This past weekend the annual summer vintage races at descended on Road America. Despite a number of recent name changes, the event formerly known as the Chicago Historics, BRIC, KIC and now the Hawk brought roughly 500 race cars and thousands of car enthusiasts to the small village of Elkhart Lake.

I believe this marked my 12th time racing at the event and definitely the most frustrating. I arrived at the event with a brand new engine that got buttoned up in the car at 1:30am the night prior. Needless to say I was expecting engine issues, but I was actually plagued by transmission problems early on. I had my main and spare transmissions out of the car a total of four times for what was mostly issues I could have avoided.

I did not manage to get in a full practice session until Friday, despite having three scheduled on Thursday and during the abbreviated practice sessions I did run the crankcase breather was puking oil. I attributed this to me adding too much in the chaos leading up to the event and over calculating how much more oil should be added for the bump from -12 to -16 oil lines. Things finally seemed to be in order for Sunday's warmup session and I was optimistic going into the race, where I was gridded at the back of the back due to not finishing the previous days qualifying race. This was the result of a charging issue that did not pop up previously due to the cars inability to complete more than a couple of laps in prior sessions. ..

The Sunday feature race started well and I managed to make up about 12 positions in the first couple of laps. Unfortunately, the car belched oil out of the breather yet again, dripping onto the exhaust and creating more smoke than a Cheech and Chong movie. On lap 5 I was meat balled off of the track ending my frustrating weekend.

With my next event a month out I need to figure out if the oil puking was still the result of too much oil in the system or another underlying issue. I've really lost excitement for racing the rest of the year...

On the bright side I did enjoy watching some of the other races and attending the Friday and Saturday night concourses in downtown Elkhart Lake. I posted a video and some photos on my company's blog which can be viewed at the link below. I did not get as many photos or videos as I would have liked...


http://blog.twincitiesluxuryauto.com/2012/...ad-america.html

Thansk for the link! Put a vaccum gauge on that engine and see what's going on.

a buddy of mine went up with his RS America #22. Can be seen at 0:40 on the video and a few times in the track action. Went up as a guest of Hawk.

He said I NEED to go next year...I'd say he's correct!!

Not sure if I can drive Papa Smurf there, though....

Unseated rings, even in one cylinder, apparently can produce enough blowby to move several quarts out of the oil system.
Erik Madsen finished the '05 Runoffs with his oversize puke tank full to overflowing.

Its a good thing he had that big box in the trunk or he would have been meatballed, and unable to secure a podium finish.
As it was, the rear trunk had a bit of oil in it already when he pulled into the pit lane.