Sandeep hold his own…. From what I can tell since I was putting gear away and getting some water. Somewhere along the way Sandeep gets punted from behind while waiting in line for the chicane. With all the traffic and varying levels of skill at times there were lines of cars waiting to get through the tire chicane. In some cases the more aggressive cars would try to cut the line and make up spaces. This lasted for a few laps till people stopped yielding to them and they would be hung out to dry for 15 to 20 seconds. This also may have helped seal the fate for the Miata that earned the people’s curse. Somewhere in this mess one car did not check up enough and smacked Sandeep in the back while in line. No major damage was done but our exhaust did point at a 45 to the sky afterwards. It was at this point that I lost track of Sandeep. His stint was up, so I suited up to head across the pit lane and give him the sign to pit and hand off to Ben. Just as I step into pit lane my phone starts to ring, and keeps ringing, since I was not about to answer my phone in the middle of pit lane I let it ring.

After two laps of “missing” Sandeep I start to get concerned. At this time I see Sandeep motioning for me from the cold pit side of pitlane. He tells me that the car is back at the truck. While he was out on track he slowed down to avoid some traffic at the chicane and the car just shut off. He tried to restart the car but could not get it to fire. Since we are running the small battery I figured it was dead and just needed a jump. So we scramble to get the jumper cables and the backup battery. We attach the leads and try to get it to fire with no luck. In the meantime we start refilling the radiator with water and continue to try and start the car. After a few more minutes I notice a very bad sign, water coming from under the exhaust manifold. This confirms that the difficulty starting is a blown head gasket. Immediately we send our parts runners (Thank you very much Saki, Atul, Whitney, and Saki’s dad) back to the garage to pick up the spare head gasket and bring it to the track. While they are heading out for the parts the team starts to disassemble our head in preparation for the replacement. After about 40 min we have exposed cylinders and the water inside the #2 and #3 cylinders cleaned up, and the team was waiting on the parts. Our crack parts team showed up with the new gasket and 2 and a half hours after I frantically ran to the car to start the diagnosis we had the head back together and headed back out into the race with Ben at the wheel. We had a couple of great comments and even made the repair pages for a couple of the groups (link to jalopnik, and lemons facebook) covering the race. The biggest compliment we got was from Prison Break Racing who was next to us in the paddock who looked over and saw our manifolds and head on the ground and said “You’re doing a head gasket change at the track?!? Ballsy.”

Ben was running pretty good and didn’t come back into the pits so we figured that we could at least make the rest of the day. Ben continued lapping until about 10 minutes left in the race session. All of a sudden he had the temperature spike and he decided to pull in and not risk blowing the head for the second time in the day.  This ended our day on Saturday and Project Yellow Racing packed up and headed back to our adopted Houston headquarters. Once unpacked, Ben and I set out to address the overheating issues. We started by removing the fan and radiator to make sure we were getting adequate cooling from it. Using a garden hose we plugged the inlet and outlet of the radiator and made sure we were getting flow through the radiator. This also helped to flush any other junk out of the radiator that may have been left over from the 20 plus years of service the car had already seen before we started to abuse it at the track. At this point I also gutted the thermostat to make sure that a similar failure could not happen. After we had completed these relatively simple tasks we reassembled everything and tried to start the car in order to bleed the system. There was only one minor problem, the car would not start. The key was turned from the off to accessory position and the fuel pump did not prime, not a good sign. 6 hours later the electrical masters (Tim and Sandeep) had troubleshot everything we knew to look at. We checked the main relay, ECU, kill switch, ignition and any other component we could think of. We could rule out just about everything and gave up for the night.

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