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Investigations began looking for the poor running issue
At this point I'm freaking out while Ryan was calmly diagnosing things, checking for any visible issues, but couldn't find anything obviously wrong. He would find something small, fix it, and we would go blast down the highway or take another lap, and the car always ran like crap. Re-routted vacuum lines, fixed a chafed wire, pulled the spark plugs, checked a lot of things, and looked at any engine codes each time. Finally traced it down to a recurring code showing "Bank 1 lean", all the time. Kept resetting, going back out on track or on the highway. Bank 1 Lean, Bank 1 Lean, kept popping up. Nothing we tried worked. Ryan spoke with Sean at True Street, who thought that it had to be sensor or something electrical, and told us to look at the O
2 sensors first.
Meanwhile we had a lot of other customers out at ECR that day also, some of whom needed a hand with this or that, or came by to talk with us, so it was a very hectic day. Long story short by 4 pm we were out of ideas and the car was still running poorly. I felt like crap (hadn't slept in over 2 days), had just got some bad news at the shop the night before (our new Ops Manager had turned in his notice!), and the prospect of racing this car in this final NASA Texas weekend looked slim. My 2013 goal of setting every TT3 lap record on the Texas schedule would be squashed.
Damn it! I was really pessimistic but Ryan thought it
must have a fouled O
2 sensor. He made some calls and we found that the closest Oxygen sensor was at a Ford dealer 50 miles away (they only had one!), so we made the call - lets head back to the shop.
Of course we had ALL of our gear unloaded and the trailer set-up for the upcoming race weekend: chairs, coolers, tables, parts displays, wheels/tires, tools, and we had a perfect paddock spot. Grrr... so we loaded
everything back up, loaded the car, rehooked up the trailer, and we left the track by 4 pm. I called Brandon at our shop and had him run to the Ford dealer to get this O
2 sensor (about $130, since it is a wide band) then run by my house to also get our stock 2013 Mustang GT. We were going to pull parts off that car and swap sensors over until we found the issue, if we had to - I wasn't missing this last race of the year, not at my home track!
Even with only a handful of laps the mesh grill was packed with grasshoppers
So we kept talking ourselves into this issue being a bad O
2 (pre-cat), and I knew it wasn't mechanical. The engine has been
rock solid reliable for over 3 years and it ran perfectly when we loaded it into the trailer after the last event in October. Had to be electrical in nature...right? So we hauled ass across town, through more murderous 5 o'clock Friday traffic and got back to the shop around 6 pm.
At this point Ryan was coming down with a cold and I was so tired I couldn't see straight, so Olof and Kyle did most of the wrenching at the shop. Kyle has a better scan tool here that also data logs and it was pointing to a bad Oxygen sensor. Amy brought everyone some food (Ryan and I had skipped breakfast and lunch out at the track, since it was such a thrash). They got both pre-cat O
2 sensors pulled and, lo and behold... Bank 1 O
2 was blacker than midnight. The Bank 2 sensor looked fine (tan), so we swapped in the ONE new sensor we could buy in town that day and fired it up. The 2013 GT was still there in case we needed to rob another one, but we hoped this lone sensor would do it. Fired right up, cleared the codes, and I took the car around on a drive of our test loop with Ryan riding shotgun again. All of the problems cleared up before we left the parking lot.
Woo! No more bucking, hiccups, nothing. Well, I noticed one or two small hiccups at part throttle tip-in, but we chalked that up to fouled spark plugs.
We got back after our 2 mile street drive, I did a few donuts in the parking lot, and pulled it right into the trailer. Man, that was a huge relief! Ryan was still wrenching on the car inside the trailer, but everything was buttoned up and ready for transport by 8 pm, after a long 13 hour day. We ended up leaving the R6 set on the car for use in the first "Warm Up" session Saturday, since those times wouldn't count (this was a mistake, in hindsight). I finally went home with the truck and trailer to try to get some much needed sleep, where I promptly passed out.
NASA at ECR, Saturday, Nov 2nd, 2013 - Day 2 of 3
After a ridiculously early start Amy and I got out to ECR again before dawn, looked around and settled on a less desirable paddock spot at the bottom of the hill, out in the dirt (but hey, that's why you show up on a Friday for the NASA weekend at Eagles). We quickly unloaded the car from the trailer, unhooked the trailer, unloaded our gear for the day, and got ready for the TT warm up session. It was pretty dang cold (42°F!) and I got to grid on this worn set of Hoosier R6 tires. We had a huge class in TT3 (7 cars), with a bunch of new cars and drivers I wasn't familiar with. No idea what to expect for the class today! It was still very cold, and in heavy traffic with plenty of blocking (a recurring theme all weekend) I only managed a
1:58.100 lap, slipping and sliding around. The time was crap but still good enough to start grid 4th on the grid out of 35 TT cars for the next session (which is the first official TT session). Looking back I should have been out there on sticker A6s and qualified in about 2nd place on grid, which would have saved me a lot of traffic grief in the next session.
Qualifying is key!
After the TT Warm-Up we had a small break, when Kyle from our shop had arrived at the track. We did a quick wheel and tire change and mounted the sticker set of Hoosier A6s to the Mustang plus worked on some other customers' cars. It had warmed up into the mid 50s and I went out hopeful that this
could be my fastest session of the day, which would also make it my last session to drive. The plan was to let Amy drive in the last 2 TT sessions of Saturday, if I could get my best lap in this session.
What you don't see in the video below are the painful first 2 hot laps where Corey Wells' TT1 ZR1 Corvette and I are stuck behind another TT1 car, who is known to "take a bit of time to get up to speed" and accidentally holds up the front of the pack. Very, very frustrating. Mike Weather's TT1 Z06 had some issues and waved everyone by on the first hot lap, and in the middle of the 3rd hot lap Corey and I
finally pushed our way past the slower TT1 car. By then I had gotten all 4 Hoosiers and brakes truly overheated and almost blew off the session, but I knew it wouldn't be this cool again all day plus I wanted to let Amy drive the last two TT sessions, so I took an unprecedented 3rd hot lap in a row. Always a bad idea on A6s...
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