We Kicked A**...
...and Phil took names!
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We planned to build a supercharged propane powered Triumph GT6 and bring it to Orlando Florida for the Grassroots Motorsports $2002 Challenge. I (Erik "Iceman" Quackenbush) provided the supercharger and the workshop. Phil "The Factor" Fox provided the car. Mike "Wheelman" Konopka was our designated driver. Each day brought us closer to the event. Each day we tried to shake the feeling that someone, or something, wanted us to fail.
The weekend before the race was "paint the GT6 weekend". Phil Fox Jr. and Sr. arrived at Q-branch on Friday evening and began sanding the old paint off car. Hours went by. Phil Junior counted nine layers of paint on the driver's side of the car.
On Saturday Phil Sr. returned to continue the work. On advice from the Stagmeister, he decided not to bring the body down to bare metal and instead spent the day sanding the rough spots and removing trim.
On Sunday the car was masked off and we built a makeshift spray booth out of some plastic sheeting, a propane fired heater, and an HVAC blower I recovered from a dumpster near my office. Phil mixed the primer and sprayed the car while I tried to keep the air hose out of the way. The primer went on smoothly and was followed by the paint. At this point the fumes got the best of me so I had to let Phil to finish the job alone. After an hour or two Phil came into the house dejected and told me that the clear coat was riddled with runs. I went out to see the car. The runs were noticeable but the car still looked 100% better than it had before.
On Monday and Tuesday the whole team worked furiously to get the car finished in time for a Wednesday Morning departure. Mike finished rebuilding the front suspension and replacing the rear shocks. I received news Monday evening that my great uncle Alan (a fellow British car owner) had passed away. Alan and I were very close and I thought I would miss the actual race, but the work continued.
During testing on Tuesday we couldn't get the propane solenoid valve to work correctly so we bypassed it to get the engine running. Once the engine was running for a while the car overheated because, while the fan belt was driving the supercharger, it wasn't turning the water pump. Later on, the propane regulator froze solid for the same reason. The regulator relies on engine coolant to boil the liquid propane from the tank (29 below zero!) and the coolant wasn't circulating. We thawed out the regulator and solved the belt tension problem with a makeshift idler pulley.
The rules required us to have a working horn and taillights. The horn actually caught fire when we tested it so we began looking at the electrical system. We found large wires with high current draw spliced into smaller wires using low power telecom connectors. We found vibration prone AC wire nuts on some connections and non-electrical tape on others. We even found an old-fashioned porcelain lamp socket conveniently providing light for the driver's feet.
Tuesday night became early Wednesday morning. Alan's funeral was scheduled for Thursday morning so I planned to fly down Thursday night and make it to the Friday morning drag race. We worked until 5:00 AM on Wednesday and then caught a few hours sleep. The 9:00 AM departure time was going to slip a little.
We resumed work at noon and spent all afternoon chasing little problems with the car and assembling our tools and spare parts for the trip. At 5:00 PM, eight hours after our scheduled departure, it was time to load the car onto the trailer. Surprise! The clutch didn't work. The master cylinder was bad. We couldn't cry at this point so we laughed instead. I looked across the garage at the Triumph Herald I had just bought and said, "hey, I bet the Herald has the same master cylinder as the GT6!" My wife Susan sensed our exhaustion and fed us dinner. Then we yanked the master cylinder from the Herald, installed it, bled the system, and drove the car onto Irv's trailer. Mike and Phil pulled out of my driveway at 8:00 PM, 11 hours behind schedule. The trailer wiring I had hacked together stopped working somewhere on the way to Phil's house so Mike called me on his cell phone around 9:00 and we found a way to get it working again.
Susan and I were driving from the funeral home to the cemetery when my cell phone rang. It was Mike calling to tell me that they were somewhere in Georgia (they'd driven straight through the night) and the trailer had a broken axle. By the time I could speak to them after the ceremony they had discovered that National Trailer Supply was only seven miles away and a pair of new axles were installed while we talked. Phil told me to get the spare clutch from his house on my way to Midway airport just in case.
I arrived at Midway airport with a one-way ticket to Florida and a bag containing a three-piece clutch kit, a Lucas distributor, and some assorted tools. Airport security walked me to a separate area and searched everything twice. Apparently they couldn't find a rule against carrying large metal objects onto the plane so they just glared at me and let me board.
When I arrived in Orlando I attempted to rent a car, but there were NO cars available for rent. There were four conventions in town and my Hertz Gold card carried no weight so I walked outside to get a taxi. The taxi line was LONG. After 45 minutes I was on my way to the Days Inn, which was about 30 minutes from the airport. I arrived at the hotel at about 1:00 AM Florida time and walked up to the bulletproof reception desk. The young lady said "you must be Erik! Mike says to meet for breakfast at 7:00". I was starving so I walked across the street to Papa John's pizza. You meet some really interesting people in Papa John's at 1:30 on Friday morning. If you're ever cooking after hours in Orlando and run out of "oregano", Papa John's is the place to go.
My alarm clock went off at the appointed hour and I got up and performed my morning rituals. Some of the lights in my room didn't work. I went outside and saw Phil. It was raining and an electric transformer across the street had just exploded and taken out half the power circuits in the hotel. The dead circuits included Mike's alarm clock so we "knocked him up" as they say in England and headed for the drag strip by way of the auto parts store. We also stopped at McDonalds where Eagle Scout Phil scored a couple of large green garbage bags to use as rain ponchos. When Phil interacted with the clerks at the auto parts store and McDonalds his sales training kicked in and he read their nametags and addressed them by name.
We arrived at the drag strip early. There were a few Japanese cars near the entrance so we drove all the way to the end of the paddock and started working on all the things we ran out of time for back in Chicago. Each time a Japanese car pulled in they parked near their countrymen. Each time a cool car pulled in it paused, scoped out the paddock, and then drove down to our end and parked. We ended up sharing tools with the Corvair and MG guys. We were just about to fire up the engine for some testing when the editor of Grassroots Motorsports and the editor of Hot Rod magazine walked up to watch. We gulped and turned the key… Vroom, purr, purr, purr. Oh my god. It started on the first crank and purred like a kitten. We tried not to look surprised. Tim Suddard (the editor of GRM and a fellow Triumph owner) told us we were the only Triumph to enter in the three years they've been running the contest and he was happy we made it. Nobody noticed the runs in the clear coat because of the rain.
The rain got worse and the drag racing portion of the event was cancelled. This was OK with us. Our list of mechanical glitches was changing but it wasn't getting shorter. We worked in the rain all day. They eventually kicked us out of the paddock because some individuals were drag racing their RX7 up and down the rain soaked access road. These were the same individuals who were passed by an unmanned RX7 on their way to the event. Seconds before it crashed into a tree they realized it was their own car and it was supposed to be on the trailer behind them. They definitely won the "boomer" for the event.
We drove through the rain to our second hotel, checked in (Phil did the nametag thing), and then met the Corvair guys for dinner at a Japanese steakhouse. Beer was consumed and at one point we all decided that "houseboat racing" would be a fun sport.
Saturday morning. The autocross and concours events were both today. The rain was worse. All the cars lined up and paraded under the judging tent for the concours before making their autocross runs through a shallow lake festooned with orange pylon islands. Many contestants had nothing but racing slicks so the autocross results were definitely skewed by the weather. The runs in our clear coat were invisible in the rain and we pulled 13th place in the concours!
Mike made two successful runs though the autocross course. While waiting in line for the judging we realized that our alternator wasn't working so I followed behind the GT6 in our tow vehicle (my wife's Mercedes ML320) with jumper cables. At the end of Mike's last run, just as he was just getting the feel for the car, the supercharger seized up and the pulley spun off. He was able to finish the run and get an official time (we beat six of the other finishers!) but we were done.
We got to try alligator meat at the awards dinner. When we got back to the hotel I went out in the rain, pulled the supercharger off the car, and dismantled it in my room. A tiny piece of metal was wedged between one of the rotors and the casing. In hindsight this probably came from the propane tank itself. When we bypassed the propane solenoid valve we also bypassed it's built in filter. It only took a ball of metal the size of a pinhead to seize things up.
The next day was sunny and warm! The magazine managed to reserve one of the drag strip lanes for the day (for exhibition only since the awards had already been given out) so we went to the drag strip and worked on the car. We filed the damaged rotors smooth and reassembled the supercharger. The magazine people announced that they could only stay until 2:00 PM so we worked furiously to get the car fixed in time for an exhibition run. At about 1:30 I stripped the threads out of one of the supercharger mounting holes. We tightened things as well as we could but the intake manifold wouldn't seal against the supercharger outlet and we ran out of time.
We drove straight through the night in shifts and made it home early Monday afternoon. We endured lousy weather, family tragedy, a broken trailer, and endless mechanical problems culminating in a seized supercharger. We had a blast and we're planning to go back next year!
By Erik "Iceman" Quackenbush
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Copyright © 2002 Illinois Sports Owners Association