Hooniverse 24 Hours of Lemons: Sucking, Knocking, and Blowing in Jersey

“That said, everything can change tomorrow“

And everything did change the next day. An hour into the second day of the race we were in fourteenth or fifteenth place overall out of 120 or so cars, which seemed pretty damn amazing. I was getting ready for my stint when a radio message from my driving teammate came in “lost some power, about 20%-30%, feels like something is dragging”


That was the beginning of the end. OBD2 scanner said that we had a misfire, and the engine seemed to have been misfiring. We inspected coil-packs, spark plugs, injectors, vacuum and electrical connections. Everything checked out, but the slight knock or misfire and lack of power were still there. We thought that it may be internal/mechanical.
We decided to go back out on the race track. It was either going to go slow or blow.
It did both.
The car was loud and slow, knocking, clonking, sputtering. On the third lap it died. We got it towed in. Once back in the paddock it actually started up, as seen in the above video. At that point we decided to pack it up, hoping that there was enough life in the engine to propel this glorious racecar onto the trailer.
The good news is we had no penalties, no contact, although I had to put all four wheels off track to avoid a BMW E36 that span-out mid-corner in front of me and started rolling backwards. We had some radio issues, which required me and another driver to come into the paddock and tell the others on the team that we used up more gas than expected and needed to pit sooner. Had the engine not failed, which we assume now was due to oil starvation, we could have possibly finished in top ten overall.