Live from the Mountain: Working up to practice

I left you last with the news of an exploding gearbox on the first day of Pikes Peak practice. I knew right after we lost second gear that this week was going to get that much tougher – less sleep, less practice time on the mountain and more stress.

After we got the car loaded up in the trailer we headed down the mountain to Colorado Springs to start the frantic rush of sourcing a new gearbox. I got on the phone and started calling everybody I knew for a gearbox that would fit our Subaru. Being a race car, our car had a different transmission and differentials from a stock 2002 WRX – all in the order of better performance. That’s sounds great and all until your trying to track down random parts that will all fit. Thankfully, I had previously arranged to have the use of a lift during race week at Heuberger Subaru.

Finally after all the phone calls we caught a badly needed break – Suba Performance in Denver had a gearbox that would fit our car and were awesome enough to donate it to our team! With the good news giving us a renewed spirit we started pulling out the old gearbox as we awaited the new one to arrive from Denver. Finally, we got the old one out and the new one arrived late afternoon. We tirelessly worked for six hours until the dealership closed for the night and decided to call it a night.

We were super bummed to not fix the car in time for early morning practice on the top section but hey, that’s racing and you need to accept it sometimes. The next morning we would get to installing the new center differential and gearbox and go from there.

The team got to work on the gearbox early the next morning and had it back in the car by noon. The temporary feeling of success was quickly erased when we got the car off the lift and tried shifting the gearbox. The new gearbox went through all five gears and then decided to engage two gears at once. WTF. All that work was destroyed due to a different shift fork mechanism found in the old vs. new gearbox. The next six hours would be spent dropping the center differential, replacing the viscous coupling and putting a different shift fork in. Finally, we were done. We got the car in the ground and re-filled the gearbox fluid before we street tested it.

Everything finally worked and we were ready for day 3 of practice on the bottom section of Pikes Peak. Day 3 of practice is very important as it is also used as qualifying and we needed practice time to familiarize ourselves with the lower section of the course. The team would to like to thank Heuberger Motors for the use of their lift and the crew of Dave and Kevin for helping us with the gearbox swap – we wouldn’t have gotten back on the mountain without them. The Peak Performance WRX was ready for battle again. Stay tuned for day 3 qualifying report from the mountain….