After a tough weekend blowing the engine at Gardermoen and starting to build a new engine, Tore and the trailer took the ferry from Gothenburg to Immingham, heading for Santa Pod and the 1st round in the European Championship.
It’s been 11 years since the car and the team raced at Santa Pod last time with Arvid Grødem as the driver.
Before the trailer went on the ferry to Santa Pod, it got a much needed wash at Storbilvasken Liertoppen!
The parts from the US arrived at Santa Pod Wednesday morning and the team arrived later that day, ready to continue to build the engine.
The problems started when we discovered that our thrust bearings for the cam shaft didn’t fit. Once again, we were very impressed over how many people that offered to help us.
We considred all the options we could think off and ended up with grinding the camshaft so that we had bearings that fit. Furthermore, we had even more struggles and once we solved one problem, another one showed up.
Despite our team working really hard, all these problems continued and led to us not being ready to race on friday and missed two qualification runs.
Friday evening we fired up the engine and finally it looked and sounded great again!
The spirit in the team lifted (after a dip earlier that day) and we went to bed with a good feeling.
Saturday we woke up ready for two qualification runs.
We had a soft setup on the car for the 1st run just to check that everyting worked, so the ET was only 5.96 seconds. But we’re very happy to see that the engine works great and we didn’t brake anything!
Also very glad to see all the spectators!
The next run didn’t go as planned, as the car went into a tire shake immediately after the start. But again, we were happy that we were racing after all and that our biggest concern was that we didn’t go fast enough.
On Sunday we were originally scheduled to do one qualification run and one elimination run (the final). That changed and the qualification run got cancelled but we ended up with having a test run instead.
As a continuation of the curse upon us, the blower lifted during that test run. The run felt good until it popped.
We couldn’t immediately understand the cause of this, so we picked the engine apart to figure out what went wrong. Everything looked good, and the only things that broke were the front window, a fuel line and the blower belt. Our theory is that the blower belt split and hit and damaged the fuel line.
Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to put the engine back together in time for the final, so Sandro Bellio won the race well deserved.
So we got 2nd place! Or last place, however you choose to view it.
We made the effort and spent the money to come all the way to Santa Pod, and the team worked really hard to get the car out on the track, so I do think the runner-up trophy we got is well deserved.