Perry’s weblog

I’ve managed to get my pictures from the 91st Running of the Indianapolis 500 uploaded to my gallery. Rather disappointing race due to it being cut off at 166 laps due to the 3 third rain shower of the day. I’m sure Dario Franchitti wasn’t disappointed though.

And here are the rest. There’s a couple movies in there as well. New Gallery software for me too. Or, at least an upgrade to Gallery2.

All the pictures were taken with my new Canon S3 IS. Pretty nice camera.

The F1 race today in Indianapolis, the US Grand Prix, was a complete failure - on many levels.

Michelin failed to make a tire that is capabale of racing more than 10 laps without putting the driver in danger.

The FIA failed to figure out some sort of resolution to the problem.

The teams failed to push Michelin to give them another option.

The fans failed to be good fans. Boo, curse, and make all that rude gestures you want. But do not throw debris on to the track that endangers the lives of the drivers that did race and the lives of the track workers that have to clean up your mess.

FIA press releases / memo releases indicate that they knew about the problem late Saturday or early Sunday morning. Michelin could have gone to extraordinary measures to get safe tires for their cars. Rules could have been broken and drivers penalized - but there would have been a race!

Some of the teams have raised with us the possibility of running a tyre which was not used in qualifying. We have told them this would be a breach of the rules to be considered by the stewards. We believe the penalty would not be exclusion but would have to be heavy enough to ensure that no team was tempted to use qualifying tyres in the future.

The show must go on!

Give Bridgestone and Ferrari all of the points because they deserve it. They’ve done a better job this weekend, but once they give them all of the points, let’s go and put on a show. It doesn’t have to be an absolute wheel-to-wheel battle because WWF survives quite well out here with an element of show business involved. But what you have here is a joke.

What happened today was a damn joke. It just pisses me off. Nevermind who is really at fault. The 150,000 people that paid to see a race will not come back next year. That is going to be bad for Indianapolis, bad for Indiana, and bad for F1 racing in the US, and bad for F1 racing around the world. I hope the FIA comes down hard on those jokers somehow. They’ve embarassed the entire sport today, caused damage that is not going to be soon forgotten, and basically made a mockery of the entire sport.

Back from the Indy 500. What a race. Too many lead changes to count!

Reggie Miller was the starter of the race. He climbed up the flag stand about 45 minutes before the start of the race and the crowd just loved him! “REGGIE REGGIE REGGIE REGGIE”. I heard them in the background during the ABC pre-race stuff during the rebroadcast of the race.

Danica Patrick put on quite the show as well. 23 year old rookie. She actually led for something like 20 laps the crowd just loved that. We were all on our feet for the last 25 laps or so watching her in the lead. She unfortunately finished 4th.

Dan Wheldon managed to take the win under a yellow / checker finish. He was my Uncle’s pick and his pit was right across from our seats at the start / finish line, so it was fun to watch him move through the field.

After the miserable time we had last year, I wasn’t really looking forward to this year’s race, but now I can’t wait for next year. It was a blast!

Didn’t take the camera this year.. it just doesn’t do well taking pictures of cars going 225 MPH. Or maybe it’s me. Or both.

I forgot to post about the Auburn Cord Dusenberg festival and Kruse car auction from the beginning of the month.

Again, too many cool cars to pick out just a couple favorites… So here are the pictures!

Mom & I went up to the Ducktail Run in Gas City, Indiana today.. There were over 1200 cars preregistered and they were expecting plenty more to show up. It was a really festive atmosphere and people were just hanging out having a good ole time.

I’m too lazy to link my favorite thumbnails, besides, there are too many favorites. So here’s the pictures. Enjoy!

Slightly used, only 30,000 miles. Single owner. Minor body damage. No reasonable offer refused!

Took two of us swinging with 2lb hammers to finally break the thing loose!

I ordered the new stuff this past Tuesday afternoon. The Tire Rack had it to me by Wednesday afternoon. I was blown away! EBC Greenstuff pads and Brembo flat faced rotors.

I bought a Porter Cable 7336SP this past week at Lowes and gave it a whirl on my hood today. This thing is MUCH more powerful than my little Craftsman buffer! It really worked the Meguiar’s polishes (#83 and #82) in and made them dust up (or become clear) just like they are supposed to do. However, I think it isn’t even strong enough to work on my paint. It’s just too far gone. Lots of etching and marring from acid rain and bird droppings from the car being outside for 8 years. It’s really obvious when I pull it out in the sun and take pictures. No swirls, but lots of tiny little marks. Maybe if I spent more time and/or used a more abrasive foam pad (used a Lake Country polishing pad) I’d have better luck, but I doubt it.

I took some pictures trying to show my work, but they didn’t really come out all that great. I guess I need a tripod so that I can take pictures from the exact same angle to show the differences better. Slightly changing the angle makes it so I can’t really directly compare my work from step to step. Oh well.

I do like the machine though. It made applying S100 Shine Enhancing Paint Cleanser go really quickly and I got a nice even coat. Same with Poorboy’s EX-P. Just a breeze. I applied them both with finishing pads.

Drove to PA on Monday for a job interview… On I-70, just west of Dayton, OH, I drove through an incredible amount of bugs for a short period. I must have had 40 of em hit my windshield within a 1.5 mile stretch.

In the future, I’m going to make sure I carry some window cleaner and microfiber towels along for my journeys. I tried cleaning the bugs with my wipers, but that just smeared them so I had to stop at a gas station and use the squeegee. Didn’t do a good job, but at least I was able to see again.

When I got home, I looked the car over and the entire front bumper is covered in bugs. Looks similar to the winter time after I’ve driven through snow and salt covered streets, but worse. Nasty. I was about to to go the quarter wash, but I knew I was going back out on the interstate (not that same stretch, but still open interstate) the next morning so I figured it would just get dirty again.

I hosed down the bugs and let it sit for a minute or two. I thought it would be hard to cover the entire bumper and front half of the hood with wet towels to let the bugs soak… I then used about twice as much soap in my bucket as I should have and my chenille wash pad. That got just about all of em off without scrubbing. One or two spots required a dab of B&T remover and a MF towel.

Last weekend I topped the Poorboy’s EX-P with S100 paste wax. The S100 product line is very similar (if not the same) as that of P21S. The paste wax costs about half as much as the P21S version. Unlike P21S, which you can really only get online, S100 is found in just about every Harley-Davidson dealership, but I guess you can also get it online.

I didn’t take a picture of the results because I didn’t really think that pictures would show the difference, especially on different days under different lighting conditions. Now that I’ve had a few days to look it over, I really like the s100 on top of EX-P. Makes the car look really wet and the shine deeper, just like a quality carnuba is suppose to do I suppose. EX-P was very clean and somewhat wet looking by itself, but I think the S100 was a nice improvement. I likes it.

I’ve quick detailed with Meguiar’s Final Detail (from their Detailer line, but it has been discontinued) and the car sure looked perty. Today I bought some Eagle One Wax-As-You-Dry spray. Eagle One says that it can be used as your only wax, but I’ll be using it as a booster for the S100, to help keep that “just waxed” look after regular car washing. It’ll be free after rebate, so if I don’t like it, no big loss.

This weekend I think I’ll try tackling my engine bay, especially my cam cover. It’s pretty nasty looking!

Computers Chase the Checkered Flag, an article in the NY Times, talks about all the computing power in an average F1 car. Data is transmitted from the car to the team computers as the car whizzes by the pits at 200mph. Teams are able to monitor potential problems in real time and predict failures.

Estimates say that teams will spend in excess of $2.8 billion this year to run all the races, with top teams spending around $400 million each.

AMD is excepted to announce that it will build a computer roughly as fast as the 10th most powerful machine in the world for Sauber which will be used for aerodynamic testing.

Seems like F1 racing is becoming more of a battle between engineers than a battle between drivers.

HowStuffWorks has an article about the technology behind CART cars. Budgets and technology in CART isn’t quite as large as F1, but still an interesting read.

Wash
Clay
Rinse
Meguiars #83 Dual Action Cleaner/Polish
Meguiars #82 Swirl Free Polish
Poorbooy’s EX-P x 2 applied 24 hours apart
Turtle Wax Tire Wax on the tires
Meguiar’s Gold Class Liquid Wax on the wheels
Polished front and rear windshield w/ #82

I used a Craftsman 7″ random orbital buffer for the two polishes.. I think I need a Porter Cable machine and some good foam pads to get some better results. The Craftsman would be fine for applying wax or sealant, but the motor is too weak to do much else really. I used it for the polishes because it’s easier than doing it by hand

This machine is the one that I want. Seems to be quite popular amongst the enthusiast, and even professional, detailing community.

Rest of the pictures.

My cousin and I got to my Uncle’s camping area about 9am and hung around for a bit, hoping it wasn’t going to rain, but not wanting to sit in our seats for several hours during a rain delay. Then it started raining. My Uncle cooked us some breakfast in his little camper dealio on the back of his truck. Around noon we decided to head in to the track because we had heard that they’d be starting the race around 1.

Got there and our seats were amazing. Every other time I’ve been, probably 13 races, we’ve been just off of turn 4. This time we’re RIGHT by the start/finish line, the yard of bricks. We can see all the action in the pits, the cars coming off the fourth turn, all the way down the front straight, and in to the first turn. The seats were also under cover, so if it started raining, we’d stay dry.

Around lap 23 they brought out the caution flag, and then red flagged the race at lap 27 due to the rain. Bah. 2+ hr rain delay and things got going again. Couple wrecks and such, nothing too bad. Worst was a three car wreck that ended up with the cars sliding down pit road and a safety worker getting hurt. Lap 175 it starts to rain again with Buddy Rice in the lead. Race is called at lap 180, and he takes the yellow / checkered flag. Bah. It was around 6:30 at that time, and we really wanted to see the race go the distance. Oh well.

As we were leaving the track, it really started raining. Got to my Uncle’s camping spot and it started raining even harder! Instead of waiting for the rain to pass, my cousin and I decided to just go on to his Jeep. Got freakin soaked.. thunder, lightning, tornado sirens going off. Then it seemed like the storm just followed us all the way home, making for a miserable drive.

All of my pictures.