Over the weekend, CO2 caught us. It’s true that the year over year heat increased in Buttonwillow dont help our cooling system, but that wasn’t our main problem. At least not this weekend.
CO2 found it’s way from the one of the cylinders into our coolant system. First during our track tests, the cap from the coolant system was venting – in one case through our recently made hood vents! ChatGPT and Claude walked through the options – bad cap, poorly bled coolant system, etc. Maybe more expansion from water vs glycol (change required for safety so cars don’t dump slippery stuff on the track). And then various fans, thermo switches, etc. At the end of the list – head gasket leak.
So late last night we did a test for CO2 in our coolant and there is a small amount as you can see in the image above. For calibration, exhaling a few times into the tester will get a greenish color and then a few more will go full yellow. So there is some CO2 gas getting in…and over 30min of hard driving it’s pushing out enough coolant to create a cooling system issue. So we could find a way to top up coolant every 30-60min, but there is a good chance of not making it or finishing at all, so let fix the problem.
This might break out economy as the parts are around $204 but we still have listings on eBay and so we might still make it. Else we take some penalty laps.
Shoutout to Brendan from Thalo Labs (yes, they’re a sponsor!) who made it out to LA late Friday night, so he could join us for the day or not-as-much-driving-as-we-hoped. As he reminded us “hardware is hard” but also appropriately his company makes and HVAC co-pilot to avoid failures and associated CO2 emissions (from refrigerant leaks and increased energy usage).
More pics soon, but here are a few for now.
Outrun Carbon 