OT: My 2024 BCHMR Day 1 (for all my devoted followers).

Well, it was great to get back on track.
With the help of the son of one of the previous owners of my previous car, two weekend days of work leading up to this past weekend put the car almost back together (although that "almost" came back to bite me a little bit). We went through the car—checked and bled the brakes and clutch, changed the engine oil and made sure everything was properly bolted, and when it was all done, we discovered that:
1. We needed new brake pads all around.
No problem! Our local race supplier, (shameless plug for Frank Micucci of driversedgeautosport.com) promised to have brake pads for me first thing Saturday morning and changing pads on a formula car such as mine is normally a 15 minute job at most.
2. The battery needed to be replaced. The car has an alternator, so it will run if started with a jump battery, but then you need someone to come to pre-grid to jump you again when the one minute signal is given, and if you should happen to kill the engine in a spin... ...well, not having a working battery makes for too many problems.
No problem! After much searching for a less expensive option than the Odyssey PC545 (now renamed ODS-AGM15L) which really was overkill for a car that wasn't running a total loss system (thanks to the Honda engine rule requiring that an alternator be included) and which was out of stock in the locations that had it for the best price, I found out that lithium-ion batteries have come down in price a lot, and I could get a 200A (cranking amps) NOCO NLP5 for $127 from Amazon with free 2-day delivery. 1.5lb vs 11.4lb.
So all was looking good, except:
1. It appears that quality control at Hawk Performance isn't all it used to be, and when I went to install my new Hawk "Blue" pads into the LD20 calipers... ...they wouldn't fit! At first, I assumed I hadn't retracted the caliper pistons far enough, but closer inspection showed that it was the overall width of the backing plate that was just marginally too big. It appears that the backing plates are punched out of sheet steel and the punching dies are starting to wear out.
Fortunately, in a racing paddock you have neighbours and my neighbour (and good friend) Marty Knoll (shameless plug for MK Technologies; maker of quality pit equipment for racing at almost every level) had a trailer with both an angle grinder, a vise, and electric power (note to self: add DeWalt cordless angle grinder to my tool arsenal), and so I was looking at the depressing prospect of spending perhaps 30-40 minutes grinding down the width of 8 pads so that they'd fit properly.
Even more fortunately, when I grabbed the first pad of the 8 to fit onto my car, I by chance grabbed the one that fit the worse of all of them. So the grinding ended up taking only 15 minutes or so. But still, that's a 15 minute job that ended up being 30-40 minutes; maybe even a few more as I discovered I'd run out of the cotter pins that we use to hold the pads in place and I had to round up some new ones.
2. And I'd forgotten just what a pain it was to get beneath the cover that reveals both the battery and the car's ECU and actually change the battery. It was clear that it was worth removing one of the front suspension's coil-over dampers to gain better access. And then...
...I hadn't reckoned with the fact that the new battery was a lot shorter from terminal to terminal than the Odyssey I was replacing. The Odyssey was 5.56" between terminals and the NLP5 from NOCO was only 4.5" long overall. Fortunately, the NOCO had enough different options for connecting the main leads that I was able to use the connection from the side of the battery to make everything fit.
So with both of those jobs running long (and with a 20 minute forced hiatus in the time before the first session for the drivers meeting), I ended up missing the practice/qualifying session for the combined open wheel and sports racers group. Honestly, not a big deal, but it did mean that I would have to bed my brakes on the pace lap for the first race (which was pretty easy as I was starting from the back and I wasn't changing compounds anyway).
So, first race (and all of these sessions are short in vintage racing—15 minutes) I started from the back of the pack, hung back enough that I could do "lunges" forward followed by hard braking to get enough heat into the pads and rotors, and when the green flag dropped, I quickly got by all the Formula Vees, the very slowest of the Formula Fs and worked my way past Erle and Keith and was hoping that the race would last long enough that I could close up on the single FC in the field and take the outright victory (he was a novice, and I'd already noticed on the practice day Friday that he wasn't yet running good enough lines, so there was probably a chance). No luck. I don't have times yet, but first in FF, second overall and I was probably 2-3 seconds faster than the next fasted FF even running on two year old used tires.
Next race, my best time in Race 1 meant that I was gridded 2nd next to the FC, so I figured I was in with a chance of winning outright. As the race started, I found it pretty easy to keep up with him on the first lap—not really a surprise, but I think it surprised him and so after keeping pace with him for all of lap 1 and most of lap 2, he eased off a little in turn 9 of that lap and let me by. Talking to him afterwards, he confirmed what I thought at the time: he wanted to watch my lines for a while and figure out how a 1.5l Formula F Honda with maybe 118 horsepower could keep up with his 145hp Pinto-engined FC. And for the next however-many laps of the race we did that. And he learned that if you want to be fast, you have to use ALL the road.
I'll post a video shortly and you can see for yourself how much room he leaves on corner exit.
But for the last 3 laps of the race, he clearly felt that he'd learned enough, and I sensed that he was going to try and get back past me for the win. And that's when he learned that being faster and getting past someone are two very different things.
Unless you have so much greater power and speed on the straights (and assuming you drive a line that lets you unleash that speed and power at the corner that exits onto the straight), you're going to have to pass in a braking zone at the end of the straight. And suddenly, I wasn't driving a line that used all the width of the track—entering from wide and exiting from wide. Suddenly, I was braking for each corner where there was a realistic opportunity to pass from the MIDDLE of the track. For three laps, I defended each time he was in a position to make a late-braking pass attempt.
The first time I did it in turn 1 of the ante-penultimate lap, he tried to late-brake and go around the outside of me, and that is almost never a winning strategy unless you're trying it in the first of two linked corners. Then outside becomes inside in the second corner...
...but then of course, you'd defend that differently. 😎
So for three laps, I frustrated all his attempts to get around me, and I took the outright race win.
Tomorrow would tell a different story, but we'll get to that.