What's that noise?

Sunday rolls around and Jason and I arrive to walk the course. After walking the course, I had a feeling that the tail would rotate today.

The course was modified quite a bit from the Saturday practice and it had become what I considered to be a more difficult course to do well. There was an optional element that was basically a shortcut around a sweeper. There was lots of debate as to which way would be faster. The shortcut had a very tight entry, so you would pay a price trying to get into it. After walking, I had picked the shortcut as my choice and called Dale to discuss and he agreed that the shortcut would be the better option, so shortcut it was.

During the event, when we were in grid, I took my first run and came back. The run was OK, nothing spectacular. Missed a couple of key apexes. Somebody came up to me in grid and said they heard a 'bad' sound, like rods knocking, something like that. We check the car and hear the noise, but it's not bad. After a little discussion, we elect to keep going. Jason takes his run and doesn't make the shortcut entry very gracefully, so his run isn't very good.

Now, we are up for 2nd runs. We listen to the car and discuss again. We decided to keep going. I get out there and take my run. During the run, I hear the noise get louder - just for a few seconds. The car seems like it is pulling normally and I clean up my line a little bit. However, after crossing the finish line, my time is some 2 seconds slower than my previous run. That didn't seem right. As I'm waiting for my time slip, the engine stalls. I restart the engine and it is sounding bad now. We limp the car back to grid and listen. This time, the noise is terminal, so we call it quits.

Jason and Daniel take care of getting the car to Moe's. Now for the work to rebuild the engine. Moe is confident that we'll be back in time for the July 7th practice.