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I know what you’re thinking. Above average, that’s all? No greater aspiration? Well think about it this way. How many people live around these parts? A lot. How many people drive, or pretend to, on the streets of the greater metropolitan area. Don’t get me started . How many people own racecars. Quite a few. How many drive them? Fewer. How many are good at it? My point exactly.

To look at it another way take baseball. An above average major league hitter on most teams has a batting average of about .275, you will get a big raise in pay if you go .300. Much more than that and you a reeeally rich daddy. Let’s say some men from Mars landed near Safeco Field in August when the Mariners do their famous El Foldo routine. After so long a journey there may be one or two things to take care of such as finding that kind of beer Martians like that tastes like brake fluid and locating loose women with four arms, three eyes and never mind the rest. They then turn their attention to the batting average of the team they see before them. Martian teams are said to enjoy much higher averages perhaps due to the gravity and atmospheric conditions prevailing late in their season. Even taking that into consideration what they see is not pretty. When they move their ship down Texas way to Arlington they see that even though the conditions are more like Mars, here is a team in first place hitting only .050 better. A little above average and you almost win the world series.

So back to racing. Every year there are drivers who win championships with few and occasionally no wins. How did they do it? They knew they were Above Average and  never quit. We will be looking at ways of being above average and who is doing it. It may be subtle. Like maybe a little head work. There may be contributions from people with letters after their names. Some of us, OK, one of us is good at out of the box engineering. If we come up with something good we may have our hospitality staff try to explain it. Some of that beer that tastes like brake fluid might help.

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The #69 Aston Martin late model raced by Mr. Fabuluous at Evergreen Speedway was not nearly as fast as was needed. High level investigations are being conducted and the relevant data will be turned over to a Blue Ribbon panel to determine the likely issues to be examined by the best designated experts with a directive to arrive at an assessment, or close to it, of the most probable causes of not achieving desired corner speed.

Was there something wrong with the front suspension geometry? Probably. Never even had the opportunity to get proper tire temps. Was it the rear suspension? Oh yes. Had to work on it constantly. Was it the driver? Well, in all fairness the car did keep trying to and for the most part succeeded in, making life on the racetrack as difficult as possible.

Here are some of the things that happened. The brakes fell out. Fortunately not at full speed. Mr. Fab did a good job of keeping it out of the wall but it did take a couple of laps to slow down enough to enter the pits. Carb issues over fueled the engine glowing the headers and flaming out the exhaust. Things melted. The diffy got wierd. Yes, this is a technical term. Sometimes it would push like the proverbial dump truck, other times get tail happy. Had to change rear ends. It leaked. Badly. Filled up the hub. Wouldn’t you know it, that race had a lot of red flags so all the oil went to one side. That really shakes a lot at 100 mph or so. On the last lap of the last race avoiding piling into a multi car wreck, the 3/4″ bolt holding the left side trailing arm left the scene never to be found, unless the sweep crew picked it up. We suspect the head broke off.

Mr. Fabulous is not happy. That was a lot of work to go through to go that slow. Especially at a track often won at in previous years.