The next race weekend was at the end of August, up at Thunderhill. After TF, I had some work done on the cooling system and some better gauges installed, so I could better monitor what was actually happening up in the engine. Top priority was not burning up my engine, but a close #2 was not having to exit early from warm up, qualifying or (especially) the race itself. One of the gauges I had installed was a cylinder head temp gauge, that I could use as a cross check against the water temp gauges. Every airplane has a cylinder head temp gauge, and why they don’t put them in cars (especially race cars) is a bit lost on me. Oh well, I had one now.
Saturday was mostly uneventful – at least as uneventful as racing insanely fast around a track can be. Normal warm up, qualifying and race. The only different thing was that we were running the full five mile course at THill – which was pretty new at the time. Few people were used to it, and none considered themselves expert at it. But, I had been lucky, as the TF session earlier in August had also been on the full 5-mile course, so I came into the weekend with 2.5 hours more experience than most people.
Sunday was a different matter. Warm up went normally. But during Qual, while coming around one of the turns on the back side, I downshifted into 3rd gear, and all of a sudden had no power and an awful clanking sound. And, I do mean AWFUL! I was losing speed – just coasting to a stop. Not really wanting to just pull over and get towed back to the paddock, I tried 4th gear and it seemed to get power to the wheels, albeit with that awful clanking sound still going on. 2nd gear worked too, but experimentation showed that 3rd was gone. And, 3rd is the gear in which we spend most of our time on a track like Thunderhill (most tracks, actually). So, while I was able to limp it back to the paddock, a quick chat with some people nearby confirmed what I had suspected – I’d blown 3rd gear. So, no Sunday race for me.
But, I had completed 4 races, which meant that I now got my full racing license, though I was still on “rookie status” for 4 more races. Nonetheless, a milestone had been achieved.