GressTale, 9Aug08 “HEY, QUIT THAT!”
My first race at Road Atlanta
It was insane. I felt like I was dancing and swatting at attacking hornets. The Mazda Miatas were lunging and diving in on me on both sides simultaneously. And their timing, speeds and car positions were such, as we flew into turn after turn, that they were just assuming that I would give way. Because if I didn’t give way we’d end up in balls of crumpled sheetmetal. Two cars can’t occupy the same space, once has to give. I didn’t want my car to get hurt. And they apparently didn’t give a shit about their cars.
Miatas have less horsepower then our BMWs, but their light
weight and low center-mass allows them to go around corners without hardly
slowing. The differences in lap
times are more driver skill then car characteristics. 
I was flying down and then back up the S curves known collectively as Road Atlanta’s Turn 4. It’s really a 90mph 4 wheel drift as the car negotiates the S curves by first sliding downhill to the left, then sliding downhill to the right and then back sliding up hill to the left again. Then, just as the car quits sliding, you have about 6’ to brake, shift and set up to enter the tricky turn 5. That’s 6’ at 90mph. Call it a millisecond. And I had Mazda Miata’s swarming and buzzing around me like hornets.
Doing the S curves well requires a ballet of precise timing. You intuitively know how fast the car is willing to change directions at this speed. You stay on the gas and take the straightest possible line thru the curves which means timing the steering inputs such that the car slides around the insides of each turn. The car slides left, then rolls gently into a right side slide, and then back gently into a left slide as each part of the S is negotiated. At around 90mph
Of course if there are maniacs on both sides of you, some improvisation may be required.
As I drifted to the left trying desperately to figure out how to get thru the last part of the S and also set up for turn 5 without hitting these Miatas, one of them smacked their side mirror into mine, bending it backward at the hinge. This occurred at about 85mph.
I blinked in surprise at the driver’s side mirror now folded back towards me. Then, while in a 90mph 4 wheel left drift just prior to the “6’ brake-shift-setup for turn 5”, I stuck my hand out in front of my window netting, popped the mirror back into position, and at the Miata yelled “HEY QUIT THAT!”
Of course the other guy couldn’t possibly hear me, but when a good one-liner strikes, you shouldn’t hold back for lack of an audience.
But let me back up a bit.
Saturday morning we had a short practice session and then a Qualification session. “Qual” determines your all-important starting position. Well, not “all”-important. My starting position is usually meaningless because everyone always passes me at the start. But that’s just one more problem to work on.
Qual didn’t seem to go so well. My tires felt very slippery. After qual I found that my tires were
several PSI low, which explained the lack of grip. I’d screwed up. I hadn’t
accounted for the fact that because I didn’t know Road Atlanta very well,
I wasn’t taking the turns nearly as hard as usual. Therefore the tires didn’t get very
hot and the air pressures remained low.
My qual time was 8secs behind the front runners. Not happy. I would find out later that my “not happy” time was actually a personal record by 2secs. So it was lousy, but for me it was good. Such is the contradiction of suckage.
The photo at right is the paddock area where race cars park. Our fire resistant driving suits are very thick and suffocatingly hot during the summer. The shirt I’m wearing is a “Cool shirt” that has little hoses sewn into it. The hoses go back to a cooler of ice-water that is in the trunk. In the usual attempt to amuse myself I have it wired into the car’s AC button.
The race.
Well, any time you cheat disaster and come away unscathed, you look back on it as an exhilarating adventure. But when you don’t cheat disaster, not so much. So it was an exhilarating adventure, but not for everyone. Not for fellow racer-newby and buddy Bob Chrystler.
The race started with my usual pathetic start. I’d qualified 13th of 15, which was fine on this track that I didn’t know well. The rolling start went down the scary turn 12 and roared off at the green flag towards turn 1. It took me about 4 seconds to cleverly fight my way from 13th back to 14th of 15. The video will show me charging after TJ Brewster (White BMW), and Scott McMennamy (Black and red BMW) charging after me. There is some trading places between all of us and eventually Scott checks out. I put a lot of text into the video so there’s no sense in doing the same blow-by-blow here.
Video of the race at ftp://Filesharing.BrasselerUSA.com Go into the Videos folder and download (not doubleclick) the RA Race 9Aug08 Miata Swarm file.
A short while into the race the flaggers thru a red flag indicating that we had to all come to a stop. Usually this means that emergency vehicles are pulling a vehicle off of the track. This is when I turned my video off and stupidly forgot to turn it back on. And that is why I don’t have my own video of the Miata madness, which occurred after the first red flag.
After a couple minutes of being parked, the red flag was
replaced by double-yellow. So we
all drove like mad to catch up to the pack before the restart. Whereas in the start all the various
types of cars had been started in 3 distinct groups, in this restart we were
all one big group. And that is why
the Miatas hit me in such a mass seconds later, as opposed to them working
their way thru traffic all spread out.
Recall that Scott McMennamy had pulled a bit ahead of me. The race’s big crash, which killed Bob Chrystler’s car, occurred right in front of Scott. Just far enough ahead that I didn’t see it happen. Scott made it by unscathed. A white Porsche 944 didn’t.
Scott McMennamy’s video of the wreck.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8v7yPIflrk
Scott’s video shows how aggressive the Miata’s were being, and how one Miata clipped Bob Chrystler’s BMW in the rear in the same S curves where they were all over me. That kicked Bob into a slide that went this way and that. At the right edge of the screen you will briefly see a Porsche 944 dodging to the right. What you don’t see is that the Porsche didn’t make it and smacked into Bob’s BMW just as he hit the wall. Both cars were destroyed.
We were red flagged again and had to all pull over. The race ended shortly thereafter.
In getting swarmed by the Miatas in turn after turn and suffering only a bumped mirror, I felt like I’d cheated death. And that’s exhilarating second only to being shot at. But I felt awful for Bob, and worried about what I was going to do when it became my turn to crash into a wall.