Billy Beer Racing 24 Hours of Lemons Sears Pointless Report
Well, in short our second race went even better than our first. The car is still not as fast nor does it handle as well as I hoped, but its getting better. Our Ford 200 six from a tow yard Mercury Comet, that we bought for $200 from the driveway of some guy in Orange County ran flawlessly all weekend.
I added a homemade 3-1 exhaust header and plugged the ends of the stock manifold, then added a bigger carburetor off our original motor. That, plus finishing the logo on the passenger side was the extent of our upgrades for the 2012 Sears Pointless race.
Saturday was a cake walk with just a little sticking throttle issue with 15 minutes left at the end of a rainy, cold and slow day of racing. This was caused by the pivot for the choke fast idle cam vibrating loose and falling out of the carburetor. A 1/4″ self tapping bolt and some Locktite fixed it and fixed it good, though there was an incident with a hacksaw and the fleshy part of my index finger. I have lost count of how many times our team spun the car out on the track, but we never got a black flag for it, so we did well overall.
Sunday dawned cloudy and cold, but without rain. Over the course of the day the weather got better and better and we again had a flawless run for the nickles. After pulling the last stint behind the wheel on Sunday in the rain, Steve Strand decided to sit out Sunday, so the rest of us pulled 90 minute shifts to minimize pit stops and maximize our position in the standings. Jason Schock had the first shift and started driving hard right out of the gate, setting our quickest lap time of 2:28, and out braking smaller, supposedly better cars in corners, sometimes 6 at a time. When he came is he reported a fuel starvation issue that would stay with us the rest of the weekend. Jeff Stuart tried, but couldn’t manage a lap better than Jason’s best, though he was only a second or 2 slower. I am the slowest and I know it, but I don’t stress the car, and I haven’t gotten a black flag yet. I ended up stuck behind a green Datsun Z car for several laps that was just as fast in a straight line, never looked in his mirrors and always took the racing line. Finally my and 3 other cars were stacked up behind him and we pushed him into getting nervous and going wide so we could get around him. Michael finished off the day with a 2 hour shift, a stop and go black flag penalty, and the checkered flag!
Final results 62nd out of 173 cars, 6th out of 22 in class C (Ugly). That means we beat 111 other cars, most of them in the faster A (Good) and B (Bad) classes.
More pictures to come as I scrape them from around the web. If you have any, please drop a link in the comments.
Look for us at Buttonwillow 6/30-7/1 for the true 24 hour race.
