In the quest to try to come up with new content for the blog, I am always searching for new ideas. After blowing his rear JRZ’s (shock was bottoming out before the actual suspension would be maxed out) on the way down to Chuckwalla a few weeks back, and not being able to run a lap time he was happy with, he got new rear suspension and wanted some redemption.
An open test day came up at Buttonwillow, on Friday, April 5th, and he wanted to make the trek down there to set up his new suspension properly and get a lap time that he was content with. He knows I’m always looking for content for the blog, so he hit me up and asked if I wanted to ride shotgun with him down there and do a cool write-up on the blog about our journey.
Thursday at 4:30 pm after we had both gotten off work, I met up with him at his house. The goal was to drive to a Motel 6 just outside of Buttonwillow, stay there for the night, and then in the morning head to Buttonwillow. I arrived at his house, and we began to load the car.
As you can imagine, there isn’t much space to pack stuff into the S2000, so we had to pack as lightly as possible. We packed 1 small toolbox filled with all the tools we could need, one box with spare parts/fluids, a jack, the camera bag, a backpack for me and my supplies needed for the next day, a day bag for him with his supplies, and two helmets. We basically had to shoehorn everything in, especially since he has a roll bar and a stock spare tire. With everything loaded, we began the journey. As we drove, we talked about how cool it was going to be to dial in the car to his liking… At this point, we were so optimistic, and we had no idea what catastrophic events were ahead of us.
The goal for this post was to help inspire people to do a track day, to show you that you don’t need a complete army of people, supplies, tires, etc… You can sign up and do a track day easily just by bringing a few extra parts, fluids, a jack, and some basic tools. As long as you aren’t running R compound tires (below 200 treadwear), you don’t even need to bring an extra set of tires.
For 5-6 years now, Patrick has made MULTIPLE trips to California, easily 25+ different times, and he has never had a mechanical failure that has inhibited him from driving back. Yes, there have been mechanical failures, but they were all easily remedied by the box of spare parts he had brought, a nearby auto parts store, or someone at the track having the part he needed. As he said, “it was bound to happen.” I guess you could say the odds were against us from the start since he had so many successful trips without a major incident.
Anyways, let’s jump into the meat of the story. I’m sure you want to know exactly what catastrophic event happened to us, but I’m going to continue the story from where we left off… With us on the road, being so happily optimistic about the fun that was assumed we would have. We traveled south on the 15 freeway all the way until Barstow, where we then jumped onto Highway 58 west towards Bakersfield. 250 miles into the drive, as we arrived at our first stop in Tehachapi for gas, it was starting to rain.
This was the first time his car had gotten a bath since I washed it before the photo shoot we did of his car for the blog back in February. I myself am a stickler about keeping your car clean and shiny. But his car is his daily, he doesn’t have covered parking at home, and he has Carbotech XP10/XP8 pads. So for him, he could care less about the cleanliness of his car because any attempts to keep it clean would be futile. He also doesn’t care much about the appearance of his car but more the functionality of it.
Along the drive, we had some slight rubbing issues when hitting harsh bumps. Here is Patrick taking a look to make sure there isn’t anything major rubbing. He’s running an unconventional (for S2000’s – most people will run a square setup with a stiffer front sway bar) spring rate setup of 800f/550r. So fully loaded with all the supplies and myself, there is probably an extra 350 pounds in the car. Nothing major was actually rubbing, just the tire on the plastic of the rear bumper. With the car topped off with gas, we headed back onto the 58 west towards Bakersfield and into heavier rain. If anyone is familiar with Highway 58 heading west from Tehachapi (4000 foot elevation), there is a steep decline and the road twists and turns through the mountains all the way down to a near sea-level elevation of 500 feet. In the rain and at night, this would make anyone uneasy. But I had faith in my driver, seeing how he knows this road like the back of his hand since he has been to Buttonwillow numerous times. So many times in fact, that he has even figured out that rather than head on the 58 all the way through Bakersfield, it is actually a better drive if you hop on Highway 223 and head through a small town called Arvin. This will spit you out onto the 5 freeway a little more south of Buttonwillow, but there are fewer stops and less traffic that way. We arrived in Buttonwillow, CA at 9:00 pm. We got off the freeway and headed straight for the Motel 6, which would be providing our residence for that night.
We had made it! No problems or issues whatsoever. *Pro tip, ask for the racer discount, and it will knock a small amount off per night. We parked the car, put our stuff in the room, and decided to walk to go get some food. The little off-ramp town is small enough that everything is within walking distance, and we had just spent about 5 hours sitting in a car, so it was nice to get the blood flowing with a little walk. Apparently, everything food-related in that town closes at 10 pm, and we somehow managed to sneak into the Taco Bell right at 10. We were the last customers, so the food that we got was the last little bit of crap they had lying around. This meant that the already low-quality food was even lower quality. No matter, I was just excited to be there and ready for a fun day of racing the next day.
We woke the next morning and partook in the morning ritual of basic bitches everywhere, topped off the tank, and headed a few more miles north on the 5 freeway to the Lerdo highway exit, where Buttonwillow Raceway is only two left turns away.
We arrived at Buttonwillow and were greeted by the most glorious sight… the lack of people who were actually there! There was no line to get in, and parking was bountiful. We picked a prime parking spot and set up camp.
Once everything was unloaded, he started to do the usual track prep inspection: oil, coolant, wheels/suspension all tightened, tire pressure checked, mounting of the AIM, resetting zip ties on the shock shaft, and the installation of the camera.
With everything gone over on the car, we still had about 30 minutes to kill before the start of the drivers’ meeting. I wouldn’t say that we were bored, but it’s just strange being so ahead of schedule that you aren’t running around like a chicken with its head cut off, with only minutes to spare before the drivers’ meeting. We were still unsure if there was going to be a tech inspection that we had to go through before getting the OK to be on the track.
8:30 am rolled around and we went to the drivers’ meeting, with there only being a total of 37 people in the meeting (this was including track staff and mechanics for some of the larger race teams that were there). The meeting was short and sweet, and it seemed like there was almost going to be too much seat time. The AM session was from 9 am to 12:30 pm, where there would be a break for lunch, and the PM session would be from 1 pm to 5 pm.
Patrick had signed up for the whole day, which was only 200 bucks. It was also an option to only pay for either the AM session or the PM session. They had said in the meeting that there was not going to be a tech inspection, and that there wouldn’t be run groups. Instead, they were just going to have everyone be able to go out at once, so you would have fast cars and slow cars all out there at the same time. As we walked back to the car, we joked about how much seat time there was going to be and that maybe I would even do a few laps.
The track went hot at 9 am, and there were about 6 cars that headed out. Patrick being one of them. His plan was to put some heat in the tires then come back into get an accurate tire pressure reading. I managed to barely get the camera all set up and snap only three pictures of his car (and they aren’t even that good, since I was still dialing in the setting on the camera) Before everything went to shit.
Then it happened… After exiting the last turn (sunset) and heading onto the front straight, I heard the unmistakable sound of an engine dying. I quickly turned around to see smoke everywhere, and at that moment, I knew that his day was done. I rushed over to our pit area, arriving just as the tow truck was dropping his car off. Instantly, we began to assess and diagnose the issue. There was no oil on the track, no oil in the engine bay, still oil on the dipstick, no sign of holes in the block, and there was coolant in the radiator. The sound that it made when it blew was the sound of an engine losing compression, so to be optimistic, I thought maybe it was the head gasket. We decided to pull the spark plugs to see if we could figure out what had happened. We pulled #1, and everything looked normal. We pulled plug #2, and again everything looked fine. When we went to pull #3, this is where we knew there was something majorly wrong: the spark plug wouldn’t loosen or even come out. We moved on to #4, and there was nothing wrong with that one either. So, it was narrowed down to cylinder #3 being ground zero.
It’s a strange feeling trying to document a disaster like this, basically documenting someone’s despair. I feel like at the time tensions are so high that it could almost be offensive, but on the other hand, there isn’t much else I can do. Besides, the reason I’m here is to document our trip, for better or for worse. I also felt like this is a great opportunity to be completely transparent with everyone so you can see that there isn’t one person that doesn’t actually have issues, if they haven’t had issues theirs is coming for sure. Just like they say in motorcycling: there are two kinds of riders, the ones that have crashed, and those who will. Your time is numbered and how you persevere is what makes you a true enthusiast. You must truly enjoy the whole experience of the journey and understand that sometimes things don’t always work out in your favor, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to throw in the towel.
We managed to get spark plug #3 out, once out it revealed the severity of the issue. My optimism of it being a head gasket was no more, and we now had to switch our thoughts of how we were going to get home. There was no point in looking any further at the engine, it was clearly FUBAR! Luckily, Patrick had just gotten AAA for this exact reason. AAA would only get us so far though… 200 miles max to be exact, which puts us right around Barstow. With still 150 miles back home to Las Vegas, we had some decisions to make.
Here’s Patrick making some calls, trying to see what options we had. In true track racer forum he has his La Croix in hand. While we had a few hours to kill until the tow truck would be able to get us, I ran around trying to take as many pictures of the other cars there that day. You can click the link below to see all the pictures that I took.
After a little while, Patrick texted me (since I was on the other side of the track taking pictures) saying he found a hole in the block. We just couldn’t figure out why this happened, and still, we have no idea what happened. He has an oil pan baffle, the oil level was good, the gas tank was full, the engine made no mechanical noise, the valves were adjusted, and the engine didn’t smoke at all.
Since he has been home for a week now, he has taken some things apart and has found metal in his throttle body/intake manifold and in the radiator. He has already purchased another long block, and when we remove the old engine, we are going to try to see what was the cause of this. *side note: the engine was still running after it blew as he pulled off the race line and then turned it off. It was making noise obviously though, but we never tried to refire it for obvious reasons. Also, remember that this is Patrick’s daily driver, this is how he gets to work every day.
Here’s the video of the best lap he did and the engine blowing. you can clearly see/hear there is no issues with the car it just decides to die. Remember also there is plenty of time left on the table as this was only the warm up laps and he managed to get that time.
Patrick was able to secure a ride home for us from Barstow to Vegas. Luckily for us, his friend Scott (who he tracks with) was able to take the shop van and car dolly from his job in Vegas to Barstow and pick us up. So all that’s left now is just to wait till the tow truck picks us up from Buttonwillow Raceway.
Here’s how it sat for the time being until the tow truck arrived. The trunk was open; however, we never actually packed anything up. He was preoccupied replying to concerned friends. And, being the competitor he is, he was out where I was taking pictures, timing cars to see how his time was going to hold up against some of the other faster cars. Once the tow truck arrived, we rushed back to pack the car quickly since we were clearly preoccupied.
The tow truck got there and seemed surprisingly familiar with everything that was going on. The driver even knew that there was a concession stand in the building behind us, he walked over to grab a soda and we snapped some pictures of Patrick “driving” the tow truck.
As we set off for our 2.5-hour ride in a tow truck, I asked the driver if he had been here before. “Oh yeah,” he says. Just last weekend, he towed a Porsche that had blown its engine all the way back to San Diego! So apparently, we aren’t the only ones who have AAA come pick us up at a race track. Just so you’re not wondering why we didn’t take the AAA tow truck all the way back to Vegas… Well, it’s because the package only comes with 200 “free” miles. Anything after that is $8.00 a mile! We weren’t towing a Porsche, so we couldn’t afford that extra 8 bucks a mile after the 200 we used up.
It was strange riding in the tow truck for 2.5 hours. The driver was very polite and tried making small talk with us. No matter what, though, it’s going to be somewhat of an awkward situation. The language barrier and lack of knowledge about each other’s interests made for very basic and general conversations.
Things were silent on the road as we listened to the radio playing the cliché “music for everyone,” then losing reception and changing the Spanish station, and then back to easy listening. Randomly, he just decided to pull off at a rest stop between Tehachapi and Barstow. As he pulled off, he said, “PEE PEE time,” parked, and ran off to the bathroom. Patrick and I both got out to stretch our legs (the tow truck is much more uncomfortable than it looks). Once he returned, we merged back onto Highway 58 East towards Barstow. Instead of having him drop us off at Barstow, we tried to squeeze every last mile we could out of him and had him drop us off just east of Barstow on Yermo Rd where Peggy Sue’s diner is. Since he had to drop us off somewhere with people, we could not have him just drop us off on the side of the road exactly at 200 miles. So, the farthest we could go without going over was Yermo Rd.
When we arrived at the ARCO where he dropped us off, it was just about 5:00 PM and his friend wasn’t off until 5:30 PM. With still a 2.5-hour drive from Vegas to us, we had lots of time to kill. There really isn’t much going on where we were dropped off: 4 gas stations, 1 hotel, 2 diners, and a Jack in the Box. We decided to go to Peggy Sue’s Diner just so we could sit and hang out for a while and debrief about the day we had. Peggy Sue’s ended up being the grossest, creepiest place ever, so we didn’t want to stay long. Remember that we don’t actually have a way to get around, so we walked to Peggy Sue’s and then walked back just to double-check on the car (not like it was actually going to go anywhere). We still had a few hours to kill, so we decided to walk to the newly built Eddie World, which is 3 miles from where we currently are. *side note… it’s funny that the name of the place we are going is Eddie World, meaning a world of Eddies. Why is it not called Eddies World.
Anyway we started making the trek to Eddie World and received a call from Scott that he was on his way.
The 3-mile walk that sounded like a good idea before we started, but quickly turned into a “why did we decide to do this?” There wasn’t really anything else we had to do other than sit in the car. This at least took some of the boredom away and ate up a lot of time while Scott was driving down to us.
We continued on the journey only to have a coyote cross our path and seem a little more interested in us than we were both comfortable with. We passed a house that had 4 large pitbulls in the yard. Thankfully, 3 of them were chained up, as the fourth one just paced back and forth, getting increasingly anxious as we approached.
We managed to make it all the way to Eddie World without any problems, but were severely let down by the lack of ice cream that this place was “famous” for. We had hoped for a full-on ice cream parlor where we could get sundaes, banana splits, and custom ice cream sandwiches. But like most things in life, we were let down, only to be served generic scoops of ice cream by 16-year-old minimum wage employees, one of whom was asleep in the corner.
We also made the decision to just wait at Eddie World since Scott was only about 45 min away at this point. I had already walked 10 miles that day, and I didn’t want to make it 13, so we sat in the eating area, ate our ice cream, charged our phones, uploaded some stupid funny pictures to Instagram, and patiently awaited Scott’s arrival.
Not long after, Scott had arrived. Not knowing exactly what kind of vehicle he had to transport us, we walked outside and gazed upon the most neglected transport van, with only two seats and a mattress in the rear. At this point, we didn’t even care; we were just so spent from the day we had that started at 5:30 am. We were just happy to have a ride.
We drove back the 3 miles we had walked to the ARCO where the car was parked and got started on loading the car up.
For the car to fit on the tow dolly, the front bumper had to be removed. I’m not sure what the guy in the yellow jacket was doing. Was he the security guard for the gas station? Was he just a truck driver who was interested in what we were doing? Did he like S2000s? We don’t know; he never said one word, just stood there and watched us. No doubt there are some strange people out on Yermo Rd, so I guess his behavior could be considered normal for that area.
Before I show you the van and tow setup, let me just tell you that the van was only running on 7 cylinders, the CEL was on, and it had over 200k miles on it. We were assured by Scott that this van has towed cars to New York and made other long journeys, so we would be fine for just a 150-mile trip to Vegas.
We spent an embarrassingly long amount of time trying to wrangle the car onto the tow dolly. I mean, we were practically doing a circus act, making sure that car was more secure than Fort Knox. We must have checked and re-checked every single bolt, strap, and hinge, just to ensure that we wouldn’t have a new addition to our collection of broken things that day. It was like a hilarious episode of “Car Tetris Gone Wild”!
All loaded up and ready to make the drive 150 miles back to Vegas. Despite the van running on only 7 cylinders, we made the trip back with ease. I couldn’t believe how well the van handled the trip. Even going up the big hills outside of Baker, it just plowed right up them like it wasn’t even towing anything! By the time we got back to Patrick’s house, we were all convinced that we should just buy tow vans and car dollies. Big thanks to Scott for making the drive down to rescue us, you’re the real MVP!
In conclusion, when we consider the grand tapestry of life, the extravagant amounts of money we splurge, the countless challenges we face, and the precious hours of sleep we sacrifice for our passions, one might question why we persist. Why not indulge in a simple pastime like sipping drinks and watching sports? But let me ask you this: where’s the thrill in that? I wouldn’t trade a single moment of this exhilarating adventure for anything else in the world! I understand that Patrick felt guilty about ruining our plans with his blown motor and worried that it would mean no blog content for me. But I reassured him, saying, “Don’t be absurd.” I’m sorry that his engine failed, and it’s true that the blog post encompasses our entire journey and not just his laps around the track. Undoubtedly, it would have been ideal if his engine had held up, but in any case, I am able to weave the tale of our voyage. Regardless of the outcome, we had an incredible time, shared in hearty laughter, and made the best of a challenging situation.
Patrick seems to believe that the motor blew due to sheer misfortune, but I refuse to accept the notion of mere “luck.” There must be a reasonable explanation, a mechanical failure to blame for the devastation of his cherished F20c. He also claims that it was his time, that the odds were against him and this catastrophe was bound to happen sooner or later. Personally, I am grateful that I was present when it occurred, for now I have an incredible tale to share with the world. And let us not forget the invaluable lessons I learned along the way – from discovering how to secure a “racer” discount at Motel 6 to vowing to never set foot in Peggy Sue’s again, and realizing that a van can tow you safely home even when running on seven cylinders. Some may deem us insane for the ordeals we willingly endure, but I believe it is those who waste their precious days off lounging on the couch that are truly mad. In the words of Patrick’s wise father, “In 30 years, you’ll yearn to relive these moments… trust me.” Do not allow life to pass you by while you are consumed with saving for retirement or following the so-called “right” path dictated by society. There is no singular correct trajectory in life. Simply strive to be a virtuous soul and savor every moment, for one day we shall all rest in the embrace of the earth.
…And always remember, DONKEY BOP!
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