Hey guys,

I had a very poor Saturday at buttonwillow. This is what happens when you shift from 3rd to 4th on a berm. This was on the my warm up lap on the first session of the day!!


There was a loud pop and no power. Lucky it broke near the sweeper going 80mph and I was able to roll in to the pits. I later had a talk with the race shop owner at buttonwillow and she said that a lot of spec miata's break there axles at that section of the track. i guess it was a combination of speed and shifting when the rear wheel was alittle bit in the air and when it came down it just shocked it.

I have to thank Rylan aka Krazik for helping me fix it at 7am sunday. He has to be one of the nicest guys I have ever met. One of the fastest s2000 I have ever seen.

Also have to thank Elton at Raceline who magically found a 07 rear axle for me on a Saturday!! I would have towed it to his shop but the tow cost was 800 dollars. Also have to thank Aaron at speedventure who let me use his truck to go pick up the axle which was in Van Nuys.

Because the kindness of these great guys I was able to have a great Sunday at Buttonwillow.

 

Glad everything worked out for you. Good group of people

 

glad you found a fix. how'd u do on sunday?

 

I did ok. Still not at my goal yet but Im about 1 second away. I posted a 201:12. Funny thing is I posted a time on Sat on a warm up lap which was 2:09 but was not given a 3rd place finish in the S2k series?


I guess they overlooked it.

 

that 201 is mighty impressive, congratulations on that.

I'm sure they'll give you the third, they overlooked it I suppose. Glad to see you and your car are doing okay.

 

Thanks man. There stills two more seconds I know I can pull from the car. I was doing really slow shift today because of what happened on Sat. LOL

Did you make it there on Sat? I did not see your car there.

 

No I was unable to attend. I had some things to do that kept me from being there. I really wanted to go.

I do hope you get your 2 seconds though, from the looks of it it won't be hard to do. I generally never shift on the berm though, its good to know now to not even risk it! I will be at the march and april buttonwillow events, and I will make sure to stop by and say hi, maybe even get a ride along. I would have placed 2nd in street class if I had gone though, so I'm kinda boiling in my regret =[. Emilio's just fast haha.

 

[quote name='blkblks2k' date='Jan 25 2009, 09:27 PM'] I did ok.

 

Sorry to hear what happened, but could you clarify what happened? I'd like to minimize chances of that happening. If i'm not mistaken, a berm is a dirt wall/mound of sorts, so you hit something like that? Or am i missing something?

 

Here is a picture of a berm. The mini in the picture is running over it. At buttonwillow the berms in the Esses at turn 11 are much higher then this. I would normally clip two of the first ones (there are a total of four) to get a straight line going out of Esses. It was weird, I normally never shift around there but since I was warming up I was going a lot slower. I guess it was a combination of being slower on the warm up lap and not knowing that something like this could happen that did it. Rylan said maybe it may have just been a bad axle.