BertOne

08/04/2026

Thompson August 2026 race report

Pretty good, but not great

14th overall
Best lap: 1:27.952 (that counts as a 1:27 😂)
Median green flag lap: ~1:33.9

We had three issues that lost us laps.

Saturday morning we didn’t navigate a cluster in turn 1 well, and wound up making contact with Monkeys House Racing #222 and then the railing. We had to roll out the right rear fender to make clearance for the tire.

Saturday afternoon a fuel line in the engine bay popped off. Thankfully no fire, and a pretty easy fix once we were towed in.

And with 10 minutes left in the race we had a catastrophic water loss / overheating event.

Wr haven’t determined the root cause of that failure, or how badly we hurt the motor. Hopefully it’s all top-end damage. Current guess is a water line or fitting at the oil filter’s water cooling heat exchanger thing failed. I (Jason) was driving at the time and was too preoccupied battling with a red Miata, convinced that after almost the whole race with no temp or coolant issues that it would be fine, and wasn’t watching the gauges. There may have been a brief window of time to notice things were going wrong before it caused damage.

06/10/2026

06/08/2026

Thanks to everyone who said hi over the race weekend at NJMP.

We continued to have issues, although we may finally have identified the cause / causes of our overheating and running lean over the last year plus. A new fuel pump switch and fuel pump seems to have us finally running comfortable air fuel ratios at ~10 PSI of boost. We haven’t tried yet dialing it back up to 12 (or 14) PSI to see if it continues to hold… maybe next race?

Unfortunately, the diff we have had in for all 50 plus races in Bert finally gave out on Sunday, so we didn’t make it to the checkers.

Enough people wandered by asking some variant of “how is that thing that fast?” to make us smile - even with all those races, it still surprises other people, and even us sometimes, just how fast a turbobrick is out there!

10/18/2025

NHMS practice and day 1 summary

Practice was on old tires - we ran some 1:25s and a 1:24.9. Kinda crazy for our old Volvo on worn out street tires.

Day 1 with Falken 660 tires. Much more grip at the beginning of the day, but corded the right front with about 20 minutes left in the race. We’ve never gone through a tire in 1 day before. So the 660 is definitely not good for Bert.

Had a 1:25.6 in the morning, so surprisingly good in traffic.

Put on a backup set for falken 615s for tomorrow - we’ll see what that brings.

Finished the day in 32nd place

06/11/2025

Paging Three Pedal Mafia- 24 Hours of Lemons Racing Team

06/08/2025

Another sub-optimal weekend…

We blew a head gasket on Friday practice. Reasoning that it was due to running lean from having more boost than our fuel injectors could handle, we dialed back the boost, got the head milled, and reassembled things (in the rain, lying in a puddle).

Got on track Saturday to find the engine not happy to rev over ~4.5k and lots of oil smoke. We’ve seen this before - most likely oil blowby which fould the MAF.

Replaced the MAF and got some higher revving for a little while, then something went catastrophic again and we wound up with another blown head gasket.

We have theories, but it will take some investigation to try to figure out what is actually going on now. But 4 head gaskets in 2 races isn’t a good sign. Especially after being reliable for sooooo long.

This is a different block than the reliable one. So we want to look more closely at the block / rings.

Also, it looks like all the head gasket failures have been on cylinder #4, so we want to check the injector for that one to see if it is clogged or something causing that cylinder to run more lean than the others.

And, we want to see if the oil seals in the turbo are good or not as a possible source of MAF fouling.

06/07/2025

Things are going great!

06/07/2025

Another trying day at the track with two big problems. First, Bert overheated again and blew another head gasket. Second, Russ’s tow rig went into limp mode and was definitely not going to be able to tow the trailer back to Vermont at the end of the weekend without a repair.

Bert: our best guess is we had been living right on the edge of failure for a few years in terms of boost and fuel delivery available to us. When freshening up some parts, we found that the stock intercooler is becoming unibtainium and we wound up with an aftermarket (larger) intercooler. So, cooler charge air = a little more boost = running lean = overheat. We found shop to machine the head tomorrow morning and will dial back the boost a little.

Tow rig: diesel truck was complaining about DEF fluid, but the actual problem was a NOX sensor. A handful of phone calls led us to a diesel repair shop that worked late to get it fixed

On to a better tomorrow!

10/19/2024

The track time is paid for, so someone should use it Moot Point Racing