Guess what the cat dragged in? Here at the Tire Rack headquarters in South Bend, the start-finish line for One Lap of America, the Dodge Challenger SRT that wrecked back at Road America rolled up to join the road-weary One Lap cars. Having made the drive from Wisconsin to Indiana under its own power, and despite having been disqualified it from competing officially, the mangled Mopar had its own victory to celebrate. Not only it participate in the final skid-pad event—it delivered, with Erich at the wheel, the burliest burnout of all the cars that scorched their tires in victory circle. It turns out the crash damage was almost entirely cosmetic: the only mechanical difficulties resulting from the wreck were a burned-up fan motor (it was smoking after being pinched against the engine when the radiator got mashed back a couple of inches) and some torn-up ABS wiring. Erich will be driving it home to Detroit, and fellow Chrysler engineer Ralph Gilles will be rebuilding the race car to run in the Targa Newfoundland. Stay tuned, as CarDomain will be following this project closely. And check below the jump for more pics of the Challenger’s powerful One Lap encore!

Buzz Clarke and Joel Lipperini started out on One Lap of America with a tough Acura NSX, but it soon blew its engine. They disappeared from the tour for most of the events, but then turned up at Virginia to run a ’96 Mustang, and promplty blew up the transmission. They’re not in it for points anymore anyway (if you have to replace your car, you’re out) but for the events yesterday at BeaveRun, they’d somehow managed to come up with this Ford GT. Let’s hope the GT can stand up to whatever it is they’re dishing out!

It must’ve been a combination of abused tires and the measly glaze of rain on the track that helped make this hairpin even more treacherous than it would be normally. Either way, a whole mess of cars spun out in the space of a couple of runs. Let the record show that this was well before the leaky Mustang’s afternoon run, and plenty of cars had run just fine through this spot during the morning session.

Continue reading "One Lap of America: Gnarly Turn At BeaveRun Sends Multiple Cars On Grass Ride" »

Nope, it’s not fried rings. But the supercharged fastback Mustang driven by Dave Goodman has a moderate transmission leak that’s dribbling gear oil onto the exhaust. The car is also having some vapor-lock issues, and the team was putting heat wrap around the lines for that problem when I caught up with them in the garage. But as for the leak, Dave says they’re just going to run it and hope for the best, "unless it gets too smoky." I just want to see this awesome car finish without catching fire! We have to make a checkpoint at DEI in Ohio, but apart from that, there’s only one event left: the skid pad. Best of luck to you, guys. 

Continue reading "One Lap Of America: Supercharged Stang Soldiers On" »

Ok, the pics kind of suck because the camera was stuck on some kind of closeup setting—but this has to be the closest scrape I’ve seen so far on One Lap, so I had to share ‘em. Robert Dubler in the HHR got onto the outside grass on the last turn before the frontstretch at VIR, snapped it across the track into the pit lane entrance, nearly lost it into the inside wall, then changed direction to stay on the track, missing the pit-wall tires by a hair. He was later heard saying that he just really, really didn’t want to pit because that would’ve meant a DNF and the accompanying huge penalty. Another 3 inches to the right and it could’ve been a lot worse! See the whole sequence after the jump.

If you’re ever traveling overnight to a racetrack that offers "garage suites" like Virginia International Raceway does—you must get one. The suite at VIR has a spacious bay down below and a full studio apartment up top—so it’s already pretty close to my idea of a dream home—but what makes it the coolest thing ever is that the hotel balcony overlooks the racetrack’s entire front stretch. So you can roll in at any time of the day or night, wrench on your ride until you fall into bed, then wake up the next morning to panoramic views of race cars screaming past your front door and not even have to drive more than a few hundred feet to join the starting grid for your session. Does that beat the hell out of a Motel 6 or what? More after the jump…

For a hundred bucks a night (on top of the cost of the room), I kind of felt the garage should have had compressed air and running water, maybe a parts washer. But the space was well-needed, since we had to swap out a noisy wheel bearing on the STi, as well as tinker with some check-engine codes and throw on some precautionary pads and rotors to last us through the rest of the events on the circuit. Doing all that in a dark hotel parking lot would’ve been no fun at all.

Check out all these tough One Lap cars launching off the starting line at the BMW Performance Center for their autocross session: the Lotus 7 replica, the Ford GT, the Ultima GTR, the Porsche 996, and the Challenger. I like the sound of the Ford GT, but if you’ve got speakers I’m sure you can pick out your own favorite.

Our second stop yesterday after CMP was the BMW Performance Center, the manufacturer’s world-class testing facility and racing school. The track was great, and the autocross course they’d set up was a great boon for our Boxer4Racing team, since Rankins’ primary background is in autocross racing. He cleaned house, while our closest competition, the 400 hp Neon, got a DNF after his front splitter came loose and he spun out on the front stretch.

Continue reading "One Lap of America: Autocross at BMW Performance Center" »

There’s a 2009 GTR along on this year’s One Lap, driven by Tony Swan of Car & Driver Magazine. They’ll be giving full coverage of the event, but not until their September issue hits the shelves late this summer. My understanding is that the car is basically stock—the decision to run it on One Lap was kind of last-minute, and the idea is to show what the GTR can do in its factory form. The car is doing pretty well, though Toby says it’s a handful in the rain on its factory Bridgestone Potenza RE070′s: it pretty much fell on its face at Texas World Speedway. He lucked out today at VIR though, where a downpour was promised but only a sparse few raindrops fell during his run.

Even though I’ve never run on a skid pad before, Rankins is interested in running me in the final skid-pad event of the One Lap tour—since the skid pad is all about pulling G’s, the lighter you are, the better. So we booked some pad time today at Carolina Motorsports Park so I could get a feel for things. Problem is, I’m kind of slow, pulling an average 12.3  seconds around the circle to Rankins’ 11.7. Though I did get faster in the 15 minutes we had booked, the driver for the Boxer4Racing STi for the final skid pad event is tbd.