I've been slacking on my event reports, so I'll try to catch up.

This event was my first outing in the Talon this season. I had spent the whole preceding Saturday working on the car, trying to finish some stuff up, which spilled over to Sunday morning (details posted here). So I didn't make it to the track until the afternoon sessions.

I arrived, swapped on my brand new Goodyear race tires and my race brake pads. For tire pressures, I stuck with what I had used with my old Kumho V710s, which was 30 psi / 28 psi.

Also worth noting is that I was only running wastegate pressure for boost. I had switched from a manual boost controller to ECMLinks's boost control logic and had yet to tune it. So I had it set to zero for safety (plus I had it low during my clutch break-in).

My engine tune was still the same from last year, but I was now running 100% water injection versus a 50/50 meth mix. So this meant that the engine was running quite lean in boost (13:1 AFR) but it was low boost and I was getting no knock.

When I hit the track for the first time, the tires were very greasy. They'd easily break loose powering out of the turn 2. But that is to be expected as the tire mold release agent wears off. I only did about 3 laps before coming back in.

The tires were still pretty greasy for my second session, and the coolant temps were raising alarmingly fast. They got up to 245°F at one point. So I had to cut the session short to let the car cool down.

I had probably got about a dozen laps in total at this point. As I was preparing to go out for another session, I decided to check my oil level and found that my dip stick was missing! In it's place a bunch of white goo. My exhaust manifold had cracked and was blowing hot exhaust around my dip stick & rad fan shroud. Again, the details were posted here.



So that was the end of my day. I let the car cool down until my melted dip stick hardened, then I very gingerly drove the car home.

Great start to the season.

Here's a short clip from day, driving in traffic. This was before I learned that I need to turn down the camera's exposure setting for in-car stuff, so the external view is kinda washed out.

Wow Scott, sounds like if you didn't have bad luck, you wouldn't have any luck at all

Thats strange on the FP mani, don't see very many of them with issues & lots of guys are running much heavier turbos & more boost. Looking at your pics in the linked thread it appears that area is quite thin compared to the rest of the mani. I've never noticed this before (but probably not checked too closly). Wondering if there was a casting issue with yours & you didn't get proper thickness in that area?

Oh, that's only my first outing... Just wait until I post about succeeding events.



Yes, in my opinion it was definitely a casting issue. Once I received a new manifold and compared the two, the cracked one definitely had a flaw as you can see n the pics below. Note the lack of a dimple in the new one:



I had contacted FP and the best they could do for me (considering I'm out of warranty) was to offer a $70 discount on the new manifold.