Race Therapy

In “Patience Part I” we learned how patience is a virtue, almost in the “Tortoise vs Hare’ sort of way. In this Part II we’ll see a contrasting result.

Fast forward to the following day. A slightly cooler Sunday. I arrive at the track early to play with the ignition timing a little more and to change from aging Hoosiers to a set of lower-profile Goodyears. Crew Chief Robert arrives. Seems he awoke in the middle of the night with an epiphany. He’s sure he has the timing figured out. I open the Crankfire cover and adjust the pots according to his instructions. Then with 30 minutes before we’re called to the Grid for qualifying, Carson is torquing a lug nut on the left front, and *snap!*the wheel stud snaps in half. Great. Decisions, decisions. Do I jamb the lug nut into the wheel with some Racer’s Tape and go to grid, hoping no race official notices, or try to fix it using what we like to call “the right way”? Thinking that if an 11 year old can snap one of the wheel studs that easily might indicate the others could be fatigued as well, we decide to forgo Qualifying and go in search of a 12mm stud. Patience won yesterday, it will see us through today.

First auto parts store we find in town is closed on Sunday. Patience. We find another. No studs. Pa-a-a-tience. We find an AutoZone. Nope. Even more patience. Finally, I find a suitable bolt at Lowes of all places, and we head back to the track. By now it’s lunch time and all qualifying sessions are over. We’ll be starting today’s race at the very back of the grid. But with only three cars in my class entered for this race, I’m assured of at least a 3rd place finish and the resulting points.

As they call for the group before ours to head to the grid for their race, I make my way from the VRO store to the car to make sure we’re buttoned up and to get dressed. Finally the call comes over the PA, “Group 6 to grid”. On grid I am slotted dead last next to my friend Dan in the red Porsche. Dan also opted to skip qualifying to fix his broken throttle cable and go through the car looking for more gremlins. Group 5 was running behind, so a few guys get out of their cars to relax. I feel content to remain seated with helmet and gloves at the ready, the pre-race psuedo-anxiety I used to get is now nothing more than mere apprehension with a little impatience thrown in for good measure. Finally, we’re given the 5 minute call, and soon we’re pulling off pit row and onto the pace lap. Swerve. Accelerate. Stab the brakes. Building heat in the tires and brakes before the start, I notice that the Spider feels much peppier today and I smile inside my helmet.  as we come out of turn 11 and onto the main straight, no flag. seems we have a mis-start. Around we go again, slightly annoyed. This time coming out of 11 the green flag waves and we’re off! Oh the joy of newfound power! I charge down the straight right up the backside of the Porsche and a mix of Miatas and RX-7’s looking for a sliver of light to inset the nose into.

By lap 3 I’m pushing the Pale Yellow Miata that started several positions ahead of me. Overtaking him means 2nd place in class, but Ralph has a reputation for blocking and he shows me no mercy. I’m sure he’s a bit shocked that I’m running him over coming out of the turns – I’m driving 35 year old technology after all. Coming up on the blind left uphill Turn 7 that transitions into a downhill off-camber right to a short chute, I know that I’ll be past Ralph by the time we come out of turn 11. Then it starts again. Raspy spittling at 5000 rpm. Cuss!    As we wind around and down through 70 feet of elevation change and back up again, the Miata – and RX-7 we’d caught – start to slowly pull away. The frustration is enormous. But as we work through Lap 4 I realize I’m still faster in the turns and decide that I’m going to push the car a little harder into each curve to see if I can reel the Miata back in. With the RX running interference, it just might give me the break I need to get past them a few laps down the road.

Lap 5, it’s give and take, I gain on them in sucessive turns, and lose some or all of that ground in the straights. Still I am confident that I can slowly whittle the gap over the next 6 laps.  Especially on the back side of the course from Turns 7 through 11, where the little Italian roadster had been showing plenty of predictability at the limits.  We come to 11, a tight double apex lefty at the end of a 1/4 mile straight that puts you onto the main straight. Several people had gone off here over the weekend including my buddy Paul, who’s offtrack excursion there cracked a front spindle which let go of it’s attached wheel and brakes later that same lap. At this point I’m thinking I’m going to lose ground I just snagged and push the braking point a little past my usual late brake and dive point. The car rotates just fine through the first apex and I apply power through the turn per usual. But the back end gets lose and the fishtailing ensues. It seems an eternity but withing 10ths of a second some minor steering corrections get the back end tamed. But the result is that the car is now pointed across the 2nd apex, through the infield. If I cut back to the right to stay on the pavement, I risk, no, I will put the back wheels on a path to pass me on the left in a nice smokey spin through the curve. Split second decision: The car is pointed straight, and the straightaway is just yards away on the other side of that patch of grass and gravel. I accelerate straight ahead.

Passing over the infield at speed feels like driving through a cotton field. Everything is bouncing and pounding the lowered race suspension. Controlling the car through that is a challenge and since there is little traction. steering movements are best kept subtle.  In the second  it takes to travel that distance, and as I approach the safety of pavement once again, I almost feel relived when BAM!! I’m flying! No not ‘going fact” flying’ Honest to goodness “Lord I have no wings or parachute”  in-the-are flying. It seems that as I crossed onto the track where a concrete berm/curb lines the inside of the corner, the front suspension fully compressed, dropping the already ridiculously low (and therefore armor plated)  oil pan of the Spider on a collision course with the curb. The pan/curb collision detached the motor from the mount on the right side, shoving the engine upward into the hood and back to the firewall. The energy of the impact propels the car into the air, yawing to the right, and back to the ground on two wheels. For a brief moment I think I might get to test the structural integrity of the roll cage, but pulling the wheel to the left slams the car back on all 4. The car spins and I depress the clutch and turn the wheel again to let it roll out backwards, so that I end up pointed in the right direction. The engine dies. Not knowing at that time that it has come unmoored from the chassis I his the starter. Tremndous rattling ensues and the front of the car feels like it’s loaded with a gigantic maraca. I’m done for the day, possibly longer. I leave the engine wobbling long enough to pull te car ontop the inflield to safety and kill the main power. Look right, I see a large puddle where the engine bled out.

Note to novices and anyone else who doesn’t remember their rulebook. Unless the car it on fire you stay in the car, in your harness, Hans and helmet. You’re much safer inside that roll cage than you are exposed on the side of the track. Those corner workers sit in the concrete bunkers for good reason.  I see an official on the other side of the wall motioning to his head in a way that says “keep your helmet on”. Thanks for the tip, wasn’t planning on disrobing yet.

Patience, why have I forsaken thee? Had I just left well enough alone and accepted the fact that ignition issues had taken me out of the race just as I was really in it, I would have finished 3rd in class and loved to race another day. Impatience caused me to push too hard, to not use my best judgement, and as a result I did not get a complete race (Did Not Finish) and at a minimum I have a lot of mechanical work to do just as the 2011 season starts.

“In order to finish first, you first have to finish”. And in order to finish, you first have to learn to have a little patience…

Now you would think that racing and patience mix about as well as oil and vinegar.  After all the point is to finish ahead of everyone else. Think again. Racing is all about patience, as evidenced in this tale of two races

Part I

So there I was at the last SCCA double regional race. We’d worked out some kinks in the car the week before, resetting the front alignment and adjusting the timing – as best we could since the previous owner/builder neglected to leave timing reference marks intact when adding the Crankfire ignition  system.  On a beautiful Saturday morning, we lined up on grid for qualifying. Everything felt good, and we roll onto the track to take the requisite warmup lap under yellow. Coming back down the main straight, the Starter drops the green flag and engines roar. All but one. My 1.8 liters of fury sounds more like a sputter as the revs climb toward 5000. What the cuss?  Oil and water temps look fine and short-shifting before 4500rpm keeps me moving around the track. Best thing to do here, I think, is to go ahead and get some laps in and get a qualifying time. We can deal with the engine stuttering before the race.

We talk about the sputter back on the paddock and make some adjustments to the “best  guess” timing, thinking about how smart we would have been to have taken more time to rectify the shortcoming we inherited. Grid sheets never show up before the race so we never see lap times from Scoring, but as we take to the grid for the race that afternoon, I find that I qualifyied 15th out of 19 and last in my class. Not where I wanted to be.

Pace lap, pace car falls out and we get a clean start. Sputter. More cussing. At this rate I figure to finish DFL, and am pushing just to keep from being lapped.

Patience.

Despite the lack of power in the straight, I stay in the race.  With about 5 laps to go, I crest a blind left turn to see the 2nd place Miata at rest in the infield. This bit of misfortune on his part puts me in 2nd place in my class. I press on. Then with one lap remaining, the 1st place Porsche 914 breaks a throttle cable. I take the checkered in 1st place. Not the way you want to win a race, but that’s racing. As Robert said, to finish first, you first have to finish. Patience pays off!  Staying on the line and out of trouble turned a sure loss into a welcome, if not unexpected, win.

Chump - A stupid or foolish person; a dolt.

ChumpCar – A heroic spectacle of true grit racing and backyard engineering; a throwback to days when racing was a little less about liability and sponsorships, and a little more about showing up to push your car and yourself beyond the limits of reason.

For the past couple of years, the mention of racing cars worth $500 in a crowd of serious club racers would draw several scoffs, a gaggle of laughs, and even a few a derogatory comments about “those LeMons assclowns”.  And while it’s true that the genius of “The 24 Hours of LeMons” pioneered the modern concept of amateurs green off the street racing $500 cars fender to fender (often literally),  the newest Crap Can series – the ChumpCar World Series – takes that concept a little further, if not a little more seriously.

For those of you who, like me, spend too much time sleeping, watching cartoons and contorted inside of or underneath a vehicle, ChumpCar, founded in 2009 by John Condren, pits teams of drivers against each other in cars that hit the track on a $500 budget. To be specific, the car and all performance aspects/adds/modifications can cost no more than $500. Safety equipment such as the required (and meticulously spec’d) roll cage, fire systems, etc are exempt from the penny-pincher budgetary demands. Yes, you can enter the race with a formerly totaled Hyundai Excel or a Chysler Cordoba sporting the decayed remains of its vinyl roof (did they really used to build cars that way, Dad?), as long as you can get it through a rigorous safety inspection.

The overriding idea here is to make real racing accessible (read: affordable) to the masses, without it being any more dangerous than an SCCA or NASA event.

Good luck, I thought. Not that you can’t build a race car from a $500 heap. I’d been to a LeMons  race, their success has proven that people posses the ingenuity and cajones to undertake such a venture. But the LeMons series has some, uh, “peculiarities” that remove some of the thrills and chills of racing. Two wheels off the course for any reason gets you black flagged. Same for contact with another car, even if you were merely minding your own “looking at the next apex” business when some joker running guaranteed to fade and fast Duralast brakes plows into where your taillight used to be. Even aggressive driving of experienced racers can draw unwanted attention from the judges. And with those infractions can come penalties and fines. And then there are the infamous theatrics that made LeMons the most interesting show on wheels.

What I soon realized after talking to the head Chumps at a recent ChumpCar series race at Texas Motor Speedway was that ChumpCar really is Honest to Al Unser Serious racing. Incidental contact is no harm, no foul. If you spin off course, just don’t cause an incident getting back on. No fine, no penalty laps, no having to be rolled through the paddock on an unmoored toilet yelling “I’m a crappy driver”. No one’s car gets mauled by a backhoe or C4 halfway through the race. Yes there is still the opportunity for the more creative among us to impress everyone with their auto bohemianism. But the one thing that really drew me in was how ChumpCar out-balls the other $500 series in stamina. Almost every Chump race runs over the course of 24 hours, which means racing all night with headlights in true, endurance racing style. (LeMons runs about 10 hours on Saturday and 8 on Sunday, which even by my math ain’t nowhere near the advertised 24 hours). That, my friends, is a challenge to the Primitive Male instinct. It’s also a trunkload of seat time when spread out across four Crap Can Commanders.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not dissin’ my friends at LeMons. It is what it is – copious amounts of fun and pageantry mixed in with real, safe racing that the average car nut can afford. It’s good for the sport. It’s entertaining. They break on Saturday evening so that you can fire up the barbi-q, crack open adult bevs and lovingly beat the shit out of a sticky slave cylinder with a crescent wrench before assaulting the course again the next day. If Delta House had a Racing Kegger instead of a Toga Party, it would resemble this. I hope they never change the format. But ChumpCar appeals more to the racing spirit in me. The challenge of coaxing a junkyard dog to run with the pack for 24 hours straight. Being aggressive (yet in control) into a turn and around 3 slower cars. Fighting over who mans the crew radio at 3:30am. It’s the ultimate endurance test of car and driver. The fact that the car was dragged out of a river bed and set on blocks 2 years ago to die of oxidation is simply icing on the Primitive Man’s meatcake.

Vick Racing Inc is now Vick Racing Outfitters (VRO)!

Founded in 2003, Vick Racing has been one of the best kept secrets in racing safety equipment.

And we hate secrets, unless we’re in on a good one. So we commandeered the store, created a nice little club insignia, and are ready to let you into our little clique. No initiation required.

At first we thought we could draw you in with our charm and good looks. But that’s not going to happen for obvious reasons, and frankly, that’s not what we’re about. We want to provide you with the best quality products and service at the best possible price. And we’ll throw in all the advice you can eat for free because we’re generous like that. Yes really.

Like you, we race. We love to race. And because we want to continue to race we are dead serious about safety. For us and for you. To that end, we thoroughly research products and manufacturers to select brands we feel will give you the best protection and performance possible. And while value is a factor in the equation, we will never offer a product based on price alone.

We do our due diligence. And because we do due, you can go do that thing you do so well.

But we don’t want a one-way relationship. We want to hear from you. Review our products. Send us amusing racing stories. Pictures of your dog. Or maybe your car. Or your dog writing an amusing story about your car. Tell us what you would like to see from VRO. There may even be something in it for you. Who knows? If you are in the Dallas/Ft Worth area, stop by. We’d love to see you. Especially if you are attractive and packing 1.5L of Patron.

Watch and be amazed as our store undergoes changes over the coming months. If you don’t see what you are looking for, odds are we can get it for you. Give us a call. We also like to get out every now and then, so if you are a track owner, promoter, club or racer and would like VRO to bring our products to your track or event. Give us a call.

Go fast. Be safe.
Joey Todd
Head Honcho
Vick Racing Outfitters