The Slaabs had a weekend to remember…for all the wrong reasons.  It started with feeling the contempt of the other 75 teams when we pulled up in the Red Beard Racing 18 wheeler into the pits…though the scorn visibly subsided when everyone saw the non-turbo Saab 900 we rolled out the back.  We entered the weekend with the premise that we’d pamper our car though Friday and Saturday with the goal of racking up valuable laps and being in the top 50%.   In reality, we spent all day Friday absolutely hammering (its all relative after watching the other, cough cough, $500 cars) our car around the track to within an inch of its Swedish life.  To start with, we nearly flipped the car in turn #1 and managed to dislodge the radiator hose.  We also blew the #4 cylinder on the last lap of the day.  Thus, we spent Friday night pondering our short Swedish future, and ultimately decided to run the engine on 3.5 weak Swedish cylinders with the help of our innovative Swedish Oil-By-Pass System (picture attached) on the #4 cylinder which included an oil-catch-reservoir in the passenger compartment (which tended to fill the cabin with oily smoke and keep our competitors confused behind us….kind of like the old arcade game Spy Hunter).  


We started the race on Saturday with the expectation that we’d last less than an hour.  In reality, we spent the entire day racing, if you call coming into the pits every FIFTEEN minutes to fill the car with its entire requirement of oil.  Yes, we spent more money on oil than we did gas.  We also put more Engine Restore / Ring Seal / STP into the car than the law allows.  We started Saturday on our virgin Goodyear Eagle tires, and promptly spun the car twice in 20 minutes after doing all of our practice laps on our Barum Bravaris tires (yes, I said Barum tires).  We quickly changed back to the Czech “specialty” tires, and racked up almost 100 laps on Saturday, and were absolutely wetting our pants at the idea that we made it to day #2.  We fixed one of our many substantial oil leaks that night, and started Sunday managing hour long stints in the car…still on 3 cylinders.  We decided to let the dogs out, and decided to drive the car reasonably hard, and ultimately got to within 2 seconds of our 4 cylinder laps.  Well, in the long run, that didn’t work out so well.  We blew the motor 3 hours into Sunday, and ultimately only got 66 more laps.  


While we were proud of our Slaab paint job, we were also proud of the Exxon Valdez re-theme job.  Our lead fab-man / resident Brit did a great job putting a funnel on the car as part of the ship theme (which probably cost us 20 seconds per lap in aerodynamics).  We also were very lucky to have Tony Chin in our pits, the resident Saab expert in Houston.  The man brought a great sense of humor to our crappy car, and he deservedly won an award for the help he dished out in the pits on multiple teams.


We shall return in 2009 with the same chassis, a rebuilt motor, Tony, and the semi again (we need somewhere to hang out while the Saab gets continually repaired).  Somehow, I don’t think our competitors will have as much visible scorn when we pull up next time.   Our race summary and pictures are at http://thecrokerfamily.blogspot.com/