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New Blue Racing

New Blue Racing page

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Finally!  Our first outing in "new blue" at Blackhawk Farms with Midwest Council in April 2001.  It drew admirers, and also rain - we ended up loading up and heading home due to the rain.

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Road America, SVRA-sanctioned event in May, 2001.  The car performed extremely well, besting old blue's best lap times by a second (2:54 lap time).  There were some teething problems where the tranny top caused 1st and 2nd to quit working, but luckily Henry Frye had a spare.  His is the yellow TR-4, best seen in the photo where Duck Waddle stops by the paddock to talk.  Henry drove all the way from Connecticut to join us, and we really appreciated his presence.  Some members of the Chicago Triumph Owners Association were at the race, and Joe Alexander ended up "borrowing" the rear brakes from a VERY nice TR-6 that had made the trip up.  After the race, we discovered that our tach was reading 500 RPM too low causing us to short shift, and the piston rings hadn't seated properly.  Look out, I see lower lap times in our future!

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Well, after fixing the tach and an engine rebuild, we made it back to Road America in September, 2001 and your humble narrator managed to turn a 2:52 chasing a Porsche.  Unfortunately, we didn't take many pictures of that event.

We also ran at IRP in early October, 2001 and improved our prior best lap times by 4 or 5 seconds.  The new car is performing wonderfully!  No pictures from that race, though - we were too busy having fun.

Our last race of 2001 was in Hallett, Oklahoma in late October to race with the CVAR gang.  They have a great format where you run one timed practice session and then 4 races.  Your grid position is determined initially by the times in practice, but races 2-4 the grid is your finishing position in the prior race.  We paddocked with Susan Hensley and Brad Kahler with their Spitfire,  Bob Kramer with his TR-4, and Dan Duryee with his GT-6.  What fun!  We qualified on the pole for race one.  Jack won it leaving Tony on the pole for race 2.  A wonderfully prepared and driven Mini Cooper passed Tony in race 2 relegating him to 2nd.  Jack finished 2nd to the Mini in race 3.  Tony won race 4 after the Mini seemed to miss a shift at the start and then spun trying to catch back up.  Wonderful track, reminiscent of Grattan in Michigan.  It's short, with our 3.70 rear and close ratio box, we used 1st, 2nd and 3rd (no 4th!).  Best official times: Tony - 1:33.5, Jack- 1:33.7.  Great company, great bunch of folks to race with, great track, great weather, great results - who could ask for more?

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