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2011
This year we are warned we all get "kicked off" the salt every evening by 8p.m. The team pretty much tries to work as long as possible without ticking the marshals off. Being racers themselves, they do understand and are really good about “gently” telling us to get our tails off the salt each night.
We were on the salt every morning by sunrise and off when they encouraged us to leave each evening.
By now you know the outcome! 305.596mph Record
"Return" Run for Record
The "return" run for the record was delayed a little bit by a storm the previous night. The officials had to do a lot of work to get the course put back together after high winds. (Thank you course workers!) Moisture fell and made the course even more slippery than usual. There was lake bed showing at the 3 1/2 mile. I don't know where the government got data saying the salt surface is not degraded, because it has. It is very thin. Please support Save the Salt (savethesalt.org) to preserve this iconic racing surface. Below is in-car video of the return run. I had a hard time getting traction on the surface, especially at the start. This run was also a bit of a handfull from a driving stand point. The qualifying run was very smooth, but on this return run the car wanted to move around a lot. We thought the changes we made to the venting would solve our oil spray problem in the engine bay, it did not. I could tell things were not right with about 1/4 mile left in the run. I could see small sparks and bits of flame on the drivers' side. The car was still running fairly strong, so I had to keep on it through the timing lights. Things go wrong after the timing lights. I won't spoil the surprise at the end of the run video below, but by that time the record run was completed. It turned out to be the very first Modified Sports Car with a record over 300mph. This new record is 305.59mph.
Qualifying "Down" Run
We made a really good qualifying "down" run. The average speed set on this run was 313.5 mph. This run qualified the car to make a return run record attempt the next morning. Below is footage of the "down" run. It all went straight forward. A little smoke was apparent during the run, but nothing unusual for a hot motor. When I stopped it became apparent that more smoke than normal was coming out. The course workers said they noticed some smoke at the 2 mile mark and they were already in route to the car. I was asked to pull the engine fire bottle just in case there was a problem. It may have just been oil getting on the hot engine parts. We noticed the breathers for the transaxle and the engine spit out a lot of oil into the engine bay. Since this run qualified for a record attempt, we were only allowed 4 hours to work on the car in impound. We changed the breather configuration for the engine oil and put a big catch can on for the transaxle oil. We expected that this fixed the oil spraying in the engine bay.