Not getting the health is an issue caused by the way the item is coded and the way the race is, changing either one will fix the problem. The issue with the loss of health on removal is a problem with the item.
The best long term solution will be to just reprogram the item so that there is a new item standard of them running their changes after a 1 sec spawn delay so as to not mess with the default .5 sec delay of the races. What is going on is the item is doing stuff with no delay and then is getting changed by the race when it spawn program runs.