8:00am Saturday, November 19, 2005 - the Ruppert Racing team arrives at Summit Point for the final enduro race of the EMRA season. We are in first place in the season points with a lead of 3 points. Not much considering there is a difference of 12 points from 1st to second and 8 points from second to third in this race.
Left to Right: jonmc(Driver), garyk(Car Owner), Egz(Mechanic/Gofer), Bri(Engineer/Chef), thetable(Pit Van/Gasman), seanmc(Driver), and taking the picture, Hal(Cameras/Radios/Fire Extinguisher)
The drama starts early. Gary's back is hurting so he will not be able to drive. That leaves us with two drivers one(Jon) who has never driven the car and one(Sean) who has never driven in a night race.
11:30am - Send Jon out to get some practice with the car. He finds that the ABS is not working and is locking up the right rear tire under braking.
That causes some interesting views thru the windshield.
Time to pull the rear hubs and replace the sensor rings and sensors.
12:30pm - Egz finishes up the work while Bri switches to his Chef role and prepares lunch. After testing the ABS is still not working so we just pull the fuse and will run without ABS. We are confident that our drivers can "drive around the problem".
3:15pm - Time to set up the pit.
The pit is setup ready to go and thetable has gotten dressed for his Gasman role. Gasman is required to wear at least 2 layers of Nomex, Helmet and Gloves while fueling.
3:30 - Race is started, we can't leave yet. The race starts on a handicap system. So ST7 cars(Sprigets, etc) start at 3:30, we have to wait for 19 min and the Trucks(last group) will start 10 min after us.
5:00 - Starting to get dark, driving lights have to be turned on.
The lighted building is Timing/Scoring and the two lights low on the right is Pit Out.
6:45pm - We make our third pit stop to gas up and change drivers. We made 4 pit stops total, one for gas, one for gas and driver change, and two to change tires(discovered the left front was "corded" on first gas stop). Driver must be out of the car when fueling so that takes a little longer.
Bri adds some oil then checks the tire pressure, Sean briefs Jon on track conditions, thetable puts in the gas, and Hal mans the fire extinguisher.
7:55 - Checkered Flag!
It got a bit darker from 5:00 to 7:55, good thing we had lots of lights on the car.
There were only two "Black Flag All" conditions so the four hour race actually took 4:25 to complete.
Rob(wreckerboy) and the EMRA crew did a great job of keeping the course clear with a minimum disruption to the racing.
We finished third in our class and second for the season(8 points out of first).