Charnell Pugsley, Rob Kinkaid, Dave Sherman, Kevin Lee, Jim Park

Wow! We’ve returned home from the 24 Hours of Lemons event at the No Problem Raceway in Belle Rose, Louisiana. I can honestly say that we got a true taste of this race this past weekend.

In my last post, I mentioned the PEER 1 road trip that started off on the wrong foot with an incompatible wire harness from RV to car trailer which left us with no working lights. Then the car trailer coming off of the hitch to the RV that left us stuck in rush hour traffic in Atlanta. Definitely not the way we wanted to start our road trip. Nonetheless, we made it to the event and all was well. Sort of.

After we finally passed tech and were allowed to race, the first day of racing started off great. The PEER 1 car and drivers (Team PEER Pressure) handled well and then the problems began. First we had an overheating problem due to a stuck

PEER 1 Car Overheating

thermostat.  We pulled the thermostat to run the coolant at full flow all the time.  Apparently, that causes the car to overheat almost instantly.  We drilled the thermostat, but the car would still overheat so we had to run a few laps, come off of the track to let it cool and do it all over again. By the end of the first day, we weren’t confident the PEER 1 car would make it for the next days race.

We started off Sunday replacing the water pump and thermostat with new units. I asked Kevin Lee, our racing team lead what exactly happened and he said:

After a few runs, we never got the car to the point where it wouldn’t overheat and started seeing oil in the cooling system.  This could be an indication of blown head gasket or cracked heads and we suspect that something may have broken off in the block that is possibly blocking the flow of water.

By the end of the race, the PEER 1 car just couldn’t make another lap around the track. We ended up finishing in 42nd place (which by the way matched our car – #42 and we all know 42 = answer to life, the Universe, everything ) After all of the long hours our team spent wrenching and welding, getting sunburned and dehydrated, we still had a damned good time and we’re looking forward to doing it again. Maybe we’ll get to go head-to-head with other hosting providers the next time, if they’re up to the challenge.

PEER 1's Mercedes race car at 24 Hours of Lemons

View our pictures from the 24 Hours of Lemons on our PEER 1 Flickr here: http://tinyurl.com/lbzet5

View all of the pictures (over 7000!) that we took at the event here: http://tinyurl.com/mk2bud

Charnell Pugsley
PEER 1 Community Evangelist

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 4:53 pm and is filed under Managed Hosting, PEER 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.