As some of you know, two Friday's ago Hyde left the drag strip in the trailer
I had some odd scraping noise going on when I made left turns, but I went racing anyway. My first launched I nailed a 1.53 in the 60' and the scraping noise got much worse.
On my second launch, the drivetrain broke. I wasn't sure what went, but I knew that I was only getting power to one wheel and I was spewing tranny fluid everywhere. I posted and assumed my season was over as I had no time or money to play the "what did I break now" game ... but this community stepped up to the plate again. I am back rolling again thanks to two awesome people/businesses in the MR2 community.
Well, I would like publicly thank
David Hawkins of Club MR2 and TwosRus.com for offering his assistance in diagnosing & fixing the breakage.
I would also like to thank
Josh Boam (mister3) of Chice Race Works for quickly supplying an axle stub in a matter of 2 days!
Anyway, this is what broke:
I haven't seen an MR2 break and axle IN the tranny before, but I guess there is a first for everything. That is the LSD inner stub. I'm not sure if you can tell in the photos, but the stress fracture spiraled around like a candy cane stripe and split in tow in the middle. There were many, many chunks in between those two pieces and I spent a good amount of time on Labor Day with a magnet on the end of a twistable stick fishing them out of my diff
David, flushed it all out prior to reassembly. We also found that I had broken the p-side sway bar end link tab off of the strut housing which David took care of getting the welded back on for me. He also installed new ball joints and a set of H&T end links.
He got all of this done inside of a week and it was our intention to go racing Sunday (today) at MIR in the IMSTAR World of Imports Series. We were going to meet NoShoes there and do a little on track data logging /tuning.
Unfortunately when we went our for our test flight to make sure the axle/tranny/diff were working and not leaking, we had a blow out in my drag radial. Apparently 275s DRs with the beefy H&T end link hardware was too close to call and grooved the tire until it popped.
We have since rectified this hardware issue and David has made good on the tire (not that I asked him too, he's just a really good guy
). He's also a full sponsor of Hyde for the rest of this season and all of next year. thanks Mr. Hawkins!
So we missed out drag racing today, but I trailered Hyde home and stuck the 265 road race tires on and there is no clearance issues. I took Hyde out for a short beating and everything seems to be 100%.
I should be doing the Weatherly Hill Climb next weekend, a local Solo 2 autcross the following weekend and if my new drag radials come in I should be hitting the big NHRA Sport Compact event at Englishtown the first weekend of October. That will put me at 13 events for 2006 of which 12 were in Hyde. It was my goal this year to make 12 events and it has been challenging, but with this communities continued support that has been able to happen.
In other news, I am in the process of securing support to send Hyde to North Carolina for a 1-mile Land Speed Record race at the end of October. If hyde makes it there, I
will be setting a new 1-mile land speed record for my class.
Thanks to everyone involved and this community!