4/22/2023: Open Practice #1 - Riverhead Raceway

I'M BAAAAAACK!!! Your friendly neighborhood car owner and team updater for the #92 Legends Car! Today marks the unofficial start of the 2023 racing season for us, and the actual start of our track time for the year. Going along with these weekly (hopefully) blog posts, we will also be starting a vlog (video blogs for you older folks) over on our YouTube channel: Stat's Auto Garage, so go check us out over there as we talk about our goals, plans and various goings on around our shop and team.

This morning started out a little chilly, and overcast, which in my opinion, is always better than sunny and hot, but a good day to go racing regardless. We got quite a good number of cars, across all the divisions, for this first day of open practice. Our goal with today is to give the car a good general shake down, and make sure Ed didn't break anything over the winter. 

While Ed may not have broken anything during the off-season, he certainly jumped head first into giving me anxiety. About halfway through the first round of practice, he found the wall and wanted to see what our car would look like with a set of white-walls.😑 Otherwise it was a successful first time back out on the track. Seriously...  first round of practice on the first DAY of practice and he's already trying to make the highlight reels. 🤦‍♀️

After we double checked the car to make sure nothing was bent, we got ready to get back out for round 2. This round went okay up until a new-to-us driver (possibly just new) spun on the back stretch, and Ed ended up spinning to avoid them. The car is mostly okay, but would not re-fire after the spin. We were able to push-start the car, but we're unclear as to the actual problem as of writing this. 

After round 2 Ed went back to mechanic mode as he went to work diagnosing why the car wouldn't start. Currently the belief is a bad alternator, since the battery wasn't charging while running, but further investigation is required. We're gonna try to run the 3rd round of practice on the battery alone, since we don't have a charger with us, and most likely pack it up for the day afterwards.

Round three went better than the first two, and we hit our fastest time today. However, we were once again broken out of our rhythm due to someone else's issues. We're gonna keep going, as long as the battery does at least so on to round four. Hopefully this time we can actually establish our racing rhythm!

Sooooo... 5 laps is definitely not enough time to do anything more than make sure the car doesn't fall apart... but it's also understandable when there is a time-crunch, multiple divisions, and technically a threat of impending weather. There was also 1 more round of practice that we sat out of, simply not wanting to push our luck running purely on battery power. We ran fairly consistent all day, which isn't terrible given the circumstances. It's not the day we were hoping for, but the car is still in one piece so I'm not complaining too much. We have our homework for the week and next weekend to try again before opening night on May 6th.

Luckily, once we got back home and unloaded everything on Sunday, there wasn't too much hidden damage from the day's events. The rear end was knocked out a little bit, but was fixed with a new bolt, and the firing issue was just a simple electrical glitch that was very quickly solved.

 As always, follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok for updates, clips, and random auto related stuff! A huge thank you too all our sponsors for helping to make this all possible!

~Sam (I can be found at KazulStudios on all social media)