Lug nutmen

At the repair counter

A man brings a telescope to Len Mercer from the far end of Marrow Creek and lists the symptoms in the order he noticed them. Len lays out a tray and sets each thing that can come loose into the other side of a folding cloth. He doesn't ask whether anybody in the man's house has been adjusting the eyepiece. The person who brought it in needs to be able to answer other questions before they'll be useful. As a new repairer, Len sold a customer a replacement washer while the original was still glued to the back of a broken case. His partner Wilson refers to the story each time Len wants to store a potentially useful shim in the kitchen drawer. You have to turn it over before you lay it up, Wilson says. On the next line he writes who might want it.

Len brings the same habit to the Nissan 2009 GT-R (R35) he once kept a pencil drawing of inside the drawer where he saved his spare screws. He keeps the latter ready to depart on a day when his own bench is still covered with repairs.

The floor crack

At DGM he heard a wheel hit the floor and then heard the last tiny sound it would make in a crack beyond the reach of two searching fingers. He asked the person who'd dropped it to show him the height it had fallen from. Ron Stelleto set down a loupe and fetched a narrow brush. Len found where the crack took the wheel after it stopped being visible. There was a small nut resting alongside it. The owner took the wheel and said the nut must belong to the next person. Len kept it in a pale enamel dish on his bench so that person could find it.

The name Lug nutmen grew out of several jokes about counting the hands that had reached for one small piece of hardware. Len left the lower-case word as the crew first wrote it down. He did spend enough time considering whether it made a difference to miss the first briefing, which gets left out of the story when he tells it.

Visible on the sketch

If another person is there to look, Len asks them to tell him when he goes through a braking point too carefully. He can keep the Nissan settled there. He'd like to see what happens when he lets it release a fraction earlier and trusts the turn he set up. He catches himself worrying that somebody will notice he asked such a basic question before he feels any benefit from the answer.

Last practice, V-Tech Daniels gave him an axle drawing he could use with a visitor who had asked about a nut. It gave the two of them something definite to discuss, and Len had to admit he'd said two different things while pointing to the exact same piece on two different cars.

On the next ticket

Wilson helped him pack the old dish with a rag so it wouldn't sound the whole way to the paddock. Len would like to drive a session with the repairs board back home out of his mind. Today he's asked Wilson to tell him how long he spent last time on the last small check. Len can hear the silence that comes before the answer from the other end of the kitchen.