Fri 4.15

Friday. April 15th, 2011. Test and tune day at NJMP Lightning Circuit.  Luiz, Cecil, and Mike are at the track bright and early with Jeff Ricca from CIP Motorsports/240SX Motoring.  Both Cecil and Jeff are rookies in NASA so they were to complete the comp school before racing the rest of the weekend.

The day went smoothly for everyone but Luiz. His first testing session was fine until he developed a terrible misfire during the 2nd session.  "I dunno what changed. The car was fine in the first session," Luiz said. When trying to go out for the 3rd session, the #54 car would not start. After taking out a spark plug to test for spark, there was none.

After trying to find the cause, Luiz and Griff found that the ECU was at fault. They quickly swapped ECU's with Cecil's #999 M3 and the #54 car fired right up with no issues. Looking relieved then frustrated, Luiz gave Hugh a call to bring an extra 413 ECU for his car. 

"I should have replaced the ECU over the winter.  At the last race at Thunderbolt in 2010, there was a funny hiccup when the engine hit about 5500rpm.  We thought we fixed when we replaced the spark plugs but I guess not," Luiz said. If that wasn't enough, an annoying clunking sound was coming from underneath the car whenever it rolled. Hugh found it that the center driveshaft bearing had cracked during Luiz's previous session.  When that was replaced, the car had no other problems the rest of the weekend.

The Comp School did numerous sessions of drills for passing and such. After doing that, Cecil and Jeff then did the practice races. In the first part, Cecil started in the lead with Jeff in the pack behind him. Cecil pulled out numerous car lengths on the 2nd place yellow Corvette until the 2nd lap when the Vette passed him on the front straightaway. But Cecil was not giving up that easily.  The #123 Corvette braked a bit too late into the 1st turn and Cecil got underneath him to pass as they headed down to turn two but the Vette had the legs on the straightaways. 

Jeff made his way through traffic and was closing in on Cecil, but then the checkered flag was waved and this first part of the practice race was then brought back to the pits so that the grid could be rearranged.  

Cecil actually did an extra lap around before returning to the pits to guarantee him starting at the back.  "I needed to get used to traffic so I went around again," he said. Starting near the back, both Jeff and Cecil got phenomenal starts on the wave of the green flag.  Cecil passed two Spec Miatas while Jeff battled with a blue Mustang and one of the Nascar-Spec trucks. The race soon was over.

Both Jeff and Cecil were successful in getting their licenses and were excited to take part in the races to come during the weekend. Congrats guys!

-GG