I can’t believe I’m blogging about a kitchen instead of the race car 
Poor “RedRum” has been sitting in the driveway getting rained on. I discovered yesterday that I have a coolant leak somewhere. Looks to be around the middleish of the motor so maybe its a cracked hose or similar. Going to diagnose this weekend and get her ready for the Barber race at the end of August.
Ok, back to the kitchen. Got the granite installed today. Looks absolutely AWESOME.
I had another awesome weekend at Road Atlanta. This time it was a super super hot July weekend with a SARRC 15 lap sprint race, and an ECR 90 minute enduro race with the old car owner as codriver. The sprint races are the ones I focus on, while we were just running the enduro so Dan could keep his competition license. In SCCA, you have to run 2 races a year to maintain a license.
The weekend started out with qualifying, and I put myself on pole by 2 seconds for the SARRC race. I only ran a 1:44.3, but considering the hot weather, it was a pretty good time that I was happy with. In the afternoon, Dan got in the car and shook some rust off, putting us middle of the pack for the start of the ECR. Saturday evening was eventful, with me leaving the new brake pads I needed at work. We had to drive back from Road Atlanta and ended up spending the night in Marietta. Next time I’m making a list before leaving the house
We put on the older Hoosier tires for Sunday morning’s 90 minute ECR. Immediately, I noticed a vibration above 100mph, which was probably an out of balance tire or two. I came into the pits after about 15 minutes instead of my 45, as I didn’t want to hurt the car. It wasn’t worth continuing with everything shaking, as this wasn’t a points race or anything. We took the tires off and got them balanced with enough time for Dan to get 45 mins in the car, and finish out the race. No damage, no real wear on the car, success!
Sunday afternoon was the SARRC Sprint. I put on some fresh(er) tires and got ready to kick some butt. It was a fairly uneventful race, which on one hand was nice, but I would have like to have a little more of a fight. I drove hard for 5 laps and put some time on the rest of the field. After that I put it on cruise control and finished off the win. It was the first win (out of 2 races) in the new car. The last one I broke an axle with a 15 second lead on the last lap Brian Cembor also came out to watch and took my camera for a spin. He ended up with a few great pics of my car, as well as Kirk’s Golf. These are also the first “evidence” of the new car on track! As a photographer, I never get to take pictures of my OWN car.
On a sadder note, it was a weekend full of carnage for some other racers. Everything from spins, to wall hits, to totalled cars, to flips. I got lucky avoiding the bad luck and came out of the weekend with no damage, other then the scrapes on the front bumper from some bump drafting
Funny article I read today from slashdot. I’ve done this I think 3 times in my 4 years at WebMD. With a 20+ minute commute, that sure sucks!
After what seemed like an eternity I finally got to work on the race car this morning. The next race is Road Atlanta next weekend. All the qualifyings will be on Saturday and then I will be doing a 30 minute sprint race by myself on Sunday morning and then splitting a 90 minute enduro with the old owner in the afternoon. Late July in Atlanta should be scorching so I’m going to start drinking water starting Monday. This should be a well attended weekend, so I should hopefully have some on track photos of the race car finally. Its nice being a photographer, but no one takes pictures of YOUR car. This time I’m going to set loose my camera with a bunch of friends and we’ll see what comes out
On the car note, I finished rebuilding both axles today. Just need the boot clamps and those can go back in the car. Holy CRAP that is a messy job. The grease that came out of the old ones was super nasty, but other then that, they looked great. Not sure if I’m going to drop the $300 on raxles unless I keep on breaking them. Hopefully the redline grease prevents the failure I had last race. Other then that, just need to bleed the brakes, a quick oil change, get the new tires mounted up and make sure all the bolts are tight. Might also do a quickie alignment to make sure everything is still square.
Lastly I broke out the powerwasher and washed all the mud off the jeep. It looks sort of weird being clean! We probably won’t get another chance to get her dirty again till August 
Finally! Corporate email support, 3G, GPS, and now I’ve got one
It was quite an adventure this morning, as I got in line around 6:30am at the store a few mins from our house. I was 55th in line (lucky number, sweet) and there were people that spent the night waiting.
The whole process with AT&T was a total and gigantic clusterfuck. Their systems were up, their systems were down, their systems were slow. They did something last night so where the staff had no idea what they were doing and were reading off instructions off printed sheets. Half the people that showed up to buy a phone had no idea of contracts, some didn’t have their license on them, just plain WOW
At least I had my laptop and wireless, so I got a bunch of work done while I waited. I got the phone and busted out of there after the lady told me everything was perfectly setup. 3 hours later and I’ve still got No Service. Time to call AT&T. Coming from Verizon, I’m real happy to have the iPhone, but real skeptical on being an AT&T customer. I hope this experience so far isn’t repeated on down the road
