A story of survival
In our last blog entry, we’d managed to crush the Barber Motorsports Park event and qualify for the invitational in Las Vegas. This post is about the trip to and from.
Pre-trip prep for these types of events is always a rush. The primary aim is to make sure the car is mechanically sound with a secondary aim of getting it as clean as possible. A full wash and detail was done, with claybar and a fresh ceramic coating application, with a good coat of wax on top of that. The idea is to protect the car as much as possible so that after the outbound trip the considerable amount of grime that builds up on a car moved cross country on an open trailer accumulates.
The mechanical part involved a nut and bolt check and an inspection of the wheels and tires, which uncovered the first snag of this adventure. All four tires had flat spots, big ones. Too big to leave them on the car. I contacted Dallas Reed at VitourP1.com and he had a set heading my way the same day.
Once the tires got here, it was a four hour struggle to get them mounted. I have a cheap tire machine and it struggles with these low profile high performance tires. The kick in the nuts was after I got them all done, as I torqued the last lug nut on the left rear wheel, the stud broke. Luckily my local parts store had 12 in stock. I bought ten. Replaced the broken one and torqued it all down.
The trip westward began early the next morning. The plan was Louisville to Oklahoma City on day one, then OKC to Williams, Arizona on day 2, then Williams to Pahrump on day three. The outbound trip was uneventful until we got to Las Vegas and turned towards Pahrump. The climb over Spring Mountain turned out to be too much for my old truck. We stopped a couple of times on the way up the hill to let the truck cool off. Both times, folks stopped to check on us, which was awesome. We ended up unloading the car and drive it over the hill off the trailer, just like we had to do when crossing the Vail Pass a few years ago.
At the Track
Once we got to the race track, we could settle down and take everything in. Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch is a fantastic facility. An oasis of motorsports in the desert. We got unloaded, through tech, and on to the road rally. As it was all season, we just needed to get to the local Autozone and back again. But, on this trip we realized we didn’t have fourth gear.
Now, I changed the transmission fluid as part of the prep, so a quick check once we got back to the pits revealed the transmission was underfilled. We added a quart and fourth gear was back. Success.
Moving into the evening, there was a drivers’ meeting at 4, then the group photo. Doing the photo at the beginning of the event was awesome. Nobody was broken yet, so everybody got to be in the picture.
We’re the third row back, fourth from the left.
After the picture, King Kong Motorsports hosted a cookout in the pits. Many potstickers were consumed.
Sunday was rubber meeting road. The schedule appeared daunting. Four road course sessions. Four autocross heats. Each autocross heat was just two runs. The road course sessions were twenty minutes, but on a track that’s over three miles long, that really was just four or five laps each session. And then scarsely fifteen minutes between them.
The first road course session was difficult. The track was hard. Practice in the simulator over the previous week left me knowing where to go, but what sims don’t relate well is camber and elevation. This course featured mostly off-camber corners and the elevation changes were extreme. And the transmission got hot. Really hot. By the time I realized the temps were out of control, I had started another lap and had to get the car 3 more miles before I could pit out. By the end of that lap, the transmission fluid was above 320 degrees. Worse, the overflow can I have attached to the vent was leaking, making a mess.
Once back in the pits, while idling the temps continued to rise. This was not good. I shut the car off. The plan changed: Survive. I’d let the car cool by skipping my morning autocross heat and the second morning track session. I had a clean lap in the first session (a 2:57). I only needed one clean autocross run all day, and I needed one more track lap in the afternoon.
So, what was a really busy schedule got really easy. I let the car cool down, then ran my first two autocross runs. Then let it cool off over lunch. The plan after that was the first afternoon autocross session and then the last afternoon road course session. But then there was an incident. A car caught fire on the course and caused the schedule to shift a half hour. This meant the last road course session was no longer garunteed. If there was another incident and delay, the sun would set and we’d lose that session. I had to run the first afternoon session.
So I did. I babied the car during the outlap while watching the transmission temp. I hammared one flyer, then got off the course. It was a much faster lap, 2:51. Respectable considering I only got two cracks at the course. Sadly, the camera didn’t turn on and I didn’t get video of the lap.
Then we let the car cool down and went out for our last autocross session. This was a success. Using the first run to warm the tires, we laid down a flyer on the second.
This 52.02 run landed me in 11th in GTV in the autocross. Perfectly acceptable.
I also landed in 12th in GTV with my road course times. Pretty good considering the limited track time.
SEMA
And just like that, we were done at Spring Mountain. We loaded the car on the trailer and headed to the hotel. The next morning was going to be a dance. We had to get to Vegas and be at the convention center at precisely 10am for show load-in. Normally, we’d unload the car and drop the trailer at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and drive the car to the show. With the transmission heating problem, I didn’t think the car would make it. So, we dropped the car at a shopping mall about a mile from the convention center, then dropped the trailer, then went back to get the car.
The plan worked. We got moved in and were done for Monday.
Tuesday was basically a free day for us. We had no scheduled activities, so I was able to walk the show floor. It was interesting. The first floor of the South Wing was basically all Chinese and Korean wheel and tire companies. Almost no domestic representation. North Hall was still the main hall with all the “fun” stuff, and way in the back, I ran into this guy:
One of my favorite SEMA stories is from 2018, when Jay crossed the parking lot right in front of me in the Buick and gave me a thumbs up and said, “Cool car!”. Finally meeting him in person and getting to shake his had was even more cool.
Wednesday and Thursday we ran the Peak Performance Challenge (formerly Speed Stop) at the show. This was a bit of a struggle. The car was running well, but we were still having heat problems with the transmission, so everything was done with one eye on the transmission temperature. Then, the number of runs was doubled on us due to things running more efficiently than the event staff had anticipated.
We got two good runs, then blew what we thought was a charge coupler. We later found it was a vacuum line.
But, before it did that, it was fast.
This run in particular, if you go through the data, was a 0-60 in 4.8s on an unprepped surface where we really couldn’t launch the car. The 5-60 time was under four seconds, which is fast. Really fast. Fast enough that on runs where the car ran correctly, we walked everybody we lined up against, which was a really good feeling.
Wednesday evening, we did discover the vacuum line and reconnect it. Thursday morning was our second batch of Peak Performance runs, and we blew another line. Some quick thinking by my girlfriend to use an old sticker stuck to the inside of the trunk lid allowed us to quickly repair it and complete the event.
The rest of the time we got to spend doing stuff. Jenni likes to gamble, so she had her fill of slots and roulette. We spotted several car celebrities. We had a great evening of Hibachi and Karaoke with friends.
Friday was move out day. We staged the trailer at the same shopping mall we used on Monday, and at 2pm we rolled the Buick out of the show and down the mile or so to the mall and loaded up. We were in Arizona before nightfall and made our first hotel stop by bedtime.
The trip home was pretty smooth until just outside of Rolla, Missouri. The TPMS on the trailer alarmed and we’d lost pressure in the right front tire. We managed to find a place to stop and check it out. The bearing had failed and the tire had started to wobble, and eventually wore through the sidewall rubbing against the trailer.
This began a five hour ordeal in falling temperatures to replace the bearing assembly before nightfall. After AAA refused to come help us (30 year member here, not any longer, AAA is dead to me now) a good samaritan with a truck full of tools stopped to help. We three-wheeled the trailer a mile up the road to the next exit and over to the parking lot of a Harbor Freight where we managed to get the old bearing off, a new bearing on, and the spare attached. We were back in business, but dead tired. Instead of continuing, we checked into the local Hampton, ordered from DoorDash and passed out.
Monday, we made it home. Got there in time for the kid to get home from archery practice, then we headed to my parents’ place to pick up Rose, our German Shepard. Once we got back home, Rose got on the couch, crawled under a blanket, and slept for 12 hours straight.
Overall, we finished 11th in GTV and 54th overall with 299 points, which I believe is my best finish at the invitational ever.
Closing out the year
But the season wasn’t done! The following weekend, there was the very last event of the year, a fun event with the Kentucky Region SCCA at Salem Motorsports Park. I wanted to run the event, so the car went on the lift so I could diagnose the transmission problem.
It turns out the cooling loop in the radiator was clogged. Not sure what it was clogged with. When I put air to it, nothing came out, but it was clearly clogged. Since the transmission fluid crossed 320 degrees at Spring Mountain and the rubber lining of AN oil line is only rated to like 250 degrees, I needed to replace all the lines, flush the two external coolers, flush the transmission, and drop the pan to clean it out and replace the filter.
So I did those things. I ran brake cleaner through the coolers until they ran clear and ordered new 6-AN line plus heat wrap. I ran a gallon of clean fluid through it, then dropped the pan and replaced the filter.
On a test drive, the transmission didn’t get above 140 degrees. We were in business.
So we went autocrossing one last time for 2025. The event was setup as a test ‘n tune with a shootout in the afternoon. We got seven test and tune runs, then there were three qualifying runs. The top three in each group (we split everything into four classes based on tire size and treadwear) entered a shootout. Then the winners of each group went into another shootout to crown the days’ Champion.
The Buick performed flawlessly. The highest transmission temperature we say was a meager 164 degrees after the qualifying runs. We ended up fourth in our group, the mid-tire group, only missing the shootout by 0.4s.
So, to recap the 2025 season in a word, wow.
We had no intentions of going to OUSCI this year, but made it anyway. The car performed really well all year. I finally feel like it’s properly sorted. There were some minor issues, but I was mostly able to just drive it. Doing things like shock adjustments instead of facing major repairs was really awesome.
So, it’s always good to go out on top. For 2026, we’re going to take it easy. I need to focus on finishing the Corvette and sorting it out, so we’ll be staying close to home, focusing on local autocrosses and maybe a few track events at NCM or Putnam Park so I can funnel money and time into finishing the car and getting it sorted. Then we’ll be back on the national stage again in 2027.
Huge thanks to Optima Batteries for supporting these events; Boost Crew Motorsports for their ongoing parts and tech support; the KYSCCA and CKRSCCA for providing events close to home; my parents for watching the dog; my kid for understanding; and Jenni for putting up with me and this ridiculous hobby.
Watch this space for updates on the Corvette. Work will start back on it in earnest soon.
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