SCCA The Sebring Cabin Fever SARRC...

Southeast Division South Atlantic Road Racing Championship – SARRC

Sebring International Raceway - February 27, 2005

The Sebring race was one of those events that you look back on and say, “We should have stayed home”. In fact about an hour into the drive down, Dave was ready to turn around.

It was raining and the forecast was for rain throughout the weekend, but sometimes the weather people are wrong…not this time. Susan was already suffering from a cold and by the time we arrived in Sebring on Friday, had completely lost her voice.

Our son, Mark, his wife, Janet, Casey Miller and Debbie followed us down and helped set up the tarp and unload in between the rain showers. We met up with our friends, Mark & Karen Kalfas, and headed over to the Chateau Elan hotel to check in and get some dinner. We discussed the schedule for the morning and headed back to the room to get some rest.

Saturday was cloudy, but it never really rained. Mother Nature had to spill a few drops occasionally, just to keep our attention. Dave took the car out for practice and quickly determined that he had the wrong gear in the car. As an indication of how the weekend was going to go…we discovered that we didn’t bring the correct gear with us.

As could be expected with the wrong gear, the afternoon qualifying session did not produce the results we wanted. Our starting position was 7th overall. While we were not real happy, we consoled ourselves with the fact that we were at the event mainly to fulfill the license renewal requirements. The weather forecast for Sunday was calling for heavy rain and thunderstorms so we bolted on new rain tires and did what we could to prep for those conditions.

Sunday morning it was pouring and it continued through the day. Our race was the first one after lunch, so Susan stayed in the room and watched from the balcony until noon. Her voice was still just a squeak, so Mark got radio duty and she took the scanner.

Due to the rain, about one half of the grid didn’t show up, so Dave started in 2nd position. After a “wave-off” on the first lap, the field took the Green Flag on the second lap. The car was running fine and the rain tires were doing their job. All Dave needed to do was hold his position and in the rain that didn’t look like it would be a problem.

Wrong. On the 3rd race lap, Dave came on the radio with “The oil light just came on. I’m coming in…and clean the window too.” As Dave pulled in, Casey (who did not have a radio) started on the window until he noticed Dave gesturing to the interior of the car. So, he started cleaning the inside of the window as Dave kept pointing to the gauge panel of the car and then his radio connectors.

The oil sender unit had broken and was squirting oil all over Dave and the interior of the car. Casey realized this and helped Dave exit the car...end of race. Luckily, the oil didn’t have time to get hot enough to burn Dave and the rain had kept the floor pan of the car cool so we didn’t have a fire.

A dejected crew packed up in the rain and made the long drive home in the rain. The combination of the rain and the oil was a mess to clean up. While this cut our weekend short, aside from the expense of new slicks and new rains, the motor was not hurt and the fix was not an expensive one. It could have been a lot worse!

We'll be back!