the pit stop area while reading a speed of 77 on the speedometer. However as I turned into the next bank of turns the “check engine” lit up. Figuring that I didn’t want burn the car up, making our team ineligible for the remainder of the rally, I backed down while paying attention for engine noise or vibration.
After completing my run, we allowed the car to cool down and then a team member assisted us in resetting the car’s computer, while we checked all fluid levels.
Tomorrow we are off to Oklahoma City with our arsenal of radar detectors with a lunch stop somewhere around Dallas. As long as you’re not a Trooper, we invite you to watch for us along the Interstate.

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