Major Problems for the M3

After taking to the track for the afternoon sessions, the car began to develop a strange fuel pressure problem.  It gave us 5-6 complete fuel pressure shutdowns over the course of the afternoon on a fairly random basis.

But we would have been happy if that was all we encountered.  With 15 minutes to go in qualifying we did a tire change...unfortunately one of the wheel spacers wasn't put back on the car, causing rubbing between the rim/tire and the shock strut.  By the end of the session it had worn through a huge portion of the shock strut, which resulted in a loss of all damper oil and severely weakening the strut:

This picture doesn't really do it justice so let's just say the shock strut was FUBAR.  It would have been impossible to drive the car like this and it pretty much looked like we were done.  It was too late, 6PM PST, to try to secure a new one and have it sent to us for the 11AM start tomorrow. 

We asked around the paddock and nobody had a replacement but someone had a similar one.  We tried to make that one work to no avail.  Finally we decided to try to build the damaged one back up with a tig welder by depositing aluminum back into the void caused by the rubbing.

After about 4 hours of running around, the final result came back and looked like this:

We're not sure if, (a) the strut will stay together under the loads for 25 hours, and (b) the seals in the shock were compromised by the heat of the rubbing or the welding process.  But hey, it's all we got, so we're going to find out tomorrow I guess.

Meanwhile another group of guys has been trying to diagnose and repair the fuel pressure problem we were having.  After lots of theories, tests, and a conference call with the car builder we have something to try that we hope will work.  We'll find that one out tomorrow I guess too.  Unfortunately we won't get a chance to test any of this before the race starts at 11.

Other than that the car seems to be running pretty well but everyone's nerves are pretty frayed right now.  25 hours is a really long time and so far we haven't run more than about 1.5 hours without an issue!

The good news is the other car, the BMW Store/Yahoo! #99 330i, ran problem free today and the guys have just a normal pre-race prep to run on the car before tomorrow's race.