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20-22Aug10, Racing with “ChumpCar” at Roebling Road, Savannah, GA. “MY NAME’S SCOTTY GRESS AND I’M COMING THROUGH! WOOOHOOO!” I exclaimed excitedly as I worked the greatest lap of passes in my life. We were in a “restart” after having been brought into the pits so oil could be cleaned off of the track from someone’s blown motor. Not before I found it of course, having gone thru turn 2 sideways. All the cars were brought in and lined up in the pits while they cleaned up the oil, then they waved us out for a lap “under yellow”. When the first guy in line came around to Start/Finish he’d get the green flag and the race would be back on. About 30secs before the front of the line of cars got to Start/Finish, I’d radioed to my teammates…”CALL GREEN, CALL GREEN, CALL GREEN”. The race starts when “Control” waves the green flag at the flag tower. But if you are a ways back, you won’t see the leader get the green flag. But even though you can’t see the waving green flag, the race has indeed started. With some cleverness and radios you have a teammate radio you as soon as “Control” waves green to the leader. That will give you an incredibly precious couple seconds headstart on the gas pedal while the poor saps around you remain blissfully unaware that the RACE IS ON. “GREEN GREEN GREEN GREEN” I heard in my headphones. Puttering along at 50mph behind a long line of cars, I floored the throttle. I move left and picked up the first guy at ~80mph before we hit the straight By now the other cars had probably figured out that the madman in the charging blue BMW was probably an indicator that green had been thrown. Then I moved right and at ~100mph motored by a Camaro that had twice my engine, making the pass right in front of all the spectators at Start/Finish. He had more engine, but I’d gotten on the gas earlier. Heading into the braking zone for turn 1 at 110mph I accepted risk and flew by a Fiero that had been well ahead, but was now braking for the turn. Once I got by the Fiero I braked hard, countersteered a bit as the rear tried to come around, and then slid into place two car lengths behind some ex police cruiser. He moved right and blocked me in turn 2, but I darted left at ~70mph and got around the outside. That’s 4. Somehow, after watching the rear of a race car for a couple seconds, you can often read the driver’s mind. <insert subdued exclamation of evil> Turn 3 is a fast left hander that can be scary at high speed. I got by an RX7 and a Mercedes by hauling ass down the inside. Then I used turn 4 and 5 to get into a pack of cars with more hp than I. I got by one of them at the exit of 7 by taking a larger radius line, and that gave me the speed to get right on the ass of the other 2 fast cars as we approached turns 8-9. That’s 7. “GODDAMN THIS IS FUN” I thought with a big silly grin on my face. If I was to have any more fun, I figured, I’d have to jump out , drop my shorts and…. well, you get the idea. But there was a problem. The pink pig Saab was slowing for the pits and taking up the inside line. He was going to kill my momentum if I caught up to him too soon. So I breathed off of the throttle for a heartbeat, and then back on the gas. On the inside I raced towards the Saab slowing in front of me, as the other two fast cars set up to pass the Saab on the outside. The Saab was just pulling off on to pit road when I threaded the needle and shot Tenacious Darwin Wrenching #11 through the gap. That kept me on the tail of the two fast cars as we roared down the front straight. At about 115mph the group of us passed an RX7 and then those two lined up behind some piece of crap car to brake for turn 1. But instead of getting in line, I darted to the outside, held off braking until the last minute and passed them both. Then I stood Tenacious #11 on it’s nose and turned into the turn. And that’s 10. My greatest…..passing…..lap…..of…..all…..time. This restart is at the 12min mark of this “best passes video compilation” of that 90min session. Background. ChumpCar is another racing series for $500 junk cars, folks at “24hrs of Lemons” being the first ones in the niche. The idea is that you find a fixer-upper somewhere for under $500. Staying within your $500 budget, you fix what you can. Since you’re sure to need, at a screaming minimum, new hoses, belts & bushings for the junker to survive 16hrs of racing over a weekend, you try to sell what you can off of the junker. Selling parts adds to your budget. The safety budget……. tires, brakes, cage, driver’s seat and harness, etc. is unlimited. So inevitably you and your team of 4 or more drivers spend $3k or so. The organizers go over your documentation so you have to be prepared to show how you paid for shiny new things like radiator hoses and suspension go-fast parts, if any. The judges levy penalty laps against gray area violations and have been known to buy the entire car, for $500, for gross violations. In my first Lemons race last year, for example, the team was penalized 40 laps because they didn’t like the way the team captain started dancing when asked whether or not the differential was limited slip. 40laps is a lot of penalty, and they are easy to get so the documentation needs to be good. Almost all cars have some silly “theme”. There’s Batmobiles, Monty Python cars, Star Wars cars, etc. A good theme goes a long ways to preventing penalty laps. Since a good fraction of the junk cars don’t make it thru the first day, Saturday night becomes a beer and bbq wrenchfest as teams work hard to get their cars running again. Replacing engines and transmissions is common. Folks have re-wired cars that burned, and fabricated clutches out of brake pads. There’s genius at work Saturday night. And beer and bbq. Although we had done a couple Lemons events, this was our first attempt at the competing series ChumpCar. In Lemons racing you get silly pita penalties for every tiny infraction. In real racing, for example, the grass is considered “a racing surface”, albeit a slippery one. At a Lemons race if you touch the grass you’re likely to get dragged in for some godawful penalty like spending 20min marching behind a car with giant speakers singing Village People songs. In costume. Last Feb we tried our goddamndest to race squeaky clean and we still got 7 penalties. It remained to be seen what ChumpCar was all about. Fred, Jim, Al and I all race virtually identical BMW’s in a class called SpecE30. Those are our real race cars. We also share ownership in tenacious Darwin Wrenching #11 for when we want to go slumming. Oh shit, our shocks are shot. Our crappy $500 1987 BMW 325i, with a silly plastic front end from a dirt circle track car, had OEM suspension. Fine for a daily driver, less fine for a race car. At a Lemons race last Feb the car was rolling over in the turns like a ferry boat. So we decided a couple months ago to lower the car a couple inches by cutting coils out of the tall soft OEM springs. That’s when Jim found that our shocks were so completely shot that they didn’t, well, shock. Jim was to head out for our house in 12hrs towing tenacious Darwin Wrenching #11 and we had not-shocks. The race was at Roebling Road, Savannah’s local 2.2mi long road racing track, and about 30min from our house. First thing Thur morning I was on the phone to get Bilstiens Sport shocks in a hurry. These are the same shocks that go on our real BMW race cars. We figured that if we had to buy new shocks, we might as well upgrade to something we could race with. Jim and tenacious Darwin Wrenching #11 got to our place at 0100 Friday morning, and the Bilstiens showed up on our porch while Jim was drinking his leisurely mid-morning coffee. The shocks made it 2000miles in 12hrs. Makes ya proud to be an American. Darwin Wrenching, with team principles Fred Switzer, Jim Levie, Al K, and I made it thru tech inspection easy enough on Friday. To my disappointment, they weren’t at all interested in my carefully prepared documentation supporting the $$ value of our $500 car. They said "that shit-box? <snort of derision> You're good." Once we got the track we started noticing some obvious differences between ChumpCar and 24hrs of Lemons racing. There were some cars about the track that looked pretty capable. In contrast, I have never looked at a Lemons car and thought “looks pretty capable”. There was, for example, a yellow Camaro with a shiny Holley 650 carburetor sitting on top of it’s engine. Fred’s comment was “that Holly is worth more then our car”. Some cars had really nice paint such that you couldn’t possible look at it and think “what a piece of junk”. And there were at least a half dozen cars that were sitting a lot lower then you’d expect a $500 crap can to sit. Saturday, race day 1. Cars lining up at the start.
http://a.imageshack.us/img295/1686/img00049201008211039.jpg Oh, and when ever you hit the brakes the car's rear end would try to come around. If we pressed on the brakes hard, the rear end would come around so dramatically we’d spin like a top. Even under medium braking we had to countersteer each time because braking was as much drifting into a 30deg slide as anything else. It’s not ideal to head into a left turn at 90mph, brake briefly hard, and have the car suddenly pointing right because the darn rear end keeps coming around. Sliding sideways with your car pointing right is no way to start a left turn. Our lap times were pathetic. The car was also overheating a bit. Well, hell, it was 97deg in the humidity of the deep South. The inside of the race car was probably 130deg. We were all overheating. We were wearing “Coolshirts” that have little tubes sewn in that get a steady stream of chilled water from an ice chest. But the car’s radiator wasn’t getting enough air flow thru our silly plastic circle track front end. Well, ok, it didn’t help that the car was a piece of crap. Every lap the coolant temp surge over and then back down to the ¾ mark. The headgasket wasn’t going to take this forever. Each time we caught up to someone, air flow to the radiator would get blocked and the coolant temp would spike. As the day got hotter we had to start running occasional laps easy so the engine could cool a bit. And we had it as bad as the engine. A driver’s suit is a thick fireproof garment that can be imagined as similar to wearing a thick oven mitt. When it’s warm out, the suit is suffocatingly hot. The chilled water from the cooler seemed to only last about 45min. After that we just baked. Jim’s “Coolshirt” got a hole in it and started leaking icewater on his crotch. By his reaction you’d a thought he’d caught his balls on fire. Between gasps he hit the Coolshirt switch and shut off the pump in the cooler. After his stint, Jim disappeared into Al’s enclosed, air conditioned, car trailer for a bit. I went into the trailer to get something, and closed the door behind me so the chilled air wouldn’t all leak out. We didn’t see Jim for a while after that. I got a little worried, because when I’d left him he’d really not looked so good. He’s no spring chicken and, except for his balls, he’d just spent an hour fifteen wearing an oven mitt in a 130deg race in an environment where one slip in concentration could put him into the trees at >100mph. It would turn out later that when I closed the door to Al’s trailer, I’d locked Jim in. Apparently there is no latch on the inside. So Jim had sat in a corner and drank water for an hour or so, reasonably sure that eventually one of us would come along, want something out of Al’s trailer, and open the door. Jim reacted to his imprisonment with good natured aplomb. He was less sanguine about dropping one of the heavy duty battery powered impact wrenches on his toe. That had him hobbling around all day. End of Saturday’s race. Considering we were driving a car that was only barely controllable, we did pretty well to get 8th of 31, especially since everyone seemed to have “bought” themselves bonus laps by making large donations to charity. There were lots of fast cars, even if the quality of the driver’s was a mixed bag. One guy ran times about as fast as I’ve ever done Roebling Road, my home track. And there was another 5 guys running laps only a couple seconds behind. So Lemons may be entirely crappy cars, but ChumpCar has some that are less crappy. Here’s some pics that shows how a pit stop works. http://picasaweb.google.com/116924494989914450195/PittingAtChumpCarRaceAug10?authkey=Gv1sRgCPya-NbhwuvURA&feat=directlink Al had the fastest lap of the day. I think that his fastest was ~2secs faster then my fastest. I’ve no idea how he did that. I was driving that POS just as fast as it’s widow-maker handling would allow. There’s no way I was leaving 2secs on the table. But the transponder doesn’t lie. Is irksome. I take some solace in that I didn’t have a single “off” so no time was lost spinning off into the dirt. I pulled a couple bonehead moves tho. I forgot our damned transponder for one. I was supposed to take it off of my race car and bring it for the Lemons car. We were all at the early Saturday moring driver’s meeting when the lead Chump mentioned “Transponders” and I went ashen. All Friday I’d kept a running list of all the things I needed to bring Saturday morning and I’d completely forgotten the damned transponder, the device that tracks use to time your laps. While I raced home to get the transponder the guys were able to borrow one from my nemesis, the 40’ long 1970 Ford LTD USS Enterprise. My next bonehead move was to forget my head-and-neck restraint (HNR). These are $1k fiberglass and strap contraptions that limit your head movement in the event of a crash. I had my gear in the pits so I could wear it all for fueling, per the requirement, but I’d left my HNR back at our paddock site 100m away. You don’t need an HNR for fueling. So there I was in the race car buckling into the harness just about to start my 90min racing stint when I reach back to fasten the HNR straps to the helmet and there’s no HNR. “F**K” I yelled, and I jumped out and sprinted across the paddock area in my oven mitt to retrieve the HNR. Fred had the scare of the day when some knucklehead attempted a bonehead pass and clipped Fred’s rear. This spun him through the exit of turn 9, a particularly treacherous place to lose control. Most folks that lose it there get thrown across the track and into the pit wall at high speed. Fred got lucky though and spun into the grass. Karma played and the guy that hit
Fred ended up getting a tire cut on Fred’s rear fender. NASCAR might be able to
change a tire in 4 secs, but it takes us that long to say “Huh? You want me to
change what”? As soon as the track went cold Al launched out for home, an hour away, and grabbed the, conveniently already removed, rear springs off of his real race car. We all race BMW’s of this same generation. Saturday night, under a small pop-up canopy in sheltering us somewhat from the thunderstorm, we replaced the stock (but cut) rear springs with Bilstien race springs. Then the car’s rear end seemed to sit normally. Sunday, Race Day 2. We had a whole new car. Finally it was fun. It couldn’t stick to the turns like our real race cars, but it was predictable. The rear end didn’t hop around turns like a kangaroo, and the car didn’t try to go sideways every time you touched the brake pedal. The car pretty much did what you told it to do. We told it to go fast. And it was really fun. Pics before Scott’s 90min stint. http://picasaweb.google.com/116924494989914450195/PicsBeforeScottS90minStint?authkey=Gv1sRgCNWPqdvVzOTMSg&feat=directlink There was really just two cars that we couldn’t take. Calling them $500 cars was a joke. But the other 28 cars were meat on a stick. And we had a blast. Some passes really stick in my mind. At one point I let one of the two really fast cars pass me before turn 8-9, the turn that leads to the long front straight. But as soon as he got by me, he came up on 2 slower folks. So he was trying to push thru and I was going to be there too in a couple seconds. They were all kind of in a confused cluster at ~110mph, and I predicted that the two slow cars would get rattled and an opening would occur just "so". I darted towards the future opening and squeezed in like an appleseed. We were 4 wide down a front straight that was only 3 cars wide. This put me into the pit exit lane that was going to end in about 50yds. Side by side with the other 3 cars, I started moving over (into them) because I didn’t want to be in the grass at 110mph. I figured that either they’d move over, or we’d rub a bit and then they’d move over. They moved over. In another entertaining pass, I’d gotten a good run out of 9 and had caught up to two cars on the straightaway. But I didn’t really have enough speed advantage to get around their effort to block me before the turn 1 braking zone. My thought was to try to position myself such that I could out-brake them. That’s often a little dicey because from the other guy’s perspective it can happen so fast that they don’t see it happening and turn into you. Or it becomes a braking dual which is also tricky. At the same time, in my rear view mirror, I saw one of the two fast cars approaching at high speed. With a grin I hatched a new plan and dodged left to center-track. The fast car with high closing speed roared past me and I darted right to get on his tail. He startled the cars that I’d been stuck behind and they made a gap. He roared thru with me on his tail. They guys that had blocked me were still exclaiming “holy shit” when I roared by. It was really great fun. After about 50min I was headed down the straight away when I saw a car blowing smoke around turn 2. The 50’ long 1970 Ford LTD “USS Enterprise” with it’s trick suspension and 500hp, in front of me, must have seen it too because he also slowed. I cautiously braked to set up for turn 2 and the car went sideways. “Shit, oil”, I thought, and countersteered to bring the car back under control. The smoking car pulled off the track and the next tower threw a red flag which directed us all to come to an immed stop on the track. 5min later they pulled in red and threw a black flag, indicating that we were to come into the pits. Heading back into the pits I radioed for someone to bring some more ice for the ice chest and my Coolshirt. It was just pumping warm water, the high tech oven mitt I was wearing had about 10lbs of sweat in it and in the 130deg oven I was gasping for air like a fish. Thankfully Jim ran out with a bag of ice and dumped it into the cooler. It was the restart after that red flag that created the fun that I opened this tale with. I was running fast laps. Early in the Sunday race Jim had worked our way up to 8th place of 31. Then Chump put in all the bonus laps folks had bought (irksome scheme) and suddenly we were in 22nd. Al then had moved us up to 15th, and then I’d worked us up to 10th. It seemed odd to execute probably 30 passes and only move up 5 places, but most of the cars I passed were cars that I was lapping. The fast guys were coming back to me slowly. No worries though , we had several more hours to keep working our way up. 40min later I was nearing the end of my 90min driver stint. The gas gauge had taken an hour to get to “1/2”, but had been dropping rapidly since then. 3 laps earlier the needle had gone in the red and now it was on “E”. I radioed in to give 2 laps warning that I was coming in for driver change and fuel. I was exhausted and dehydrated. But damn how it had been fun. As I roared by the pits at 115mph I waved at the guys to ensure that they understood that I was coming in. Jim would be jumping in after me so he’d be buttoning up his suit, helmet and head/neck restraint. 45sec short of pulling into the pits, the engine note suddenly changed. It sounded awful. “Hole in the exhaust manifold? Is a cylinder missing?”, I thought. I wasn’t sure what the problem was, but I was thinking furiously re. what we’d have to try in order to diagnose the problem. I didn’t want to lose a bunch of laps over something dumb. I radioed in “I’ve got a problem. Something’s wrong with the engine. I say again, there’s a problem with the engine. I’m coming in.” The engine was running, but was weak. A couple seconds later I was pulling into the pits. I loosened the harness belts as I came into the pits. Fred held out our gas catch pan with our # written in huge letters underneath it to show me where exactly to stop. When I stopped I reached forward and pulled the M&^$%%F$%%$G hood release wire with every fiber of my being. “Man how that hood release needs work”, I thought. Jim listened to the motor for a couple seconds and said “I think it’s a broken rocker arm”. “That would be bad”, I hollered, “Maybe it’s just a spark plug wire”. “I think I hear the broken rocker rattling around”, said Jim. “Shit”, I said. “That’s it for us then.” Fred and Jim helped me out of the tenacious 130deg oven. I was utterly thrashed from the heat, dehydration, and just exhaustion from the requirement for sustained concentration. Changing out of the oven mitt I put on shorts, a tank top and big floppy straw hat. Then I slumped in a shady chair and put down water bottle after water bottle. Bummer about the engine, but damn how that had been fun. A few more pics. http://picasaweb.google.com/116924494989914450195/MiscChumpCarPics?authkey=Gv1sRgCMz48Zik1YLYLQ&feat=directlink Tenacious Darwin Wrenching was retired to my garage where it is undergoing some repairs and improvements.
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