As many of you may already know, we ended up DNSing at Buttonwillow, which was slated to be our first event of the 2010 Redline Time Attack Series.
Most of the crew arrived early Saturday morning with the trailer and race car, and got set up next to our local Subaru friends from GST, and across from Cobb’s trailer, where our friend Brian Lock had his widebody GTR.
Unfortunately, we spent most of Saturday trying to fix an oil system issue that worsened after a few practice sessions. There was a large leak coming from a factory flange on our tall-deck diesel block, and Javad and Christian had to drive out to a friend’s machine shop in San Luis Obispo to get the issue sorted out.
The leak left our car disabled for the majority of Saturday, but we were still able to tweak the car’s setup a bit, pass out some of our Redline flyers, and wave the Audi flag around. Once the leak was fixed, we had high hopes for the Sunday morning practice sessions and afternoon time attack.
After a hearty Jack in the Box breakfast, we headed back to the track early Sunday morning. Once we verified that the motor was leak-free, we were able to head back out to the track for the early morning practice session.
With a few laps under his belt with the fresh setup, Christian headed into the pits for us to make sure that there were no leaks coming from the car.
Everything checked out, so we gave Christian the thumbs-up for a few more laps.
Within a couple of laps, disaster struck, and the car lost oil pressure in the front straight. With the oil pump no longer able to scavenge from the pan, oil drained back from the tank into the motor, forcing it into the combustion chamber, which resulted in a massive smoke show, and a small fire on the side of the car near the exhaust.
Once the car was towed back to our trailer, we found that the oil pump had seized, and the belt had snapped in half. (Upon arriving home, we found that one of the heads from the cam gear bolts on our Cat cams had sheared off on Friday, and caused the oil pump to seize later.)
This put us out of the Buttonwillow Time Attack, so we started packing up the trailer, and spent the rest of the day talking to our track buddies, and snapping a few pictures of the event.
Overall, we had fun hanging out with a lot of people that we rarely get to see outside of track events, but were disappointed that we could not race. Our times at Buttonwillow from the ETGP on street tires already made our car a serious contender in this event, but we will have to wait until Las Vegas to really see what the new setup is capable of on real tires.
It was another bittersweet race weekend, with a few teams shattering records, lots of teams breaking cars, and some doing both at the same time.
Ryan Gates, one of our major competitors, suffered an engine failure in practice with his AMS-sponsored Evo X. Our buddies from GST were unable to make a timed lap in their monster Impreza due to headgasket/cylinder head failure. Brian Lock – who won the Modified AWD class in his GTR – later had to withdraw from the Super Session due to mechanical problems. The nice folks at AMS blew a motor and had a car fire while shattering the Mitsubishi standing mile record.
But that’s racing, and we all come back for more every weekend. Our B5 will be fixed in time for the Redline Time Attack in Las Vegas, and we’ll keep the updates coming.
To see more pictures from the event in the 034Motorsport Gallery, click here!
