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The track was pretty cool for a street course. It was in a hilly area based on a divided highway through a slight valley right by the Tecate Brewery. One side of the road went up and curved back down the side of a hill, then to a short straight with a long dip, 90 right, hair pin right, sweeping left back on to the wide road through the valley that curved slightly. Since it took you at a pretty high speed (110-120) down to another hair pin right back onto the front straight, they built a chicane out of tires to slow things down before the hairpin. This tire barrier would get regularly rearranged from cars blasting through them. |
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Practice |
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| Rob Tallini was driving our 1G FWD this weekend. On Saturday Morning, the car started running a little hot. We found one of the flat fans had died, melted solid inside the fan motor. Scot Gray went on a tour of down town Tecate looking for some kind of universal flat fan. Not in Mexico. Lucky for us, our number one race fan in Mexico Pedro Kim volunteered to drive to Pep Boys in San Diego to get one for us. He lives in Tijuana and had driven all the way to Tecate to see us. He has been to every Mexican race we have run and even drove up to watch the LA Street Race. Pure devotion. We just turned the boost down to 1.0 bar and it ran cool enough till we got the fan installed. | |
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Qualifying |
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| We qualified fastest in Group A on Saturday but were a little slower than the faster open class cars. Power seemed a little off even for 1.0 bar and there was a little dark smoke when the car came on full boost. We went looking for a boost leak and found one, one of the Allen bolts to the compressor outlet flange was a millimeter too long and wasn't tightening the flange down enough. Fixed that up Saturday after the sessions and were ready for the Sunday morning warm up |  |
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Race Day |
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We turned the boost up to 1.2 with the overtake boost set at 1.3 for 6 seconds (one of the few working PRofec A's in captivity) and with new Porterfield R4-E's the car was pretty much dialed in. We played a little with tire pressures and were ready to race. This time they combined the three fastest groups so we got to play with the faster open class cars. The two fastest were VW Rabbits running 2.2 liter 16 valve motors (one turbo and one supercharged) and weighing 1800 lbs. Power to weight we were about the same and they had a lot less weight for their brakes to slow down. They started the race groups separately in their qualifying order. We were at the pole position of the second group, standing start. Rob got a good launch on El Coyote in the Mustang (pronounced "Mooseestang" in Mexico) and just squeezed in front of him heading up the hill. As soon as the open class cars disappear over the hill and as Rob is approaching the crest of the hill, we see a huge dust cloud rocketing along the side of the hill and down to the center of the little valley. Red flag all corners, everyone back to the start. One of the open class cars (a 1500 lb Pinto with a XR4Ti turbo motor) was the victim of a little too much enthusiasm on cold tires and cold brakes. Re start is a replay of the first one. Rob worked his way through the remaining open cars and up to the back bumper of the lead bunny. They played with each other up to about the 1/2 way point, Rob was a little faster but since they weren't racing for actual position tried to be nice. He got a little bored and started working on a pass but the Rabbit started blocking, on one drive out of the last turn Rob ended up giving a little "assist" for the Rabbit up the front straight. The car gets hot with no air flow when following close so he let the Rabbit have a little space. Then bwaaa...pop. It just started misfiring and sputtering. No juice race over. The alternator kicked the bucket. Rob coasted in to the pits. Arturo in the red rabbit went on unchallenged to finish first. After our strong showing in the last two races we were politely asked
if we "wanted" to move our Group A car over to their Open Class.
No problem. |
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| Thanks out to Scot Gray and the whole crew over at DSMPorn.com for helping out this weekend. Culver Misawa crewed too and Rob did a good job of keeping the car out of the walls and off the curbs. Thanks also to Toyo Tires for lending us their EZ Up tent to keep out of the sun (makes us look huge too:) The Toyo Proxes tires are working great, we ran two full race weekends on one set of Toyo tires. The next Border Series race is on the coast of the Sea of Cortez in San Felipe in November. They have not set the date for sure yet, if it doesn't interfere with the SCCA Treeline Pro Rally in November we'll be racing it there. If we get bored this winter we'll hang a big turbo on the FWD car and see what it can do dragster racing with it. | |
In car quick time movie at the LA Street Race 7/00
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