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From Swedespeed.com Miscellaneous Features We just returned from the weekend at Road America and to say that things were interesting would be an understatement! I’ll give you a play by play of the weekend, but first, I have to thank all of the incredible fans we met during the weekend. There is an incredible outpouring of Volvophiles that have been awaiting our debut. In fact, one such fan was so excited that she (yes, She) had a Volvo tattoo on her ankle… On with the story.
Meanwhile, by the way, the weather is absolutely spectacular with no humidity, cloudless skies, and temps in the lower to mid 70’s. Unbelievable! Friday’s practice showed that our move to the different oil cooler had paid off. Temps were down quite a bit and within a more acceptable range. Our morning practice went well, but Derek was now reporting a high speed (140mph+) rear vibration and a soft brake pedal. Strange…where did these come from? Between practices, we changed tires (maybe out of balance?), examined the drive components, and checked everything else. We also made some significant adjustments to our suspension setup in an attempt to try some new settings, bled the brakes, changed pads, and installed new rotors all around. Yes, the boys were working hard. The second and final practice of the day still found us with the mysterious vibration. Overnight, we decided to change a number of drive components just in case there was something unforeseen causing our problem. Saturday morning found another beautiful day at Road America with our practice session at 10:05 AM. On our first lap, literally, we had one of the strangest material failures our head engineer had ever seen. The prop shat (drive shaft) literally sheered off. Derek was able to bring the car safely to a stop but that meant that we did not have any times going into the race. Even so, we were determined to race and the team worked hard to get the car ready for its 4:00 debut.
The race started as many other World Challenge GT races do with some interesting driving decisions by numerous drivers. At one point, Derek needed to use the AWD system on the grass to avoid folks intent upon seeing the inside of our new Volvo with their front end. Getting away cleanly, Derek began the historic first race of our new S60R Competition Version. All was going well when he suddenly radioed that he was noticing some handling problems out of the rear end and some smoke. “Come in!” was obviously our response. In we came to find that a $6 suspension bolt had backed out of one of the rear suspension arms and replacing it in the pits was impossible. In fact, the rest of the suspension had remained so rigid that Derek was able to make it back to the pits from nearly half way around Road America (almost 2 miles to travel) with a wobbling toe link. Although the reason for the end of our race was disappointing (that’s right a $6 bolt sidelined our car!), the amount of development knowledge we brought home is invaluable. Changes are in the works right now and we will hope to be at Road Atlanta later in September with 2 cars, the second driven by rookie sensation Jameson Riley.
See you there and thanks for all the support! Bob Miller At Speed Motorsports
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