Mt Washington Auto Road Gravity Challenge

This past week I traveled to Lake Clear in the Adirondacks for our annual early spring canoe paddle. I am very luck to be able to share such a wonderful and peaceful sport with my Dad. Each one of us paddles a “singles” canoe, each day we move around the park to enjoy the vast array of lakes and streams.

My life has been pretty busy lately with the rebuild of the car and of course my training. Although my plan was to train each day after our days paddle it really did not work out like that. Instead I enjoyed a few great days paddling with little else to worry about. We saw Loons, a Bald Eagle and few Osprey and were treated to flooding conditions that allowed us to paddle over many Beaver dams! Any of you who have had to carry your boat over a Beaver dam knows what I mean :-).

Spending this time with my Dad is priceless and once again reminds me just how lucky I am!!!!

Here is a short clip from my GoPro camera I mounted on the side of the boat with the suction cup mount (I will be using the same mount for the outside of the car on Mt Washington).

This past Saturday I was lucky enough to be a part of the Tire Rack Street Survival Program. From there website  “The Tire Rack Street Survival^® school is a safe teen program designed to go beyond today’s required driver’s education and give teens across the U.S. the driving tools and hands-on experience to become safer, smarter drivers. Trained and qualified in-car driving instructors as well as classroom experience for each student.”

I was contacted by Jake Fisher, a fellow racer and lead auto tester at Consumer Reports to help out as an instructor. They used licensed race car drivers as the instructors.

It was a very interesting and rewarding day! When asked in the morning meeting how many of the kids wanted to come, not one rased there hand!! It was to be an interesting day! We worked with each of the students on braking, cornering during braking, a slalom course to teach them  how to look ahead and high speed avoidance. In between the hands on track time they had classroom lectures.

This was a volenter only program for the instructors and many workers. It was great to see so many folks give up there Saturday to help teach these young students!!

By the end of the day, every student there was grining from ear to ear and each walked away a more knowledgable driver. Time well spent!!

Thanks Jake for the opportunity to touch so many lives!

Here is some coverage of the event  http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-teen-driving-0501-20110430,0,2661593.story

“Project SE-R” has turned out to be a very complex rebuild. Unwilling to compromise safety for time, we have decided it better to dust off the 1.6 liter Sentra. Don’t worry (or better yet for those of you hillclimbing and racing NASA be very worried!) the “Project SE-R” will be finished at a later date and time!

It will be fun to bring the same car that I have raced so many times up the Auto Road, now Sas and I just need to get is ready for the event! The car has not been started in 4/5 years or so. I needed to swap out the gas tank and fuel pump as well as all fuel lines…

The brake system needed to be gone through and we decided to upgrade the front brakes to some Willwood 4 piston calipers. All fluids were drained and replaced and the exhaust has been cleaned up and tested. Yesterday we started her up, it was a great reunion and made me very happy to have the car running again. We still need to remove some old stickers and make way for the new ones. With any luck I will have it back on the road next week!!!

I do want to thank Bob Legere for his hugh effort to try and get the car ready for the hill!!

Next year buddy!!!

Not many folks are lucky enough to be able to enjoy all that I do! This past weekend was a great example of that!

Friday night was spent in my garage :-). Jumping between rebuilding the car trailer and the continued rebuild of the Sentra 1.6. Welding new fenders on and installing new brakes on the car, just a little bit of everything. Since Sas was out of town, work went late into the night…

Since Sas came home very late Friday night we got a chance to enjoy a nice breakfast out (one of our favorite activities 🙂 ) Saturday morning. Then back to work on the trailer… Al had written a 1:20 run for Saturday, I decided to try our Monday night mountain bike loop, about 10.5 miles…

It was a great trail/road run!!!

Saturday night it poured, like 2-3″s of rain…. Coach Al and I had planned on a long mountain bike ride, I was a little worried.

We headed out around 10:30 hoping it would have drained a little by then, the sun was out and it was in the 60’S! Lots of water on the trails, little streams in fact! The good news was the trail was hard packed so we did not rut up the trail and there was really no mud, just lots of water!!! We did our Red loop around Gay City and headed up the hill to Case Mountain. Case is very rocky and lots of ups and downs! Al for the second week in a row stepped up to the challenge and rode with confidence and strength! There are some pretty gnarly rocky downhills in there!!!

It was great to see a bunch of other riders out enjoying the day!! We did come across some trail vandalism, I guess some group does not want us enjoying the public state park and continues to cut down trees to block the trail. Not sure I understand killing trees to stop mountain bikers! Within a couple of mins a bunch of riders had gathered and we made quick work of the 100 yards of blockage.. After some friendly directions from the other riders we found our way back over to Gay City Park.

By now we were 3 hours into our ride, I was getting a little tired and was hoping for nice downhill (mostly) ride home. I decided to try a new trail to us hoping it would save a little time. Oh well so much for that!!! It was a great trail and really challenged Al and I as we were pretty fatigued by that point. Needless to say it was not the shorter, nice downhill way home! We rode into my driveway right around the 4 hour mark. A great ride with a great friend!!!

Well that was my weekend, I hope all of you had a chance to get outside and enjoy life as I did!!! Till next time….

The other day I was browsing around the internet and stumbled upon the results from the 2000 Climb to the Clouds.  I had a very good year on the Hill that year. I set my fastest time up the Hill with a 7:32 during the Saturday full hill practice run and I won my class on Sunday’s main event. What I had forgotten was how well the car did overall. To finish in the top 10 with a car that weights 2500lbs and maybe has 110 hp to the wheels is pretty cool!!

Over the last few weeks I have been pulling that car out of the moth balls and going through it for a back up car for the race. Believe it or not the car is now over 2o years old!!! I am also looking forward to driving it on the street again! With gas prices rising it still gets the best gas mileage in our fleet :-).

Till next time…

http://www.rallyracingnews.com/scca/mt-wash00.html

2000 Mount Washington Hillclimb
“Climb to the Clouds”
Final Results
June 25, 2000

Results Courtesy of: John Buffum

Got a few more parts in. Last week was a slow week, so I didn’t make a whole lot of progress on the car in general.

The new 550 lb front springs. I’ll remove the existing 8 kg/cm front springs (447 lbs) and will be putting them in the rear of the car. And I’ve already removed the front and rear sway bars from the car, since the hillclimbs tend to be a bit rough and sway bars can cause a loss of drive traction and lateral grip on the bumpier sections.

Since I am building my own lower a-arms from round tubing, I got in these parts. Some 5/8″ chromoly rod ends to replace the pivot bushings and a tapered pin with 3/4″ high misalignment monoball and housing to replace the ball joint.

I stripped out the front of the car, and cut away the sheetmetal that houses the headlights and radiator mounts, and even removed the lower crossbar which supports the radiator and the fore/aft lower engine cradle. I’ll be making a bolt-in tubular crossbar that is lighter and can be removed for greater serviceability. I’m also going to shift the radiator and intercooler mounts a bit. It’ll give more ground clearance from the intercooler tubes and more room between the radiator and the supercharger.

Newly capped off crossmember stubs.

Crossmember made and tacked in place.

Final welding, and bolted in place.

I re-used the stock radiator lower mounts, and bent them to fit the new round tube crossbar, and finally welded them in place.

The car already had a Koyo aluminum radiator in place, but the Koyo has tiny 1-1/8″ inlet and outlet tubes. So the radiator hoses had to be sleeved in order to neck down the stock 35 mm (1.378″) hoses to fit. To me this is just one more potential failure point…plus the flow is restricted, so I chopped the stock tubes off and beaded some 1-3/8″ 6061 aluminum tubing, then welded them to the radiator. I will replace the OEM rubber hoses with some custom silicone racing hoses.

Last week I brushed on a coat of POR-15 paint onto the LF front fender in order to ‘seal’ the pores of the body filler. I will wait until the RF fender is also done, then I will be spraying both fenders with high-build urethane primer and blocksanding them smooth, and finally spraying a urethane topcoat. Once that’s done I’ll make parting flanges on the fenders and lay on some gelcoat and tooling resin/fiberglass mat to create the molds. The fender and flare sure aren’t perfect, but they’re acceptable for a racecar.

I also made a pair of headlight ‘covers’ from .060″ aluminum sheet. I saved 10 lbs from the very front of the car by deleting the headlights and corner lights! I will end up attaching the grill, the headlight covers, and the lower grill trim all together. This way I can strip the front end down to the bare shell in about 45 seconds by undoing a few Dzus fasteners.

It is the last day of my Coach Al’s Tucson Camp, some folks are out getting in a last minute run, others are already on the way to the airport.  It has been a very interesting week.

I got in some great rides, a cool early morning trail run and even some outdoor early morning swimming. Overall, a great week to be me!

The week has given me the chance to put my “Challenge” into perspective.  Over the years I have had many great accomplishments. I am proud to say I drove a 130hp Nissan Sentra up Mt. Washington in 7:32, I rode my bike up the same road in under 1:16 mins. I have even been lucky enough to say I qualified and ran the Boston Marathon!!  When I first thought of this challenge, it was not to duplicate any of the above accomplishments, it was to challenge myself with a string of events near and dear to my heart! It being the 150^th year of the Auto Road only made it that much sweeter!

The last two years have taught me a better life balance and to just enjoy every day of my life, I have so much to be thankful for!!!!  From time to time this past winter, either myself, or others have set goals or times for each of these events. There has been talk of 2 wheel drive records falling in the car and a sub 1:20 “Top Notch” bike times.  As fit as I felt going into this camp, I realized that I am not as fit as I once was and that is okay.

As much as I really wanted to show up with a new 320 hp car, it is ok if that does not happen. Just the fact that I can show up with any car is enough for me.

And in case I have not said it already, thank you everyone for helping me and following me through this cool challenge!! I do love my life and everyone in it!!!

Since the Ski to the Clouds I have only posted updates on the car build, mostly because I am so excited that Bob has started on the build. I also am trying to keep my diverse audience entertained :-).

I have been getting in some very solid training, from long road rides on the cross bike to nice suffer fests on the Computrainer. I even have started to run again… I am feeling very fit and ready for my Tucson cycling/triathlon camp starting Tuesday.

This weekend the training has been put on the back burner as Sas and I have headed out west early to spend some time with her folks and have some fun!!

So after a visit to Red Rocks we got a chance to test out the Sunbuggy Vegas Mini Baja Chase. It has been to long since the last time I have had a chance to get behind the wheel and have a little fun, this was my chance to dust off my driving skill before I head to my first auto hillclimb. Here is some video from the GoPro camera I mounted on the bumper, this is also the same time frame with a camera mounted to my chest with the GoPro “Chesty” harness. It was 90 mins of great fun and reminded me how much I enjoy and missed performace driving!!

I was hoping to get out on a rented mtb tomorrow  in Red Rocks but the weather is not looking good for that….