"Dude! You're on fire!"
Yeah, yeah, the car is fast, I know, but I just melted an intercooler hose or something, so this isn't exactly the best time to talk. Nor is it really the place, limping my disabled car around Thunderhill Raceway. Maybe we should catch up in the pits.
Just as I'm about to yell across a short version of all that and encourage Scott Higashi to move on, he leans even farther out the window of his SE-R and yells again, with the clear enunciation usually reserved for people who don't actually speak your language.
"Your ... Bumper ... Is ... On ... Fire!"
Oh.
A quick glance in the mirror reveals exactly the same heat waves and ominous black smoke you never want to see coming from your car.
I yell as loudly as I can, hoping desperately my voice can escape the confines of my full-face helmet, waft across the swirling chaos of noise between two cars on a racetrack, and somehow penetrate all the way to Higashi's ears, "DO YOU HAVE A FIRE EXTINGUISHER?"
He seems to get the message, settles back in his seat and yells back, "NO!" and promptly drives off.
That tingle of panic hits my whole body at once, engulfing me in a cloud of dumb-ass. I should have seen this coming. The bumper was already starting to melt months ago, and the hose connecting the turbo to the hot-side intercooler pipe has melted before, being a little too close to the exhaust manifold. In fact, it was smoking for about five minutes after the last lapping session. That should have been a hint.
With a hole in that hose, all the boost blows out. The MAF just sees all the air going into the turbo, though, and doesn't know most of it's leaking out the hole. Thinking it's getting huge air, the ECU delivers huge fuel. Apparently, this time, that was enough fuel to send a 5-foot cone of flame out the exhaust.
Below 1200 rpm the amount of air entering the airflow meter and the amount actually getting to the engine are close enough that it will run, so I limp along at this agonizing pace, wondering when the flames are going to spread enough to make a Hollywood fireball out of my pride and joy. Finally, after an agonizing journey, we reach a corner worker's station and Dave Joliff, my hapless passenger, sprints over to grab an extinguisher.
It turns out the intercooler hose didn't melt, it simply blew off. In my laziness, I had only bead-rolled one end of the intercooler pipe. Reassembling the pipe, I tighten the clamp extra hard and drive directly to Wal-Mart for a fire extinguisher.
Most people would stay off the track for a few minutes after a fire, but flush with the confidence you only get from a brand-new fire extinguisher, I head straight back out. The freshly cleaned, ff,berclamped hose was unlikely to blow again, and the bumper was burned back well clear of the exhaust now.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when the other side of the same pipe, the side that was bead-rolled, blew off just four laps later. The hose blew at the end of the front straight at perhaps 120 mph (the speedo doesn't actually work), leaving me enough momentum to roll to the exit of Turn Two, right where the functional cars are powering out of the corner at 90 mph. Bad place to stop, but the only alternative is to park my hot car on the dry grass outside the track. A look out the window reveals a Datsun Roadster roaring toward me slightly ass-out. I'll take the grass.
After causing my second red flag of the day, I limp back off the grass and glance in the mirror, only to see the familiar black smoke. The adrenaline kicks in again. Michael Spreadbury, my new daring passenger, tosses me the extinguisher, and I burst from the car. My new pride and joy is a cheap $10 extinguisher with some goofy push-button trigger. I pull the plastic pin, push the button and extinguish the bumper for the second time in an hour.
I'm preoccupied with the extinguisher when the fire truck drives by. I've only used a fraction of the magic fire powder, but the trigger button hasn't come back up enough to put the safety pin back in. Like any other chimpanzee, I pull on the button, which promptly pops off.
Wait, why did the truck drive by? I'm the one on fire.
Turning around, I see two black patches in the grass, apparently ignited by the burning bumper snot dripping from my car. Not content to stand around with a fire extinguisher in my hand while the professionals douse the fire, I jam the button back in and run toward the closest patch of smoldering weeds. The button is strangely resistant after having been monkeyed off the extinguisher a few seconds earlier. I push harder and ... sproing! The button tiddlywinks across the field and lands in the fire.
Shit.
The grass was cut short, so the fire isn't that intense. Just as I'm reaching down to bat the belligerent little yellow piece of plastic from the flames, it leaps out of the way on a jet of lukewarm water. Oh. The pros are here.
Meekly, I pick up the button, pop it back into the extinguisher, and return to my car.
Track day is over, but now I have a car show. The track day was just the opening act of the three-day Mount Shasta festival of Datsun madness. Now there's a two-hour drive through a swarm of highway patrol, followed by car shows, autocrosses and nonstop Nissan/Datsun geekery. I can't show up with my bumper looking like the inside of Blanche Devereaux's colon, so Ihit the hardware store and buy one can of expanding spray foam insulation, one bucket of spackle, a hacksaw blade, a sanding fence and a can of flat-black spray paint.
All of this, of course, is just a long explanation for the apparent piece of rice on my bumper. Passenger number one works at B&R Auto Wrecking in Corvallis, Ore. Passenger number two has a plasma cutter, a welder and mad skillz, yo. So one short week after the spackle dries, we rip the makeshift patch back off, replace the bumper and taillight, and have the whole thing repaired and freshly decorated in stainless steel.
It isn't rice if it has a purpose. Preventing a bumper fire isn't a believable purpose, but preventing ANOTHER bumper fire is.