Chump to Champ - A Racing Driver's Blog

(162) There is no such thing as a black art

2012-02-01T18:11:00.000-08:00

I've heard a number of things been called a black art in racing. The most common example is the tire engineer being compared to a voodoo shaman. The argument goes that the racing tire contains so many unknowables that it is impossible to objectively develop it with any kind of expected precision.

Now, you're probably expecting me to write another sentence in which I "prove" (through my own force of utterance) that racing tires can be simply developed by taking into account some single variable that somehow applies to everything the tire does on the track. Unfortunately I half-expected myself to do this when I started thinking about this issue a week ago. That's how pervasive (and sometimes attractive) such gross simplification is these days.

No, I will say it right now - racing tires are complex. They may be the most complex single part on the car. As much as I understand them as a driver, much of their function yet remains a mystery to me.

But that does not mean the tire engineer has the same mysterious perception of the racing tire.

Racing tires are incredibly important to the car. This much is obvious. If you don't have tires you don't have grip. You can't accelerate, stop, or corner very well at all without them. Their wonderful characteristics are a perfect storm for shoes on a car - they make the ride more comfortable, they make the car more capable, they reduce noise, they make it easier to drive, and they do a bunch of other more minor things that are boring and that I can't really think of at the moment anyway. All I'm concerned with are how fast they are. Simple me.

We know why they're important. How do we make a good tire?

The first way is to have someone drive a car outfitted with our tires. As a driver, I will tell you right now, this will probably backfire. Drivers, even the good ones, are highly subjective analysis tools. The best test driver is usually totally different in personality to a championship winning driver. If you give a car to two different drivers you will usually get two different view points as feedback. This is not so much a problem when you have one car for one driver - just make it how he likes it and he'll go as fast as he can because he's comfortable. But this is a problem when you are developing a set of tires for sale to a bunch of different drivers and cars. We're not making a tire that one car and one driver has to like - we need lots of people and machines to like it. So we need to remove those faulty variables.

Meet the tire test rig.

Photo courtesy Engineering Dynamics Corporation.

This guy will take your tire through a number of normal operating ranges (called slip angles and slip ratios) at a number of speeds for any duration you want with almost any practical weight pressing down on the tire.

What it does is record the forces exerted on the arm of the machine when the tire deforms. Basically, it just measures the stickyness of the tire. By extension it can also test basic tread wear rates and simple durability in a controlled environment.

Using this rather intelligent-looking thing, tire engineers can experiment with the construction of any tire and observe the results. This invention is probably the single largest reason why tires these days are so good. There are large repositories of data from machines similar to this scattered all around the internet. One of the reasons for it is to use in simulations. In fact, you can glean a lot about how a tire works by trying to build a simulator (not that I have, but talking to other people who have is almost as good in some cases).

If you want a really good resource I stumbled upon recently, there is a document by Michelin that details exactly what a tire does. I think you will be surprised how much tire engineers understand about tires. They get paid to study them, after all. Here is a link to the document on a free download service called Mediafire.

http://www.mediafire.com/?aq30mhnhhsagpxk

(It was hard to find this, and I'm unsure if it was ever publicly released by Michelin, so if it was not intended to be shared please let me know and I'll take it down)

If you read that and still think developing a good tire is a black art, then I don't know what else to tell you. This is science. Not magic. We humans can smash protons together 250 million times each second at nearly the speed of light, and we know the exact probabilities of what will come out of the explosion and where it will go. You really think modern science wouldn't know how a tire works after doing quantum mechanics?

(161) Welcome to the new you

2012-01-14T14:29:00.000-08:00

Here we are. We're in the future. This is 2012. The last year on earth if the Mayans aren't pulling a really good practical joke on us. I thought there would be more hoverboards.

Normally by this time in the off-season I'd at least have my intended direction chosen for the next racing season. But this time that is not the case. This year the decision is about real life. Uh oh. I just said the two words every racer hates to hear - "real life."

No. I'm not stopping. I'm not quitting. I'm charging forward. I'm just not charging forward in a race car at the moment, I'm charging forward in life. I have income to secure in order to continue racing. It may be a year or more until I'm able to take the green flag again - I just don't know. I do know that I will take the green flag again at some point in the future.

My future rests on whatever means I come by to produce a humble wealth. At the moment, I'm building an advertising business. In doing so I am gaining skills I can use to earn money in other ways. It's slow going at the moment, but I have to keep trying until it works.

When it does, I'm going back into racing the very first chance I get. There is no such thing as rehab for the drug called speed. Racing cars are faster than wagons, so who'd want to ride a wagon in the first place?

In the mean time, I will not stop performance driving. Autocross is an avenue anyone with a car can afford. I will do that if only to keep driving fast. And I am continuing to train. I am keeping my body fit with daily physical training and my mind focused on racing performance with racing simulators and mental imaging.

I've been doing my training for so long I'm beginning to relish it. I have a new favorite exercise. It's a Swiss ball crunch, and it's really awesome because it's difficult and it has a wide range of movement. Look it up in order to find out how to do it properly - I'm not a personal trainer so someone is likely to hurt themselves if I explain it wrong.

There's also a sport that I love but have not participated in for a couple years called airsoft. It's like paintball but it uses pellets instead of paint. It's a ton of fun and running around in the forest wearing body armor and shooting at people all day is a good workout. I'm going to start playing again.

On the simulator side I'm focusing almost entirely on iRacing.com. I believe I've spoken about it some in the past. It's a rather good tool with very nice tracks, relevant cars, and a really well thought out online racing system. It's more expensive than other games but it's worth it as a training tool. I'm still looking to do a review on it at some point, but they are in the middle of releasing the "2.0" updates that will improve the realism, so I'm waiting until that process is finished. No sense in reviewing "1.9" when "2.0" is right around the corner. Then I promise I'll critically rip it to shreds.

I have a number of ideas to give you guys something to read while I'm away from the track. Never fear, Chump to Champ isn't going stagnant! That's giving up behavior. We don't do that kind of thing.

(160) 2011 in review

2011-12-24T12:45:00.000-08:00

Well well, what a year it's been.

The year started out a bit frantic. I wasn't able to drive the car I was planning on, so I had to make a course correction into SCCA Spec Miata. I worked fast and got into a car owned by Ed Railton, which turned out to be a great move because he has worked tirelessly to keep my and my team-mate's cars on the track and going quickly.

I got my national-level SCCA racing license and also my NASA competition license. I took the green flag racing wheel to wheel for the first time with fenders. Results wise I did quite well. I got a number of podium finishes, though, sadly, no wins.

The year-end championships turned out swell. I took home two third place finishes - one in the San Francisco region SCCA Sunoco Challenge, and one in the Racing Driver's Club driver championship (both championships were scored out of the same races).

I took home a lot of hardware too. 15 trophies in total. SFR SCCA was kind enough to grant me the 2011 SFR SCCA Rookie Driver of the Year award, which I'm very honored to hold.

I also participated in my first day-long endurance race at the NASA 25 Hours of Thunderhill, which was exhausting, and also a little sad since our engine blew up in the late morning in the 23rd hour of the race. It was an amazing experience despite the troubles.

Next year? Stay afloat. I have no money, so the challenge is going to be finding a way to continue racing. My online business is plugging along in the early stages and with luck, I may be able to do an event or two in the later half of the year. I'm pursuing options in that regard.

Until that day, though, I will try to do some autocross with my dad since he has been chomping at the bit to try it in his new Subaru WRX. Autocross is very inexpensive and it would be good training.

Well, I hope 2011 has been as good to you as it has been to me (better, even), and I hope you have a merry Christmas and a happy new year.

(159) NASA 25 Hours of Thunderhill 2011

2011-12-07T14:29:00.000-08:00

This race has been in the back of my mind for most of the year. The NASA 25 Hours of Thunderhill. It's legendary in American club racing, but it's probably one of the best kept secrets in motorsport. Most people in the western world at least know the name Le Mans, and probably half of them could tell you it's a 24 hour race in France. Pretty much everyone who watches racing on TV knows of the 12 Hours of Sebring and the Petit Le Mans. Everyone who is a fan of sports car racing knows the 24 Hours of Daytona.

But the 25 Hours of Thunderhill is a trade secret. This is a true racer's pride event. The majority of the people spectating the race own at least one fire suit and a helmet equipped with a radio headset and boom mic. It's a true pro-am event. You have teams with millions invested in them pitted next to guys that are simply groups of friends running a $15,000 car out of a trailer.

Team Premier Auto Service was closer to the latter. We had a new (for us) car. The car had competed in the 25 before - last year Ed Railton, now the owner of the car (and Premier Auto Service) drove it through the rain.

No such inclement weather was forecasted for this year's running. It was going to be cold, since it is December after all, but the engines like that, even if the tires don't.

Team Premier Auto Service! From left to right: driver Joe Kalinowski, mechanic Chris Cook, mechanic Dave Anderson (back), driver Gregory Evans (front), driver/team owner Ed Railton, driver Jeff Annison, fueler Edgar Lau, big cheese Ian Cook.

On Friday morning, the start of the test day, it was cold and windy. The first of my co-drivers Dave Allen and I were going to shake the car and it's brand new engine down during the day and dial in some suspension settings.

The car ran pretty well. It wasn't making killer horsepower but it handled decently out of the box. At lunch we adjusted the rear anti-roll bar and it became pretty well situated on the track. The second of my co-drivers to arrive, Jeff Annison, helped us test some more in the afternoon. One complication was a bent throttle plate (I won't name names), but that was fixed and the car continued to run strong.

Unfortunately the test session did not go smoothly for a number of other competitors. The worst of it was a Honda Civic that hook-slid off the track in turn 7 and flipped about 6 times. He ended up landing top-up in the concrete wall on the inside between turns 7 and 8. The testing was stopped and a helicopter was called in. He was taken to the hospital but was later released. He returned to the track to watch his team race on Saturday. Fortunately our day had no such drama.

I got one session on some used sticky Hoosier SM6 DOT-race tires in the morning and I thoroughly enjoyed them. They offered rather tremendous grip at the expensive of being slightly less predictable on the edge of adhesion. We switched to Toyo RA-1s for the rest of the test day however. We had limited sticky tires and we didn't want to shoot ourselves in the foot by using up our good tires trying to go too fast when it didn't quite matter yet. The Hoosiers had wheel balance issues anyway and were shaking the steering pretty good. One the Toyos, Dave Allen and I were doing identical times.

The other new part to adapt to was the new turn 5. Thunderhill has two ways to take turn 5: the uphill way, which has you braking while going over the crest of the hill, which is the configuration I've been used to all year in SCCA club racing, and the bypass way, which takes a route around the hill rather than over it.

The new bypass section was interesting. There is no braking involved. You set the car up on the left side of the track. Then, just as you crest (and the world falls away from your vision) you lean the car to the right and practically hover down to the bottom where you apex and floor the throttle. You have to be careful, because on the back side of the crest is a large bump. If you're on the wrong bit of track it can be pretty severe and it makes the car want to slide. If you drive the bypass at 10/10ths you have to correct the car no matter how you hit the bump and the first time you do it's unnerving. But it's easy to get used to and the car isn't in much danger when it does start to slide since the road falls away from you and it's an easy catch.

The hardest part about the bypass is the lack of visibility. If you're sitting reasonably low in the car you can't see the road until after the bump. You need a very good mental picture of the corner in order to push there.

With the bypass tamed, the track was closed and everyone prepared for official practice and qualifying during the evening.

This is when my third co-driver Joe Kalinowski arrived. He had to learn the car and the bypass as well, so he took to the track during the practice session and it was decided that I would qualify the car when he was done.

As the light was fading quickly I hopped in the car and went out for my fast laps. I got a couple in the books, and I got down to a 2:11.2 on the slower Toyos which was good for 3rd place in our class, E3 (which had about 23 entries). The pole time was a 2:04 and the 2nd place time was a 2:08, which we might've done if we had the Hoosiers on the car (I did a 2:07.8 in testing with the Hoosiers).

Then, n the 4th or 5th lap, I came into turn 8 and saw lights flipping end over end on the outside. The car they were attached to eventually ended up on it's roof. I pulled into the pits and the session was ended. The driver of the car, a kit replica of a Shelby Daytona Coupe with Mustang underpinnings, was fine and the car raced on Saturday. In the morning I heard one of the crew say it was the softest roll they'd ever seen. That's quite a trick in a 100 MPH corner.

With 3rd spot secured, we retired for the day. The race was to start at 11:00 am on Saturday and the checkered would fly at 12:00 noon on Sunday.

Practicing driver changes.

Our strategy was to take the green flag, do one lap, then come in and refuel. The reason for this was simple. E# cars (E3, E2 etc) were production derived, so in keeping with production style rules, the cars were required to start the race with the stock fuel load. In the Miata's case, it was 11.9 gallons.

Now, our car had a very different fuel setup. Fuel was fed via the stock fuel tank into the engine, because the car was already wired with a high pressure pump. Instead of wiring a second high pressure pump, the car had a low pressure pump running from the secondary fuel cell in the trunk into the main fuel tank. When the main tank was low, the driver flipped a switch in the cockpit which turned on the secondary pump, feeding fuel into the main tank from the cell.

This has the added advantage of making it easier to prove we have the stock fuel load. Just empty the secondary cell and presto.

And so, since we had to start with 11.9 gallons and we needed about 20 gallons to make a 3-hour stint, we decided to fuel the car right after the green flag.

I volunteered to start the car. We were starting 39th overall out of 83 cars! It was going to be a big start, but I hoped people would behave.

People did, and my start was clean. I lost a couple positions to faster cars that somehow had worse qualifying times than us, but it didn't matter. I was going to pit and go to the back anyway.

I pitted and we got the fueling done as fast as we could since we had to use 5-gallon cans.

With that complete I headed back out to begin my 3-hour stint. It was fairly regular. The leaders all lapped me very quickly since they were turning laps at least 20 seconds faster than me. They were so fast you could safely ignore them and they would simply pass in a flash when it suited them. But I was catching other cars, and making clean passes. I was working my way back through the E3 positions.

During the start of the stint, we were having radio issues. The pits were having transmission problems, but those got fixed and I had mechanic and fellow Spec Miata driver Dave Anderson with me giving me periodic updates and having me check the fuel level.

After a few laps I adjusted my shoulder belts and I felt a tug on my helmet - my radio got disconnected. I spent a few laps trying to find the end of the cord, but since I was at race speed I could only do that on the straights and only when I wasn't busy shifting and dodging faster prototypes. I finally located it and then spent another 3 or 4 laps trying to plug it into my helmet on the main straight. I got it plugged back in and re-contacted the team explaining what happened.

While all this was going on I was adapting to the main tire selection we were using for the race - Goodyear Eagles. They behaved differently than the Hoosiers. They were very sensitive to rubber pickup, and would vibrate for a good lap or two when I had to move out into the rubber marbles to let a faster car by. They had similar sharp handling to the Hoosiers, though they were not quite as dull feeling and they had very nice grip. They also lasted a very long time, considering they had a tread wear rating of 40. The total bill for all the sets of tires we were using in the race was around $3,600.

The rest of the stint went by in a flash. A little after 2:00 pm I pulled into the pits for a driver change. Dave Allen got in the car and drove off for his 3-hour stint. I felt elated after my stint. I felt great. I was cold, because my suit was soaked through with sweat and the wind was blowing, but I was very happy and upbeat. We were in 11th spot in our class and gaining more positions by the hour.

In the middle of his stint Dave had a small coming together with a BMW. The hit was enough to knock the front alignment off and he had to come in to fix it. It ended up being a bent tie rod, and with that fixed he went back out.

Just as Dave pulls in to get the tie rod fixed.

It was about 4:00 pm and I headed back to the hotel room to get some rest. I slept for about 3 hours and then came back around 7:00 pm. Jeff was just climbing into the car if I recall correctly. I can't remember if it was in the middle of his stint or right as he was climbing in, but the front brake pads were also changed on the car. Ed and Dave Anderson managed to get that done in a little over 7 minutes, hot rotors and all. Unfortunately there was still plenty of pad left and it probably could have gone the whole race on one set of pads.

Jeff had an uneventful stint and then it was Ed's sole turn at the wheel. He only drove for 1 hour and 30 minutes but he put down fast laps and had no mishaps save for one off track event.

It was half past midnight or so and now it was my turn. Ed gave my roof a pat, said "have fun, be careful," and off I went.

This is the video of what happened during the next 30 minutes.

Stint footage from about 12:30 to 1:00 am.

It was busy, to say the least.

The first thing that hits you is how bright many of the lights are in the mirrors. I had tape on my visor to protect my eyes from the setting sun on Friday, but I didn't think the tape would become useful at night to shield my eyes from my own mirror.

The other thing is how much effort it takes to keep track of all those lights. Not only is it impossible to judge distance without constantly looking in the mirrors, but sometimes you can't see all of the cars behind you due to the glare. One set of headlights could contain 2 or 3 cars.

This makes the mental stress aspect much higher at night. You have to operate at 100% mental capacity just to keep from turning in on someone or worse. That's draining. It makes for a long stint. I remember Dave getting on the radio to tell me I reached the 1 hour mark. I couldn't believe that it had only been 60 minutes.

On the first flying lap of my stint I was caught off guard by the lack of grip in the cold night. I dropped wheels and went off track in turn 1. I learned and started driving to the conditions better.

About 4 laps later someone spilled some fluid or oil in turns 3 and 14. They became pretty slick and the first time I went into turn 14 with the oil I felt like I was hydroplaning.

Towards the end of the video, I have a nice battle with my good friend Roger Eagleton in his Honda Civic. Roger's car had about 95 horsepower, ours had 117, so it was nice to have a power advantage on someone for once. That's a rare thing in Miatas. One of my karting coaches, Jared Thompson, was also out on track in his 700 horsepower Ford GT.

The stint was long and hard. It felt like an eternity before I was back in the pits. I managed to clamber out of the car halfway, and someone grabbed me under my arms and hauled me out the rest of the way.

Physically I felt fine. My wrists were stiff and my ears hurt from the radio earbuds, but that was it. My exhaustion was purely mental. I wanted to just sit and do nothing, to let my mind rest. But I had soaked nomex to remove, water to drink, and a bed to get to. When your mind is that tired, all of these tasks become obstacles. I found myself frustrated by the littlest things, such as the cap on the water bottle. I ended up locking myself out of my hotel room at 4:00 am while trucking my stuff inside.

I got back to the track around 9:00 am, since my driving was done. We were doing well. We were running as high as 6th in E3 and still setting solid lap times.

But then, around 10:00 am, Jeff had to come in. The car was down a cylinder. Ed changed the spark plug and Jeff went back out. It still didn't sound right. Jeff came in again. The ignition coil was changed. He went back out, still sounding terrible. Jeff stayed out this time. We were all hoping it would hold together to the end.

Then, with only about 1 hour and 30 minutes until the checkered, the car came down the front straight billowing smoke from the exhaust. The engine had let go, and Jeff parked it on the inside of turn 1. Our race was done. Ed reckoned the engine dropped a valve.

Disappointing, but we had a good run until then. We kept our noses fairly clean and the car ended up doing 568 laps, which is about 1,700 miles. When the dust settled we had enough laps to land 10th in E3.

It was a wonderful experience for me, and I hope to do it again next year because I had buckets of fun. Special thanks to everyone that helped us out during the weekend and of course to the entire Premier Auto Service crew! You guys are awesome!

(158) New cars, new cars, and new cars

2011-11-29T21:57:00.001-08:00

This weekend I'm going to be racing in the NASA 25 Hours of Thunderhill sponsored by the U.S. Air Force. This is going to be the largest single event I've ever participated in. There are going to be over 80 cars out on track from all over the country! There will be a lot of media, including television (for later broadcast on Versus), and many teams are crossing country lines to compete.

I'm going to be driving with team Premier Auto Service as I have been all year. My co drivers are going to be my team-mate Dave Allen, Joe Kalinowski and Jeff Annison. Car owner Ed Railton is also going to hop in for a stint.

It's going to be a tough race. 25 hours straight. We are entered in the E3 class with a new enduro-spec 1991 Mazda Miata with a brand new engine made specially for this race. It's got a big fuel cell for double the capacity, so the car should be able to race for 3 hours before needing refueling. We drivers are going to have to make the same distance in a stint. The good news is, it's got the manual steering rack. In the 78, the car I had for the season this year, had the power-assisted rack. Ed disables the power-assist and that makes for nice and heavy steering. The manual rack should be lighter, so that will make it easier to last the distance.

The other trouble is the driver size discrepancy. Joe is over 6 feet with long legs, I'm a little under 5' 8". I'm going to need a monster seat cushion.

Since the race is going to go through the night, the car has also been fitted with a rack of lights. This is going to be a new challenge for me, as I've never raced in the dark before. And Thunderhill isn't exactly known for being well lit. Fortunately we get some dusk-time practice. Maybe I can get dibs on the evening-into-night shift and the night-into-dawn shift.

Another new thing is going to be the tires. We are unrestricted in terms of tires, so we're going to choose something that's race-bred, like Goodyear or Hankook. Whatever we choose, we'll need five or six sets to make it through the race.

I'll be sure to write all about it next week! I probably won't get any actual racing footage, but I will be able to grab many pictures and hopefully some night-time practice onboards so you can see what it's like in the dark!

In other automotive adventures, I checked out the San Francisco auto show on Sunday. Most of this year's new cars seem to be hatchbacks. In particular I liked the Fiat 500, the Ford Focus, the Hyundai Veloster, and the Mini Cooper Coupe John Cooper Works edition. I think I want to test drive all of these cars. It seems this is the year of the hatches.

I've already gone out and test-driven the Ford Focus - good car, pretty decent handling, but could use more power (I'm sure the upcoming hotted-up ST version will alleviate that). Not unforgettable but very good. It certainly doesn't hurt that Ford gave me $50 for taking the drive! That'll pay for about 5% of one of the aforementioned sets of tires...

In other new car news, my dad has bought himself a brand new sports car - a 2012 Subaru WRX Sedan.

2012 Subaru WRX Sedan.

The car is amazing. He got it with the SPT performance exhaust which sounds absolutely killer. The other improvement was the short-throw 5 speed shifter and a beefed up shifter bushing. This vastly improves the main fault of the car which is a slack feeling shifter.

The car handles very well and has plenty of grip. The vehicle stability control system is pretty conservative and you can feel it working the all-wheel drive system most of the time during hard cornering, although it can be completely disabled. Subaru calls it "stuck mode" - sometimes the computer gets confused when one wheel is off the ground or has really reduced grip, like when you get stuck in a snow drift. With the system off, torque is applied to all four wheels equally.

The centerpiece is the motor. It doesn't make crazy horsepower, but it makes plenty (270). The nice part is the torque. You wouldn't expect a 2.5 liter with a turbo to make great torque, but this car will haul itself up the speedo with surprising gusto even in 5th gear at 3,000 rpm.

Those are only preliminary impressions though. I have done less than 80 miles in the car. My dad plans to take it to an autocross after the break-in period in order to really put it through it's paces.

(157) I can only get this once

2011-11-15T14:28:00.000-08:00

The San Francisco region SCCA award banquet was plenty of fun!

There were plenty of people there in the ballroom of the Hilton hotel in Pleasanton. Harry Mhoon Fair, Jon Norman, Gary Meeker, and Bob Stegall were all inducted into the Hall of Fame, the Board of Directors all presented their "board awards", a great many special awards were bestowed, as well as worker and race class awards being given.

I myself was rather shocked when my name was called as the "Rookie Driver of the Year". There were plenty of great rookies this year, and I'm really stoked and honored to get the award. I still don't really believe it.

I was also awarded the third spot trophy for the Sealed Spec Miata class. Here's a look at both trophies:

Thanks SCCA and GoPro for these awesome trophies!

This year GoPro decided to provide the money for all of the trophies presented during the dinner. I'm sure it was an expensive bill, so it's really awesome of them to do that.

If I get some stage pictures of all of the Spec Miata guys standing with their awards, I will update this post.

(156) A quick reunion

2011-11-10T17:35:00.000-08:00

The weekend of October 29 was a very special event. Basically, a lot of the guys from the old Jim Russell (now Simraceway Performance Driving School) kart race series, a series I participated in quite a bit, decided to gather together and do a day of reunited driving.

Problem is, the school doesn't do the race series any more. So we had to arrange to hijack a single advanced karting class for us to use to rac- I mean, practice green flag starts leading into open lapping sessions. With lap times.

There ended up being 9 of us in total. The setup was phenomenal - we had the track to ourselves, we could do our own schedule, and we had points, trophies, prizes, and gags. It was decided that we'd do a couple of practices, a qualifying session, and then two 10-lap heat races followed by a 15 lap main event.

Getting back up to speed in the karts didn't take long. I think driving full size cars has helped me go faster in the karts. I was carrying more speed into the corners than I ever have, although it's a little hard to judge since I was not using the normal 45 pounds of weight added to the kart. While the kart does accelerate faster with no weight, I feel like it corners better with the weight in. Without the weight the rear end gets very skittish, both when entering corners and when coming out while trying to put the power down. In any case, I felt like my technique was better.

The karts were outfitted with a new type of centrifugal clutch that really made them jump off the corners and not get bogged down. They were more fun to drive than ever!

The day was cool, and the track hadn't seen a race event in a few weeks, so the rubber on the track was minimal and so was grip. The most challenging thing to recall was the braking, since not only was the pedal much more sensitive, but the tires were not being their usual talkative selves, for whatever reason. I think it might have been the lack of rubber, since on cold days tires usually talk more.

In the first couple sessions I set the fastest times, despite a couple of the other drivers getting some special practice days before the race! I set times in the low 55s, which is right on my best pace.

I carried that pace into the 5-lap qualifying session, and I got the pole for the first heat race (sorry, practice start followed by open lapping).

The only problem for me was, we decided to invert the grid. So, while I got the pole time, I was going to start at the back. This posed a new challenge. Since I was light, I had a lot more acceleration than just about everyone else. It was going to be really easy to get myself in a lot of trouble right off the bat by starting at the back.

At the drop of the green, the karts in front of me fanned out and almost immediately went 4-wide. My driver-sense was tingling severely. I held my position in turn 1. Which turned out to be a good decision because a kart got sideways at the apex. I was able to capitalize on it and pass on the outside at the exit. I then passed another kart going into the turn 2 complex called Tic Tac Toe.

I continued to pick off karts for the first 3 or 4 laps. I found myself in the lead. From there it was a simple cruise to the finish.

Heat race 2 was the same deal at the start. I started in the back again, and this time turn 1 was calmer. But the drama began in turn 2. Two (or more) karts tangled in front of me, but it was a slow speed collision. I had very little choice in the matter, and I tried to position my kart to minimize the damage of the impact. I nosed into the side pod of one of the karts and came to rest with the other two. With no reverse gear, I simply leaned back and used my hands to roll the rear wheels backwards until I was clear. I fired up the engine and continued on. I lost about half a lap.

I did my best to work my way through the field as efficiently as possible, but I rushed a pass and lost some time. I wasn't able to catch up with the leaders and I finished 3rd.

The final event's starting positions were up for debate. We eventually decided to take the points positions of the mini-championship and invert that running order. I was leading, so, surprise surprise, I got relegated to the rear of the pack.

The start was fairly calm again. I bided my time. I had 15 laps to work this out.

I got through most of the field again in about 4 or 5 laps, but I still had the leaders to get. I got into 2nd place with about 7 laps left.

The leader was a keen racer with plenty of experience, and he was hard to pass. I eventually got a good run going down the main straight. I nosed along side. The straight isn't totally straight, so most fast lines make for the inside and hold tight to the edge of the road. I got most of my kart along side, but the leader started moving over. He kept coming. I had nowhere to go, so I eased the kart off track and took out a couple of cones at 65 MPH. Thankfully the starter, instructor Mike Hill, was heads-up and jumped out of the way. I rejoined the race in 4th.

I calmed back down again, and began working through the pack again. I did a much better job this time, and managed to get into the lead with enough laps to spare to take the win.

In the end, I snagged enough points to win the mini-championship with a safe margin. I walked away with a lot of very kindly donated hardware. I was awarded trophies for my pole position, my two wins, my 3rd place, one for fastest lap of the weekend (54.9), and I got two trophies for winning the championship - one driver-donated, one school-donated.

I also got the "Sassiest Costume" award, which was for my duct-taped orange pumpkin helmet which took me all of 15 minutes and 2 rolls of tape to do up.

It was one of the most fun days of racing I've had. It was wonderful to catch up with and race with everyone again!

(155) Double marks

2011-10-27T19:13:00.000-07:00

I'd like to say that I went into this weekend thinking about what an awesome season it's been, how I'd be missing the people I've been racing with for the past 7 months, and the fact that it has only been 7 months since I started racing in SCCA to begin with.

But I can't say that. Because I approached this weekend the same as I always do - with a steady mind, set on the intent to perform. Those thoughts are for Mondays, when you're setting your trophies in their cabinets. For now, it's time to race.

The weather report indicated perfect 85 degree weather during all three days. I like perfect.

Unfortunately, coming into this weekend, mathematically I had no chance of reaching second place in the driver's championship. All I had to do was finish near my team mate Dave Allen, and I was set for third spot.

This was yet another weekend where I would not be having a Thursday test day, and instead would be jumping right into practice and then qualify. And again, my goal was to be fast out of the gate.

I was sharing the car with Mike Neff, who rented the car to run another race group in Improved Touring X. Mike usually does a couple events every year and is a clean racer, so I had no problems with it.

Practice went very smoothly. I find it easy to get into the groove at Thunderhill. We put the fastest set of tires I had on the car, so that made things a lot easier. When you have a set of well taken care of tires, the car gets much easier to drive. Some of that might be placebo though. Still, having nice-looking tires that you can sink your fingers into because they're so soft doesn't hurt.

Once I was back in the paddock, car owner Ed Railton came over and slyly asked me as I opened the door, "how was the transmission?"

"Perfect" I exclaimed, "I thought I was going a little crazy at Laguna because I thought it felt a bit notchy!"

"That's what Dave [Allen] said when he drove it last time" Ed supplied, "so I threw a brand new one in there. I forgot to mention it before you went out."

"So I'm not crazy!" I said, relieved, "thanks, Ed."

It's pretty cool of an owner to just pitch in a whole new transmission because his drivers say it's a little notchy feeling. Ed's done a ton of awesome stuff for us throughout the year, like hauling the car all the way back to the shop in order to rebuild the engine overnight so I could race the next day. You couldn't ask more than that.

Qualifying was equally perfect. There was little traffic, and I had tons of space. But I'm still new to Thunderhill, relative to a lot of the veterans out there, so I wasn't quite as fast as my team mate, but I still managed to put it 12th overall, 3rd in class. The official results showed a new SSM car, the 00 driven by Barrett Tilley, had got in front of both me and Dave, but it was a mistake, and it was actually an SMT car, so while the official results say I was 4th, I was actually 3rd.

On Friday evening, during the social hour, there was a "Meet the Team"event hosted by Steve Jaroch, SCCA's Chief of Announcing. We stood by the cars and basically did a 5-way interview with Ed, Ian Cook (Ed's former boss) and his driver Ed Lever (who evidently is an excellent interview), my co-driver for the weekend, Mike Neff, and myself. Dave Allen was sadly scarce. That interview will probably show up in "The Wheel", the region's monthly publication. It was a fun time, and there was a pretty good crowd watching, so I'm glad people enjoyed it. Thanks to Steve for having us.

At the start of the race on Saturday morning, I got a huge drop on Dave Allen and left most of the guys behind me for dead going into turn 1. But Dave came back and wedged himself along side going into turn 4, finishing the deal in turn 5. At the end of the first lap, which was unusually calm for Spec Miata, the 58 driven by Jeff Annison rocketed by me. That car had some major horsepower.

Not long after, Jeff started battling the 08 being driven by John Grillos. I was happy with this, because it meant I would probably catch up. I pushed a bit harder.

The battling didn't favor John, and I began following him after trying to get by in the first couple of corners when he lost his momentum in turn 1.

It was at this point that I realized something was wrong. My temperature gauge was climbing. Racing in the draft of John's car was robbing my radiator of cool air, and the engine was going to overheat.

So I started moving over to the side on the straights, avoiding the slipstream when I could. It was a rock and a hard place: either take the slip stream, overheat, and lose power (risking the engine), or take the full force of the air flowing over the car, lose straight line speed, but save the engine. Obviously, saving the engine is preferable.

Once I broke the draft, I could see the thermometer needle going down.

This continued for a little while, until John slightly overcooked turn 14's entrance. He swung out wide, and the back end started to slip away.

He was close enough to spinning that I couldn't tell if he was going to save it or not. And he was positioned on the track in such a way that I couldn't tell if he was going to spin to the outside or the inside if he did lose it. I was about 2 tenths of a second away from jinking to the outside when he gathered it up. I had to slow to avoid hitting him.

This allowed the 20 of Andrew Holifield to easily slip by on the main straight. But I wedged myself to the outside of Andrew in turn 3 and got him back.

I was now up an unsavory creek: I had to defend my position, while tending my engine's condition. It was inevitable that I would lose some spots now. It didn't take long for Dante Paulazzo to pass me in the 81.

Dave Anderson in the 32, another SSM car, also got by not long after. I was now in 4th in class. As far as I knew, Dave Allen was still in 2nd. I couldn't lose too many class positions otherwise I would lose 3rd spot in the championship! And now, a rather large queue was forming behind me, which contained the green SSM #5 driven by Alan Gjedsted.

With the 1 lap to go signal from the starter, I had to capitalize on all of Dave's mistakes if I was going to take the position back. I tried my best, but he lost me going down the back stretch going up the hill to turn 9. I looked in my mirror and saw Brian Ebding in the 3 car pop on Alan going into turn 9. I knew this last-lap ditch attempt, even if it worked out well for Brian, would kill both of their momentum to turn 10.

I was a good 10 or 12 car lengths behind Dave now, and I was going to have to push hard in order to catch him, assuming he made a mistake. But I pushed too hard, and had a nice big drift in turn 11. That sealed my fate. I finished 4th.

I gave the car a pat as we took the checkered, for holding together in the race, and for a wonderful season. My arm bumped the wipers. It was almost as if the car was acknowledging me.

Race 13, the finale, full onboard footage.

As it stands, I did not lose 3rd place in the driver's championship. This race was really important, since it was worth double points. My third place in the championship is a result I'm proud of. But the weekend is not over yet!

Up next is the SCCA Illgen Classic 4 hour endurance race.

Our team consisted of Ed Railton, Roger Eagleton, and myself. Ed's driven Miatas for years, and has lap records. Roger drove with me during my first karting enduro a couple years ago, and raced BMWs last year in SCCA.

There were many classes taking part. Miatas, sports racers, prototypes, GT cars, and touring cars were all on the menu.

The first practice/qualify session was on Saturday afternoon. Mike Neff had just finished his race, but there was a problem. The clutch would not fully disengage. This made it impossible for Mike to shift during the race, and very difficult to get the car moving.

Ed acted quickly, got the car up on jack stands, and dropped the transmission and drive shaft. He only had about 2 hours before the start of practice.

An hour later, and we knew the problem. The throwout bearing, the part that basically pushes the clutch away from the flywheel and allows the motor to spin independently of the transmission, had exploded, lodging parts in all kinds of spots in the clutch.

Miraculously, Ed managed to clean all the parts out, put in a new throwout bearing, remount the transmission and drive shaft, all on jack stands, on his back, in less than 2 hours and just in time to practice for the enduro.

I went out first for a couple laps, to make sure the car was ship-shape. There was a ton of pickup on the tires and at first I thought something might be broken, since it was vibrating the whole car and the grip was terrible. But when I heard the "clang, clunk" sounds from the wheel wells I realized what it was. It took about 2 laps to clean all the rubber chunks off the tires.

Ed pulled me into the pits and Roger took the wheel with a practice driver change. Roger familiarized himself with the car for 20 minutes, and then Ed jumped in for another 20.

We were entered in the "under 1700cc" class, rather than the Miata class, because we figured we'd have the best chance to win. I was excited because I was going to get to try the car on race-bred tires, instead of shaved street tires. Ed reckoned the race tires would be good for about 2 seconds per lap.

Sadly, the next morning, the morning of the race, we contacted the tire shop (AIM Tire), and they were out of Miata-sized slick racing tires. They had sold the last set only 10 minutes prior, a set of Hoosier slicks, to the 35 car of Dan Cooper, Greg Cicatelli, and Doug Makishima - our main competition.

My dad and I drove the truck over to the Goodyear trailer, to see if they had anything that would fit on our rims, but they didn't.

So, we bought a set of shaved Toyos, since that's all we could get. Lesson learned. Special order the tires you'll need.

We practiced for another hour and a half, making a few driver changes and wearing in a new set of tires. Ed set the fastest time in the morning with a 2:10.5, which qualified us as the second fastest Miata. The 35 car beat us, however, by some 2 seconds.

We decided that I was going to start the car, since I had just been racing close quarters all year. The primary concern was simply to survive. I would drive for an hour and a half, then Roger would take the middle stint, and then Ed would take the final stint.

The start was good. One of the cars ahead of me didn't show, so everyone basically moved up a spot. This meant that I now had the inside on the 35 car. A large pack of Spec Racer Fords - tried and true sports racers built by SCCA Enterprises and only slightly faster than a Spec Miata - were ahead of us. My start was so good I made it nearly to the middle of this pack, and the 35 car was stuck behind. I knew it was only a matter of time before they would catch and pass me, though, with those sticky Hoosiers, once the SRFs filtered around me. Being in the middle of that pack without any hearing protection was a headache. Those cars are so raspy they literally hurt your head.

Joe Kalinowski flew in to drive the 58 car with Jeff Annison, and Joe started right behind me. After a couple of laps he caught and passed me. I followed him closely. On lap 4 or 5 he made a mistake in turn 9 and dropped wheels, which sucked him off track. I zoom-zoomed by.

I spent most of my stint battling with the 41 driven by Phillip Holifield. I was very pleased to finally be able to put some space between our cars. Phillip is an extremely fast racer and I'm usually nowhere near him in the races.

Right about lap 20, one of the large GT cars left the race with a bang in turn 8. A full course caution came out, and the safety crews hauled the car away. I'm not sure exactly what happened. I was focused on keeping the pickup off my tires.

The pace car split the field, and while I was not leading the race, I was directly behind the pace car. This basically gave the 35 car a 1 lap lead over us right away. 2 laps later, we were back to green flag racing. I again started working out a gap between me and Phillip. We were not in the same class, but you still want to finish as high as you can.

The rest of my stint was spent dodging faster cars. There was one sports prototype that was lapping about 24 seconds per lap faster than the Miatas, and that thing just flashed by every time.

With the fuel nudging empty, Roger called me into the pits and we made a driver change and filled the car with fuel. Two of Ian Cook's drivers helped us out with that.

Roger takes the plunge down the back of turn 5.

Once I got out of the car, I felt ready for another hour at least. The Miata is not very hard on the driver, and it's quite a sinch, physically, to drive.

Meanwhile, Roger was setting solid lap times. It had been a while since he had driven Thunderhill, but he was re-learning the track very quickly. Roger put a number of laps on some of our competitors and got us further ahead. We still had no chance of catching the 35 car, who was now a couple laps ahead.

An hour and a half later, Ed got in the car for the home stretch. Ed and I had very similar lap times, and he also put more laps on the other cars in our class. All of our stints were fairly uneventful.

At the line, we finished 2nd in class, 15th overall.

It was an awesome race, and it was a fantastic warm-up for the NASA 25 Hour coming up in December.

And now, the SCCA racing season is over. Now I can truly say that I'm thinking about how awesome of a season it's been, how I'm going to miss all the people who are part of SCCA racing, and how I cannot believe that it's only been 7 months since I started in SCCA. It's been a year to remember.

And thank you, to every volunteer who has helped out during the season. You guys are awesome.

(154) Let's just all be reasonable

2011-10-19T19:27:00.000-07:00

It's been said by a number of people that motor racing is gladitorial. While I do not agree with that statement (gladiators existed for the purpose of killing, racing drivers exist for the purpose of going fast), it does illustrate the basic theme of motor racing - high stakes competition with the very real possibility of a horrible death.

I'm not going to talk about what happened at Las Vegas. There are already hundreds of media outlets doing so (some more competently than others), and thousands of people discussing it on the internet (some more lucidly than others).

Rather, I want to talk a bit about safety. Specifically, one of the troubling trends I've been hearing from various people - commenters, experts, and journalists alike.

I'm not an engineer. I couldn't tell you what the best materials are for a crash structure, or where that structure should be on the car. What I will do is tell you, quickly, why I think some of the solutions being proposed to make IndyCar racing on ovals safer are probably not the most reasonable.

Basically, the solutions I have a problem with boil down to two categories: slow down the cars, and stop racing ovals.

The problem I have with these proposals is that these are very low level solutions. Specifically, they do not solve the immediate problems. They simply ignore them.

We could just stop racing, and then all racing-related deaths and injuries would stop as well. But that wouldn't solve the issue, which is the danger of racing. We would simply be ignoring the real problems and refusing to participate. This is by far the safest way to deal with a problem. If you don't partake, there is no problem. However, it doesn't actually do anything about the issue itself.

If you wanted, you could never again get out of bed. This would keep you safer than if you were to live your life as normal, where any number of nasty things have the potential to happen to you, but I think we'd all be in agreement that staying in bed would not be a very intelligent way to deal with the dangers of living.

If you have a car, you have locks and an alarm. If you live in a very cold place, you dress warmly. These are targeted solutions that address a specific problem. Instead of retreating away from the issue, these solutions allow you to carry on. Some solutions are more effective than others.

The same methodology needs to be applied to racing. If you have a neck injury issue, you develop a device that keeps the head from snapping forward. If you have a high likelyhood of fire, you put fire extinguishers in the cars and have the drivers wear fireproof overalls. If you have solid walls around the track, you do your best to line them with something soft to dissipate impact energy.

I just hope those in power try to solve the immediate problems, instead of retreating from any danger and generally limiting our sport. There are only finite threats to our safety in the cockpit. Since they are all physical problems, they all have a quantifiable, deployable solution. Total racing safety is possible given enough time, research, and technology. That day may be very far off, but with that goal in mind, the march towards it will be steady.

In 50 years we have gone from losing many drivers per racing season to having even an injury being big news, all while having faster and faster cars. Let's keep improving motorsport safety at that rate of speed.

Speaking of rate of speed, the season finale to the 2011 San Francisco region SCCA Sunoco Challenge series at Thunderhill Raceway is fast approaching. This weekend is going to contain the final regional race, which will be for double the normal amount of points.

At the moment it looks like I have 3rd spot all tied up, and I'm mathematically unable to get any higher than that. Dave Allen would have to finish something like 5 spots ahead of me in order to overtake me in the championship.

At the end of the weekend, I'll be racing in the SCCA Illgen Classic 4-hour enduro. The team is all set up and ready to go.

My team mates will be my car owner Ed Railton, and my buddy Roger Eaglton. Long time readers may remember Roger driving with me in the Jim Russell karting enduro a couple years ago. Roger spent a lot of last year driving an E30 BMW in SCCA and is definitely a very solid racer. Ed Railton has a ton of experience in Spec Miata, and holds a number of track records in the San Francisco region. His team won their class in the enduro last year.

There shouldn't be any tire changes during the race, but we will have to refuel of course. The Miatas can go for about an hour and 20 minutes on a tank of fuel, which in Thunderhill maths is about 9 miles to the gallon. Pretty impressive for going flat out everywhere. Also convenient, since it evenly splits up the 4 hours between 3 drivers.

This is going to be an awesome weekend!

(153) Loaner, part 2

2011-10-11T18:31:00.000-07:00

Back in the paddock after the race, I talked to team mate Dave Allen and car owner Ed Railton after they both had a look at Dave's busted engine.

Dave still had 3 races to go in his weekend since he was signed up to do Super Touring Light in addition to Sealed Spec Miata, but his car was toast, and Ed didn't know if he could fix it since he didn't know what the problem was yet. Dave needed a car. So I offered to let him borrow mine, with approval from Ed, for the STL races that Dave was doing on Sunday. The Sealed Spec Miatas are legal in STL and Improved Touring A, but STL and ITA both run in the same race group, so you have to choose one or the other.

Dave would run his race in the morning using his tires, and then, after changing back to my tires, I would take the car for my SSM race just before lunch. Dave would rent another Miata in order to run the SSM race with me. In the afternoon, Dave would run his last race of the weekend in STL.

Unfortunately, Dave was going to have to start from the back in the morning STL race because he changed cars. That worried me a little. If you recall my sole experience of starting from the back in June - and the subsequent crash - you'll probably sympathize with my nervousness about the car's wellbeing.

I needn't have worried, however. While it was strange seeing the little silver and yellow Miata buzz around the track from the outside, Dave kept his nose completely clean using his superior racing experience, and brought it home without a scratch, gaining plenty of positions in the process.

Back in the paddock, Dave remarked to me that my Miata "is one good handling automobile." It's nice to have all that setup work approved by someone as experienced as Dave. Dave's 2nd race later in the afternoon went without incident as well.

Ed Railton managed to grab his first (and rather spectacular) Spec Racer Ford victory in the final race of the weekend in the afternoon. He won by over 6 seconds. Congratulations Ed! He's doing very well in the SRF championship at this point.

Up next for me was my final race of the weekend in the late morning. Since this was a two-day format weekend, there was no qualifying per se for the Sunday race. Instead, as requested by popular vote earlier in the year, the grid positions for the Sunday race were to be determined by the fastest lap times set during the Saturday race. My time was a 1:49.143, so I started 3rd in SSM.

The race start this time was slower. The leaders took longer to take off, and I misjudged my own launch. I got passed by two of the more powerful SMT, but I held off Dave Anderson in the black and red 32.

We remained double-file until I passed the 00 of Barret Tilley on the outside in turn 5. Most of the SSM/SMT field had not driven the track yet that day, and were still figuring out the grip levels during the first lap.

I now found myself directly behind the 20 of Steve Holifield, and I pushed very hard on my as yet unheated tires while trying to fend off Barret directly behind me. I tried a silly fake on Steve in turn 11, and scooted up a little too far. Steve was heads up and went wide, but it blew both of our corners and Barret sailed by me as we headed down the straight. I graunched third gear coming out of turn 2. Very easy to do in first generation Miatas when you're pushing hard.

I now had the 34 of Juan Pineda staring me down through my mirror. He tried a pass in turn 9, but backed off. He bided his time a little, and then took me going down the front straight on the inside. I'm starting to crave more horsepower pretty badly by this point.

The battle ahead was starting to heat up, and behind me the 4th place SSM car of Dave Anderson was popping in and out of my mirrors with what I guessed was a 4 or 5 second gap. If I got embroiled in battling too hard, I might have lost the gap. I put my faith in the guys ahead to carry me further and further from Dave. Maybe my time would come.

A few minutes later, I saw what looked to be David Petruska's #59 sitting on the outside of turn 9, in the sand, with most of the left side of the car seriously scraped and bent. I thought for sure a full course caution would arise as a result. I kept looking for the double yellows.

Sure enough, I saw them in turn 5, along with the safety crews coming out onto the track to lend aid to Dave.

I relaxed, took a breather, and I tried to count backwards in order to figure out how many laps we still had yet to go. I was sure we would go back to green flag racing after 2 or 3 laps.

It was on this lap that I got a better look at David's car, still sitting on the outside of turn 9. The door was slightly caved in, but looked intact. The left rear wheel was pointing 90 degrees the wrong direction.

As we rounded turn 11, I saw another car, the 9 of Fred Peterson, who looked like he had spun to the outside and was beached. It didn't look related to Dave Petruska's crash.

We sauntered around again behind the pace car, and now Dave's crash site was being tended to by the safety crews and the paramedics. There was a huge stacking effect in the corkscrew as everyone slowed to check on our fellow racer. I didn't see much as I passed, just the medics checking on him through the window. I assumed it was precautionary.

The line headed into the pits and the pace car brought us to a stop at the start line. The checkered was waving. Dave Anderson came along side and congratulated me on finishing 2nd. I didn't really know what to say besides "thanks". I was thinking about Dave Petruska and whether or not he was okay. After a minute, we all turned around and retired to the impound station to check the front runners for technical compliance. Nobody wants to win a race under yellow, and no one wants to gain positions because another racer crashed. These two factors combined results in one of the worst ways to finish a race.

Race 2 full onboard footage.

At impound, I asked around to see if anyone further up the field saw what happened. Based on what I heard there, as well as what I read on the community site after the weekend was over, this is what seems to have happened.

While racing hard for the top spot in SSM, Dave Petruska had contact with another car in turn 9. He spun off the track and hit the bare concrete wall on the driver's side. He suffered broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and swelling of the brain.

Dave was taken via helicopter to the hospital, where he is now making an encouraging recovery.

All of his fellow racer's thoughts are with him. Get well soon Dave!

(152) Loaner

2011-10-04T17:23:00.000-07:00

Rapid fire is one way to describe the two-day SCCA weekends. Convenient is another. One could think of it as adding pressure, or one could think of it as not enough time to get the job done.

I prefer not to limit myself by thinking such things. I view it as an opportunity to exploit advantages, being my driving preparation and quick learning - both of which translate into speed out of the gate. You need that for two-day race weekends.

And so my weekend began with a lot of preparation. I ran laps in my head trying to dial in what I thought would be the optimal lines and speeds given the (rather ideal) conditions. In practice I was immediately on a fast pace with a 1:49.1 best lap.

This was the first time I had run the new setup with the new alignment and camber settings at Mazda Raceway. There are places where I feel like I have less grip (turn 8, turn 4), but there are other places where I feel like I have more (turn 6, turn 11). Everyone seemed to be running slightly slower times, so it's hard to tell if the setup itself is faster or slower. It feels better at the very least. Easier to drive. It suits my style.

During the run up to the weekend it seemed that there would be a dip in participation. But in the final days of registration the list ballooned, and we ended up having around 45 cars take to the track. As with the other two-day weekend at Mazda Raceway, we did not split the group into even and odd numbered cars for qualifying. So we have quite a bit of traffic to deal with.

It did not go well for me. My first two laps were clear and quick. But on the 3rd lap, I caught the back-markers. I finally got a gap a couple laps later, and my onboard timer showed I was going 7 tenths faster than my best session time of 1:49.4, but a car spun in front of me in turn 8. All the other laps were balked by any number of things, from traffic to spun cars and cautions. Even my team mate, Dave Allen, had an uncharacteristic spin in turn 2. It was one of the busiest qualifying sessions I've ever had.

My early session effort landed me 4th in class and 15th overall for the race. This was to be my lone qualifying session, with the second race's starting positions being determined by fastest laps from race one. Dave Allen landed 2nd with a blistering 1:48 lap.

The start of the first race was fast. I came out of turn 11 practically full throttle. I got a very nice start and held my position (against the more powerful SMTs, every SSM's ideal start is to not lose any positions). I got single file for turn 3, but ahead and behind me there was some two-wide action.

Later in the lap I got by Rylan Hazelton in the 17 car in turn 8. The reduced grip from this new setup in turn 8 really showed as I got a bit of a slide as I crested and stepped on the throttle. It's pretty hard to do that in a 112 horsepower car with racing slicks in third gear.

On the next lap a car spun off the track in turn 3. I was all prepared to go straight through the cloud of dust since I saw where the car ended up and was sure it was clear, but as I was going by the cloud, a new cloud of sand was kicked up and I had to duck my face away from the window or risk temporary blindness. Window nets only keep big things out.

A lap later I caught and passed the 74 of Cameron Rogers in turn 5. Over the next minute and a half I put a good gap between him and myself. Until I entered turn 6 with slightly too much gusto and dropped my right wheels over the edge of the track into the deep sand.

The sand grabbed my wheels and pulled the rest of the car off the track. I backed out of the throttle, but the car was already beginning to slip sideways in the deep sand. I had to jerk the wheel to correct, disobeying the first law of leaving the tarmac: be smooth.

I caught the slide in time, but then another slide came on fast. This one was bigger. I corrected more, it started to come back around, and then I hit asphalt. I had enough sense to see it coming at least, and brought the wheel back to center in time to avoid hooking back into the wall. Cameron sailed by.

It took at least until turn 10 to get all the dirt off my tires, and in that time Cameron put some more distance between us.

I was now giving chase to Cameron, and he held me off for a number of laps. He seemed to get a second wind when I flew off track a few laps before. But I kept gaining on him after turn 6, so I tried to push my advantage as much as possible. Eventually I got by him in turn 8 with a very late braking attempt that nearly spun me out. But his superior power carried him pretty easily by again down into turn 9.

Then Rylan passed me on the main straight, and Steve Holifield in the green #20 passed me in turn 8 after I got slowed a bit by lap traffic. It really sucks being down on power to the other classes. But at least it's not for points-paying position!

I gave chase to the three ahead of me for most of the rest of the race. I kept gaining on Steve on the run from turn 10 to turn 11, but he was always wise to me and played defensive. I didn't have the power to exploit his defensive posture down the main straight, so I wasn't able to get by him there either.

A few minute later and we all passed my team-mate Dave Allen as his engine gave up the ghost. It had been making a knocking sound all morning and he did his best to conserve it, even though he was setting blistering times. Unfortunately, they are usually fastest before they blow and sadly this was the case yet again.

The four of us then started catching some lap traffic, and the 53 was called in for a mechanical problem as we passed by on the start finish line for the penultimate time.

A lap later, and the race was done. The only other Sealed Miata, like mine, that I saw was the 32 of Dave Anderson in my rear-view mirror. With Dave Allen dropping back after his engine blew up, that meant I had finished in 3rd place in SSM, and 14th overall!

But enough of that text stuff, you want video! For you, my friend, best price! Free!

Race 1 full onboard footage.

Some notes about the video:

The squeaking noise you hear as I apex some corners is the right-rear tire rubbing the fender ever so slightly.

And as I go up the start of the hill past turn 5 and into turn 6, you can kinda see my feet a bit as I shift to 4th. My footwork is getting better and better and the shift from 3rd to 4th is getting pretty fast. The 2nd to 3rd shift is still a bit slow due to the weak centering spring and the weak 3rd gear synchro which really needs to be babied in order not to graunch it.

For now, I will save the final race of the weekend for next time!

(151) Nationalism

2011-09-25T14:01:00.000-07:00

Last week I upgraded my racing license from an SCCA regional to an SCCA national. It was time to renew anyway, and I have obviously completed the requisite 4 races. So I might as well pay the extra ten bucks and get the upgrade huh?

I already feel the weight of increased responsibility on my shoulders.

Really all it does is allow me to enter national-points events, and to go to the national runoffs if I so desire. I may do that one day. It won't be this year, and probably not next year either, sadly.

Speaking of next year, it's about that time when I gotta start thinking about what I'm going to do. This year has flown by. I've been kept really busy with training, simulating, and of course putting that all to good use racing. That's kept my mind very focused on it, and I think my writing is showing that. Most of the blogs I've written this year have been about racing. Yes, it's a racing blog, but I haven't really sat down to just type my thoughts very much this year. Maybe that's a good thing. In any case, I'm doing that right now. But back to next year.

The short story is, there are no plans. Facts are starting to take over a little bit. Facts like my near-22 years of age, facts like my finances, facts like getting my own pad, a sustainable cash flow, boring real life stuff. Stuff I'm really not good at.

My parents have been amazing to me. I don't talk about them anywhere near enough. They come to all my races. Dad helps in the pits and keeps me organized. Mom provides everything else, including the silver and yellow matching folding chairs which look great next to the car. Mom and dad helped me get my career started when there was little hope of me being financially and emotionally able to start it myself (at 18, what did I really know?). With my transition to fullsize cars, my career is officially started, and now I need to take over.

So next year I am going to be financially responsible for my racing.

That means I'm going to be on a real shoestring budget. And until things get solid, I won't know how much racing I will be able to do. In the meantime I am working on starting up an internet-based business. It's unorthodox, but I know the internet very well and I believe I can make it work. Fortunately the business I've picked has virtually zero startup cost. In any case, some of the money I earn will go to racing.

I'm fairly certain I will continue to race in SCCA in 2012, most likely still the Spec Miatas. But I want to try other types of cars next year, if I can. I still have lots to learn, even after 3 years of racing school, and trying new cars will really accelerate my learning. That fact will probably make my event participation haphazard - one month in a Formula Vee, another in a Miata, yet another maybe in a BMW E30. I probably won't be in it for any championship.

But these are predictions. I once wrote that humans are terrible calculators. Extrapolating from that viewpoint, humans are even worse fortune tellers. I'm sure 2012 will hold plenty of surprises.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We still have at least 5 races left in 2011 (maybe even 6)!

First we finish out the season in Spec Miata. There are 2 races at Mazda raceway Laguna Seca next weekend October 1st-2nd. It's another one of those two-day compacted weekends. So far the attendance roster is the thinnest we've seen this year, only 31 Spec Miatas are registered as of today. After seeing fields of over 50 at Infineon, it's really easy to say "only" 31. Considering the economic situation right now, that's still a pretty sweet number. Even in a "cheap" class, it's still hard on people. It's amazing to have 60-car fields at all.

After Mazda Raceway we head to Thunderhill for October 21-23, which is going to finish out the season with the final single-race. Double the points are on offer, so this is a big one to make count. At the end of the weekend, the Racing Driver's Club (of which I'm a member) is holding a 4-hour endurance race called the Illgen Classic, and I'm going to be driving in it using the 78 Spec Miata I've been using this season. The team isn't final just yet, but you'll hear all about it prior to the weekend once everything is sorted out.

A week after that is a little surprise. On the 29th there is going to be a get-together of most of the old crew from karting at Jim Russell (Jim Russell has changed it's name to Simraceway Performance Driving Center in partnership with a new simulator hitting the market). We'll run some races on the Infineon karting circuit and just generally have a blast. It's going to be good to see the guys again, and getting back in those trusty old karts. I've heard they've made some improvements.

Then comes the big one. And this one is also not final.

The National Auto Sport Association 25 Hours of Thunderhill is the longest road race in the country. It's a true test of even the best drivers and cars. Naturally it runs non-stop through the night, rain or shine. We will modify the car with a more powerful lump (engine), and run it with 4 or 5 drivers. The stints will probably be on the order of two hours at a time in the car. That comes in December.

I couldn't think of a better way to end out 2011 than with the 25 hour.

In terms of the SCCA Sunoco championship, I'm looking good for at least a 3rd place finish in my rookie year in SSM. I'm 4th in points behind my team mate, Dave Allen. However, Dave is going to have to drop two races from his points total at the end of the season, whereas I do not, since I missed two SSM points finishes earlier in the year (you'll recall I had to change classes when the motor had to be rebuilt at the Spec Miata Festival race, and that prevented me from getting SSM points). I'm 10 points behind Dave so assuming he drops races worth more than 10 points (which he will), I will claim 3rd place at least.

Mike Niemann and David Petruska occupy the first and second spots, and they are both far enough ahead that I don't have a chance at catching them. This is the top 5 as they sit now:

1 Michael Niemann: 262
2 David Petruska: 258
3 David Allen: 188
4 Gregory Evans: 178
5 Alan Gjedsted: 168

Dave Allen and I have similar pace at the moment. I'm faster at Mazda Raceway, though, and with two races there coming up, I stand to gain some points on him.

The tire situation is playing out well, too. The Toyo RA-1s look to be good for about two race weekends plus a test day for running the tires in and making them fast. I will use my Infineon set next weekend at Mazda Raceway (which is a track that is hard on tires, but Infineon is easy on them, so they have plenty of life left), and the final set I will use at Thunderhill. The set I am saving for Thunderhill is really fast. So it works out perfectly - four sets of tires for 7 race weekends and 4 test days (the test days were in order to run the tires in and make them fast). I won't be doing test days before these race weekends, though, so I will need to be fast out of the gate. Both the enduros will each eat their own sets of tires of course.

Wish me luck!

(150) Driving According to the Chump #6: At the Office

2011-09-17T16:48:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been over a year and a half since I last talked about driving techniques. I've learned a lot since then so I should probably write another Chump article.

This time I want to talk about your working environment - the office. How you interact with the office is going to determine your performance on the track. If your working environment is inhospitable for whatever reason, it's going to upset you in certain ways, and that's going to translate into mistakes, bad judgement, frustration, and just plain slowness.

The office of a racing car does not usually look very pretty. Typical racing cockpits are full of plain, functional, sometimes depressing-looking equipment - straps to hold you down like some kind of weird operating chair, panels with large gaps, exposed metal, wires and tubes all over the place, copious amounts of cheap plastic, exposed epoxy and welds, and, naturally, lots of duct tape. You wouldn't think that kind of aesthetic would result in a pleasing place to be. The secret is ergonomics.

A Porsche race car cockpit. This is pretty luxurious as far as race cars go.

Ergonomics make the whole thing tick. The racing driver must be happy, otherwise he won't go very fast. So the cockpit has to be able to let him use the controls with ease and precision, and it has to be comfortable.

Yes, the racing cockpit is loud, hot, and vibrates the heck out of you - but it is the initial comfort which negates these things in a lot of ways and makes it bearable.

Comfort in the cockpit is down to a number of key areas:

The seat (very important) and how it hugs your body.
The driving position.
The ease of use of the controls and the control positions.
The visibility.
The safety devices, including escape means.
Auxiliary equipment such as radios, cool shirts, elbow or knee pads, ventilation, and ear plugs.

If these areas are well implemented, the cockpit becomes a very nice place to be and work.

So let's start at the top, shall we?

The seat.

The seat is easily the most important bit for making a comfortable work environment. If the seat doesn't fit you properly, then no amount of tweaking in the other areas is going to make much of a difference.

The seat does not need to be very soft. You're not going for Cadillac leather and mountains of foam and feathers here. It doesn't need to be bare metal but it should be fairly rigid. This is a safety measure in addition to a performance measure. The more seamlessly you mesh with the car, the more you can feel it, and the safer you'll be in a crash - the car will take the energy of the impact for you.

As such, a hard foam-insert, form fitted seat is undoubtedly the best option. The driver basically sits in a bath of expanding foam covered with trash bags. He stays there until the seat hardens. As long as the driver doesn't grow too much, the seat insert will work for years and years and remain as comfortable as ever. It can take a few tries to get it right, because the driver needs to sit very still and hold the ideal position (which is a very neutral spine and hip position). The main problem with a traditional seat is that they tend to force a driver into an unnatural position. The seat designers will do everything in their power to ensure the best fit for everyone, but everyone is a little bit different, so even the very best Recaro seat will never be a perfect fit off the shelf.

With a form-fitted insert seat, the driver can adopt their most natural, comfortable position, and the seat will hold them in place perfectly for as long as the insert remains rigid.

The driving position.

The driving position, after the seat itself, is next on the list of important comfort features. It's also the most involved

The ideal driving position allows you to see easily, to reach all the controls without stretching, and to ideally operate said controls.

As we all know from driving road cars, adjustable steering and pedal position is just as important as adjusting the seat. Unfortunately most racing cars do not have adjustable steering. Most pedals can be bent or otherwise manipulated side to side or up and down, but again very few can be moved forward and back. Most of the adjustment in a racing car comes from moving the seat around. Fortunately, because race seats are bolted down and usually don't have electric motors or rollers under them, they have quite a wide range of adjustment.

Now, the most important feature of setting up the driving position is to be comfortable operating the steering, pedals and shifter. Since everyone is different in size and proportion, my method of setting the seat might not work for everyone. But I encourage you to try it, because you might find you like it.

The first thing I do when fitting into a new car is to reference the seat distance and height relative to the pedals. I find that my pedal work is best when the bottom of the seat is as level as possible with the pedals. Sometimes in street cars this is hard to do - I usually just drop the seat as far as it will go, unless that impacts my visibility.

Sometimes formula cars actually have the pedals well above the bottom of the seat - this is fine, as long as they aren't too high. "Too high" is hard to quantify because of the varying levels of recline available in modern formula cars. In a modern Star Mazda car, for instance, the driver is practically laying in bed. Really, the only thing you're trying to avoid is having your femur bone's range of motion restricted by the bottom of the seat. You need the full range of movement from each of your leg joints available.

You get the full range of motion by setting the pedals at the right distance. I choose the longest pedal (usually the clutch in street-derived cars, but in racing cars sometimes it is the throttle) and set the seat so that when I press the longest pedal fully, it is not a stretch, but it uses the most range of motion in my joints possible. For example, when I press the clutch to the floor in the Miata, my leg is very nearly straight, but my ankle is not, thus avoiding stretching. This also makes heel-toe much easier - you're just moving the feet around, not the whole leg.

There is a similar philosophy when setting the distance from the steering wheel as well. You should be able to keep your hands at the 9 and 3 positions throughout as much of the rotation as possible. In reality this will probably be about 120-140 degrees from center, maybe a little less.

The method for achieving this is a little more involved. First, the center of the steering wheel should be level with your shoulders. That will give you the most range of motion with your arms up and down. Second, the steering wheel should be close enough to you so that at no point does your arm become straight, and it should not be so close that you have your arms bump your torso during the rotation.

Now, it may be that you drive a formula car that has 12 inch wide front tires, 3,000 pounds of downforce and no power steering. If so, the steering will be quite heavy indeed (IndyCar drivers have equated it to carrying a 35 pound weight in each hand while trying to turn).

If this is the case then you're going to have to sit closer to the wheel in order to not get destroyed physically while driving the car. The situation is also different on ovals. Again, the grip generated on an oval is high, so the steering is heavier than a road course would be. Plus the corners are long, so stock car drivers sit with the wheel very close to them so that they can really lean into it and not get tired.

The reason why I prefer to put the steering as far away from me as possible without having straight arms is because that causes me to use my wrists and forearms more than my upper arms and shoulders. This goes for the pedals, too - using your ankle and calf to push is more precise than your thighs and hips. The further down the limb you go, the more delicacy you get. Try writing a note with your elbow, or balancing on your knees. The downside is this uses more energy, since the smaller muscles are less efficient for doing heavy tasks. So you have to compromise. How much power do I want, and how much precision am I willing to give up to get it?

Note that this "extend and gain precision" philosophy doesn't apply to everything. One thing I like to equate it to is handgun handling. If you watch the fastest speed-shooters, you will see that they reload the weapon very close to their body. When free-handing something like that, it is usually best to have it close to you in order to have better control over it's mass. Pedals and steering are different though. You're not holding the steering or pedals in the air, they are supported by the car. Pedals and steering are like the trigger on the gun. When you pull a trigger, it is better to have the tip of your finger contacting the trigger, rather than shoving the whole finger completely through the trigger guard and pulling it with your knuckle. The reasons are the same - giving yourself the greatest possible range of movement engages your precision muscles more.

You can see this at work sitting at your desk. Simply pretend you're holding a wheel, and try turning it while it is close to you and far away. Pay attention to your forearm and wrist movement. You will see your forearms engaged more with the wheel further away. Alternatively, try holding a weight with your arm extended (but not totally straight). Count the seconds. Now try holding it closer. You will be able to hold it up longer with it close to you because compacting your arm (reducing the range of movement) causes you to use the larger muscles closer to your torso (upper arms and shoulders). That's why you move the steering closer when you want more strength. It's just leverage really.

Finally, third and very importantly, the steering should be as straight up and down as possible. Many, many street cars have tilted steering wheels, and this causes the driver to stretch too much at the top, and compact too much at the bottom of the rotation. Sometimes this is the only way to fit the steering, however, since there is limited room in the engine bay for the steering shaft and any accompanying joints (like those required for a straight steering wheel).

This is some video I got in a practice session at Infineon. I wanted to see what I was doing as a driver, and it shows my seating position and control manipulation pretty well.

Driver view.

Now, based on what I wrote above, you will probably find things wrong with my seating position. That's the idea!

The first thing you'll probably notice is my arms are very, very nearly straight when they reach the top of the wheel. I would absolutely not put the steering any further away than this. The Miata's steering is very light for a racing car, and even with this extended driving position I don't even get close to having tired or sore arms after a long 4-day weekend. If I was driving the Skip Barber Formula 2000, I would be closer to the wheel because it is heavier.

The problem is the Miata's steering wheel is not straight up and down. So when my hand goes to the top of the wheel, the arm extends further. The other problem is the HANS device attached to my helmet. You'll notice that even with the reclined driving position, it still shoves my head forward a little bit. If I make the seat a little more straight up and down in order to get my shoulders a bit closer to the wheel, I'll be forced to stare at the dash, not the road.

You will also notice the wheel is slightly too high. I decided to compromise the steering just a tiny bit in order to be at a more comfortable level with the pedals. Comfort is the goal here. The best driving position in the world is of no use if it makes the driver uncomfortable. If any of the things I say here make you uncomfortable, drop them and forget them. Being uncomfortable on the race track isn't just slow, it can be dangerous. So I decided to compromise the method a little, and gain more comfort.

Very briefly I want to talk about what the driver should be doing once everything is set up to his liking. This is slightly off topic so I'll make it quick.

The most important thing is to relax all the muscles not related to driving, or supporting the driver, and to only have the muscles as tense as they need to be, especially with the steering. If you look at the video again and pay attention to my hands, you'll see they are only gripping the wheel enough to keep it from coming out of my hands. In fact some of my fingers aren't clasped at all.

Also, when I turn the wheel, I pull it down, I don't push it up. The outside hand does less work. Pulling down utilizes gravity, and a more natural feeling grip on the wheel. Of course, you probably shouldn't do it all with one hand and just let the other be limp, but I emphasize pulling down.

Oh, and you'll also notice I reposition my hands on the wheel occasionally. It's a nasty habit that I've been trying to kick and I've been doing it less and less. I only do it in the Miata for some reason.

The rest.

The post is already running a bit long so I'll touch on the other points.

Regarding visibility, you need to be able to see the track, but you don't need to see the hood of the car. Being in a race car I sit pretty low, both for the pedals and to keep the weight low in the chassis. I can probably see the track disappear about 20-25 feet in front of the nose. If you take a look at my onboard race videos, the camera is a bit higher than my eyes. Racing drivers look far down the track. If you look 20 feet in front of the car, there is virtually no time to react. I can see well enough to see where the car is placed on the track, and I can see through the side windows properly. I could give myself a better view of the road directly in front of the car, but doing so would make me uncomfortable using the controls, so overall there wouldn't be a gain. And make sure you have a big mirror - my rear view mirror extends all the way across the cockpit and offers tremendous visibility. The side mirrors should be adjusted to give you a view of what's beside the car. The rear view mirror is for the stuff behind you, the sides for the stuff beside you. Properly set up mirrors practically eliminate blind spots.

What properly set-up side mirrors provide. A large rear-view mirror takes up the rest of the blind areas.

On safety devices, choosing the most comfortable safety devices does a lot to make the cockpit more bearable. A lightweight, breathable suit with enough nomex layers to give you good protection is worth investing in. My suit (a Sparco X-light) has 3 layers and weighs a lot less than most 2-layer suits. The HANS device is the most comfortable and practical head restraint solution I've tried, and once the belts are on you don't even know you have it. Speaking of belts, making the belts properly tight also helps comfort. The belts should be uncomfortably tight while in pit lane, but once you get out there and the vibrations start settling everything in, properly tight belts hold you in and make you more secure and comfortable.

There is a trick to properly tightening the belts. The first thing you should do is to clasp and tighten the lap belt. Get the lap belt as tight as you can make it with it clasped across your pelvis. The reason is to make sure it stays in contact with your pelvis while you tighten the shoulder straps. A lap belt that rides up and sits on your gut can cause you tremendous problems in a frontal crash.

With the lap belts tightened, now you can tighten the shoulder belts. Pull the straps so they are snug over your neck restraint device and won't slip off. Next comes the big trick. It is often claimed that shoulder belts cannot be properly tightened by the driver. This is false. You just have to do it right.

Let's tighten the right strap first. Bring your left hand over your chest and grab the end of the strap. Now bring your right arm up and place your forearm on top of the left hand. This is to provide extra leverage and to allow the next step to work.

With the arms in place, now all you have to do is push/pull down on the strap with a pretty good amount of force. As you do this, drop your right shoulder down an inch or two.

Repeat the process on the left side, switching your left and right hand positions. Your belts will now be so tight they will hurt. Once you start rolling down pit lane, adrenaline and vibrations will remove the pain. I've found that with my HANS device, I can get the belts tighter because of the padding under the device that makes the whole thing a lot more comfortable.

Just make sure to take the extra 2 seconds and arrange your manhood properly if you have an anti-submarine belt. You don't want anything out of order once you have your belts tight - it's not fun, especially in the braking zones.

While you're out on the track, give your shoulder belts a pull every couple of laps, just to make sure they are staying tight.

If you don't have a window net, you're not racing. I'm pretty sure every wheel to wheel racing series mandates a window net, or window protection of some kind. Window protection allows you to lift the visor on your helmet safely. Doing so makes the heat much more manageable. A cool suit is a godsend, and a must on really hot days. If you have a ventilation system, make sure the intake is filtered, or in a place that can get cool air without delivering smoke and dirt into your face.

Also make sure that you know and practice the escape procedure in your car. Get good at opening the window, unbuckling, and climbing out without opening the door, all with your eyes closed. If you're confident you can get out even with the door smashed and on fire then you'll be more confident on track.

A radio, even for club racing, is very useful if you have someone to spot for you. Even if the information is just about local yellows it will still be a huge benefit. If you get a radio, invest in some custom earpieces. Custom earpieces will fit under the helmet much, much better. Even if they are simply for sound protection, it's still worth getting custom fitted plugs.

Finally, the gauges are also very important. All the information should be available to the driver, from speed to oil pressure, with the most important information being large, centrally located, and possibly brightly colored. You should have lights that tell you when to shift. I don't, and I wish I did. If possible, the information should be digital. This helps with relaying info to the team, or self-diagnosis. It's one thing to see that the water is running hot at 2 o' clock, it's quite another to see that it is at 208 degrees.

An AIM data display, with RPM, shift lights, speed, current gear, oil pressure, lap time, water temperature, and room for other custom value displays such as tire or brake temperature. These types of gadgets make me drool.

All these things help you perform on track.

Ten tips to a good working environment:

1. Relax as much as you can, and take a light grip on the wheel. Your driving will be much more lucid.
2. Do your best to get the optimum range of movement of your limbs given the seating/control adjustments available to you.
3. Don't be afraid to compromise your seating position a little in the name of comfort.
4. Use comfortable safety solutions and practice using them to escape the car. It will boost your confidence.
5. Get visibility where it matters. You don't need to see 5 feet in front of the car, but you do need good mirrors that are set up properly.
6. Get a custom-fitted seat if you can. If not, use of firm foam pillows can improve your off-the-shelf seat.
7. Make sure the auxiliary equipment functions simply and is reachable with your belts tight. A confusing start-up procedure is disastrous should you stall. Simple is fast.
8. Try to maximize ventilation to the driver, but also don't let dirt and stones into the cockpit.
9. A steering wheel that is straight up and down is important, if possible.
10. Breathe evenly and calmly. Holding your breath might be necessary in some corners if you are driving a very high-G car, but for everyone else you need to breathe, and don't forget to blink.

(149) Shark attack part 2

2011-09-12T19:11:00.000-07:00

And so our little story continues.

After the morning's 4th place finish I was feeling pretty good. The SCCA gives out complimentary trophies to competitors. If there are more than 10 cars in a race, they give trophies down to 4th. If more than 20, they go down to 5th. For the first race of a double weekend, you get a nice picture trophy with your name and your finishing position. You get to pick which picture to use. It's really swell, and they had a great picture of me waving to the volunteer corner workers on the cool down lap.

The damage incurred during the race to the passenger door was purely superficial. All that was required was a duct tape patch in order to make it clear to corner workers that the damage was from a previous session. If you don't do that you might get called in at the end of the session for body contact.

With the car patched up I headed out for afternoon qualifying.

The weather was looking really good so I knew the track would be grippy. Maybe that gave me a little too much confidence, because I over-drove slightly. I put it 4th in Sealed Spec Miata and 28th overall with a 1:59.933. I was only one and a bit tenths behind my team mate, Dave Allen.

Since Infineon is my home track with a pretty simple 40-minute drive to home, I was able to sleep in my own bed at night. But the real benefit was I got to wash my nomex undersuit every night. Only this night I forgot to get it out and let it dry, so in the morning it was still soaked and it wouldn't dry for the race. So I broke out the karting gear - an old Alpinestars t-shirt and a pair of soft shorts.

The race was unfortunately delayed due to a formula car incident in the previous group. The ambulance was busy delivering drivers to the hospital, with minor injuries (or so I hear, that might not be accurate - as far as I'm concerned, hospitalization is never minor). Since the ambulance was not at the track, racing could not continue. So the start was delayed a couple of hours.

The start of the race was much tighter this time. I started on the outside this time, presumably because someone did not start. We were 3 wide through turn 1, and I had very little room to work in turn 2. The 2-wide business continued through turn 6.

On the second lap I found myself wishing for my nomex undersuit. The car's exhaust runs right by my right leg, so it gets hot in the footwell. My legs were sweating, and the heavy nomex suit was flapping wetly against my legs on every shift and in every turn. It was not pleasant, and very distracting.

Still, I managed to keep my pace high, and I ended up setting my fastest lap of the weekend at a 1:59.218, which was only about one hundredth of a second faster than Dave Allen (1:59.229). After the 3rd or 4th lap, I found the car was acting more overtsteery than usual. The increase in temperature from the delay must have cause my tires to over-pressurize slightly, giving me less grip in the rear and making the handling a little trickier. The highlights of the race are scarce, but there were a few key events.

About halfway through the run, David Petruska and Juan Pineda had an unplanned coming together in turn 11. This left Juan with a stalled car and David with a damaged one. Dave is usually a front-runner in Sealed, most of the time finishing ahead of me and Dave Allen, but this time he had to let most of the field pass by due to his damage.

Towards the end I get on the tail of Cameron Rogers in the black 74 and Jon Davies in the 25, both SMT drivers. Cameron got a run on Jon going through the downhill section, and I could see he was setting up a pass in turn 10. I decided to follow him past Jon. So I tucked up close to Cameron, probably no more than an inch or two off his rear bumper, and scavenged another position. Coach Ric said he was "doing jumping jacks" while watching that move. I guess that means he thought it was pretty slick! In the very next turn Cameron had a big slide and slightly over-corrected, temporarily giving me his spot. It did not take him long to re-acquire the position due to his much more powerful SMT engine.

In the end, I finished in 3rd spot with Dave Allen in 2nd. Premier Auto Service lands both cars on the podium! Car owner Ed Railton was very happy about that.

Enough blabber, just watch the race!

Race 10 full onboard footage.

I really prefer these types of races, the sort of long distance fights where pace over the whole run matters more than the face-to-face brawling Spec Miata normally incurs. It's like the difference between the O.K. Corral gunfight and a sniper duel over a thousand yards. One is about reactions and ferocity, the other about precision and planning. I'm good at both, but I prefer the latter.

It was an awesome weekend and I'm very, very pleased with the results. Even if Dave Allen gained some points on me in the championship. We'll see how that plays out when we head back to Mazda Raceway next month.

(148) Shark attack

2011-09-06T16:24:00.000-07:00

Everything old is new again.

In a lot of ways I never really got to experience Infineon Raceway. I spent almost 3 years learning my craft there is Sonoma, but I never turned a wheel on the main circuit. All of my time was spent at the kart track at the top of the hill.

It's been over a year since I last took the trip up to the north end of the bay to race in anger.

The weekend started as many do with a test day. Once again I had brand new tires, shaved to my preferred tread depth (in other words, no tread, just a swath of even rubber), that I had to wear in before I would become truly competitive.

My coach, Ric McCormick, has worked at Infineon as an instructor for years innumerable, so the first order of business was a stop-and-go drive around the track at 7 AM. We talked of the line, reference points, and how to "scare the paint off the walls".

During the drive I gained new appreciation for how hillfully wonderous the track is. Almost every straight and turn is uphill or downhill, zigging or zagging. It is quite one thing to stand at the edge of the circuit and think "that looks steep" or to drive on it quickly and think "that was steep", and yet another to stop halfway up the hill to turn 2 and think "this is steep"! To say the majority of the circuit is aggressively inclined is a tragic understatement. It is unique in the US, with only a couple of other circuits world-wide that rival the topographic attitudes on display at Infineon.

The car is all ready to go!

And so the first session began. The first objective being to look after the tires, and treat them nicely so that they would live a rich, productive life down there, face-first on the tarmac. If you don't love your tires, they won't love you. They are fickle beings, and they have a short, difficult life.

Session complete, tires sufficiently loved, and here comes Ric with his magic clip board of go-faster secrets. Let the learning commence.

Every session I was going faster and faster, getting cleaner and cleaner. Ric was helping me polish my aptitude to a sheen. Technical and physical corrections, mental corrections, even some persona corrections are part of Ric's bag of driver-tweaking tools. I'm getting much better at applying the racing line. Now Ric is mostly focusing on the finer details of how to ride the wave of grip as I fly in to and out of corners.

By the time the fifth and final session was completed, I had a few 1:59 laps on the clock and the tires were feeling good.

My dash-mounted Rumblestrip lap timer was giving me a bit of trouble throughout the day. The system has an infrared sensor that points out the side of the car. The sensor is tripped by a box that sits on the pit wall. It's a really handy device because it enables me to view the lap time "delta" - essentially whether my current lap is faster or slower than my fastest at any given moment. The problem is, for some reason the sensor was picking up two separate boxes on the pit wall. This plays havoc with the results! The delta would go haywire, sometimes showing me plus or minus two seconds corner to corner.

The other challenge was the disparity between the Sealed Spec Miatas like mine, and the more fully constructed engines in the SMT class. The SMT cars have a good 10 or 15 more horsepower in some cases, so they have a lot more umph to get them over the hills that Infineon tosses at us. They also lose less power in the heat.

95 degree weather, the hills, and the power disparity meant the SMT drivers were about 2 seconds per lap faster than the SSM drivers.

The weather was beautiful for the weekend, despite the Thursday test day heat.

In qualifying I got a fairly clear track and I managed to put together a 2:00.504 lap. I over-drove a little, and everyone's times were a little slower that session. Still, it was good enough for a 3rd place start. I was happy. 3rd in SSM meant an overall starting position of 26th, out of over 50 cars. The SSM pole time was set by David Petruska at a 1:58.472, which put him in 12th place overall. My Premier Auto Service team mate, David Allen, was starting 6th in SSM and 32nd overall with a 2:00.871.

26th place meant I was starting on the inside for turn 1, a long sweeping left. The ideal position was to the outside, which would set me up well for the 2nd corner, a somewhat tight right.

So, my plan was to pump myself up for the start of the first race, begin on a high aggression charge, and try to carve out a path to the outside in order to have optimum gains through turns 2, 3, and possibly even 4.

At the start, I got my charge on, and started trying to dice my way over to the outside. I saw smoke, cars contacted, and I ducked back over to the inside. So much for that plan.

I stayed inside for turn 1, which put me outside for turn 2. I held on to the outside as best I could. Once through turn 2, I had some room to work. 84 Dave Allen was behind me, and ahead of me the 6 driven by Matt Rose side by side with the red 24 of Kim Henriksen. Kim and Matt went two-wide into turn 3, and in the second half of the corner Matt tagged the rear of Kim, slowing Matt and sending Kim to the dirt.

I gave the brake a rub to avoid running into Matt, hoping David would see from behind and not hit me. He didn't, and I continued past Matt in turn 4.

Matt came back at me in turn 6, however, and he had the inside. I drove it in hard on the outside, determined to hold on. I did, but the superior power of Matt's SMT Miata meant he motored by on the straight.

In turn 7 he braked hard and late, so I downshifted an extra gear to 2nd, played conservative, and ducked under him in the middle of the corner. It paid off, and now he was stuck behind me for the run down the hill.

Turn 8, about 90 MPH.

In turn 11, the hairpin at the end of the lap, I caught back up to the next main pack. Joe Kalinowski in the 55 was getting pushed around. Matt was still hounding me, and he took his opportunity to use the power down the start/finish straight to overtake.

In turn 2 Joe and Cameron Rogers in the 74 were still going at it, and Cameron got pushed wide. Matt and I seized the opportunity to squeeze by in turn 4.

I followed Matt through turn 6, and as he was exiting, his car began to get away from him. I trusted him to gather it up quickly so I continued on my regular line at full power. The slide got worse and worse, and as Matt finally caught it, he intercepted my line and I had to evade. That upset my car quite a bit, and it slid out from under me. A trio of SSM cars, the gray 16 of Dave Stone, the red and black 32 of Dave Anderson, and Dave Allen all streamed by me. I fell into line behind Dave. That's the 16 Dave.

I dispatched Dave Stone in turn 11 after getting a run through turn 10, and began working on Dave Anderson.

A few laps later I got run into by the 25 driven by Jon Davies. He tried to overtake in turn 4, which is a legitimate move, only he locked up the brakes and slid into me. The hit wasn't hard, just enough to send me into the rubber marbles and from there into the dirt. The thing is, his fender was damaged from the start. It had a sort of reinforced joust sticking out of the side. It was not difficult for that implement to slice my door open like a tin can.

I didn't know sharks liked sheet metal.

The damage was only cosmetic (the glass window underneath wasn't even touched), so I went into damage control mode. I was now in 6th place in SSM. I needed to run my race in order to gather up as many positions as I could in my class, and forget about dicing for overall positions that gave no points.

After I verified the car was mechanically undamaged, I started laying down fast, consistent laps that would ensure a good overall race pace. Basically, don't make any more mistakes.

I tried to make my pass attempts as efficient as possible, but that is really hard when you're trying to pass cars a class above yours.

At the mid point in the race, Dave Anderson spun his car in turn 11. I caught right up to him and began chasing. This was now for 5th place.

A few minutes later a full course caution came out for a blown engine in turn 11. I was really happy about the caution (not the blown engine). It would compact the field and I'd have a better chance of catching up!

The safety crews outdid themselves and had the whole thing cleaned up in 1 lap. As soon as the yellows came down, Dave Anderson pounced on Dave Stone in turn 11 and took 4th place. I was now chasing Stone, who had rather severe engine trouble - smoke was leaking out from under his car. He pointed me by in turn 5.

I chased Dave Anderson for another few laps. We were gaining on the cars in front.

On the final lap I saw plumes of smoke billow from under the tires of Dave's car in turn 11. He drove in deep, started to slide, and slightly over-corrected. I sauntered by on the exit and took 4th place at the line.

It was an awesomely exciting race, and definitely worth a watch.

Race 9 full onboard footage.

The next race of the weekend will have to wait till some other time!

(147) Trackwalk, Episode 2: Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca

2011-08-12T20:37:00.000-07:00

A long, long time ago I did a post on the nuances of the Infineon International Karting Center. I talked about the corners and the variety of ways to take them.

Now that I have a greater variety of tracks under my belt, I feel like I should do another Trackwalk. I'll throw in some images I found around the web as well, so you get a better idea of what I'm talking about.

So, let's do the circuit I have the most experience with: Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca.

Mazda Raceway can be seen from orbit. Or you could just drive.

Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca is probably best known by the rest of the world for it's MotoGP race. So naturally it's construction does favor bikes - it's smooth, it's fast, and it has an emphasis on acceleration. The curbs, well, they're not really curbs, more like painted bits of race track. There are, however, nasty little red humps smack on the apex of every corner as a cutting deterrent. There is deep sand bordering the track all the way around, which is great to fall into off of a bike, but not so great to drive in.

But those are just secondary features. The biggest draw for this track is undoubtedly the hill, and on top of the hill, the Corkscrew. But we'll get to that.

So, I guess what I'll do is just run through it corner by corner and try to give you an idea of what it's like to drive.

Turn 1.

Turn 1 is really only an actual corner for bikes, and maybe extremely high horsepower cars with little grip. Pretty much every racing car built after 1985 should be able to take this with no lift and minimal fuss very easily.

The turn itself is preluded by a large hump as you crest the ledge cut into the hill next to the track. That makes turn 1 a little blind, and new drivers running the track for the first time can feel a bit rushed to try and quickly place the car so that the exit of turn 1 leads them into good placement for braking for turn 2, the Andretti Hairpin (the first real turn of the circuit). You can hug the inside more and brake towards the outside of turn 2, or you can swing out wider and brake while diving down to the first apex of turn 2. It's really personal preference, and even situational depending on who's behind you and whether or not they are looking to pass.

To the left is the pit exit. And it is optional whether or not the exit leads straight onto the track in turn 1, or uses the little slip road to disgorge pit-stop-ees on the exit of turn 2. Most professional sanctioners use the slip road, but some club race organizations such as SCCA just let you cut straight out onto the track. In that case, turn 1's apex is actually inside pit road, with no penalty from the stewards.

Turn 2, the Andretti Hairpin.

Turn 2 is aptly named "Andretti". If you talk about an iconic Andretti driving style, you're talking about the ability to rotate the car right at the apex. Early in, stab the brakes, rotate the car, point and squirt. Classic Andretti driving style. All the Andrettis do this from what I've seen.

So it's no surprise that the Andretti Hairpin relies on good mid-corner rotation skills. There are a variety of ways to do that. You can stab the brake, jerk the wheel, snap off the throttle... which technique to use in turn 2 depends on the car you're driving. In a Miata, a snap off the throttle will do nicely. In a Porsche, a hesitation on the throttle just after finishing braking will make it turn automatically. In a Mustang, varying your brake pressure as you near the center of the corner will exploit the car's deficiencies and turn it into a dancing behemoth.

The start of turn 2 is a little scary for new drivers. It's not insignificantly downhill. You're talking about coming over a crest at 110 mph, lining up a flat out corner, and then braking hard as soon as you're done turning, a mere 300 or 400 feet from the turn-in point for the corner. Cars don't stop as well when they're going downhill, thanks to gravity's inexorable and unceasing pull. That makes braking for the turn more dubious, since you know the car won't stop as well. It takes a while to get comfortable with it.

The downhill nature continues through the first half of the corner. Most lines will have you apexing the corner twice. Handling characteristics and racing situation will determine whether you should apex the first part or not.

In any case, a fast lap is not going to be a case of "swing out wide, then dive in half way through the corner". The entry is too tight, and the middle opens up too much to make that a fast technique. Most of the time you should be no farther than about a car width away from the first apex.

The tricky part is deciding what to do in the middle of the corner, as the car carries you to the outside in preparation for the final apex. When does the throttle go on? What needs to happen with the steering?

I prefer to get on the throttle a little early, and feather it more as I gently bring the nose into line with my intended heading. Others will prefer to wait with the throttle, get it lined up, and then stomp on it hard. Both ways can be fast in Andretti Hairpin. I would wager the "stomp on it" technique would be more suited to a high horsepower car. Beware of staying in too tight in the middle. Let the car be free, and roll out to the center of the track. It will make the second half much easier.

Turn 3's exit, looking back.

Turn 3 is a very fun corner. It's blind due to the wall, so as you approach it looks like a 90 degree corner, but it's much faster than that. It's quite flat, with no bumps. The only real trick to this corner is choosing a brake pressure, and a proper approach.

The approach will be somewhat curved, almost no matter what line you take. As you cross back over the track after exiting turn 2 in preparation for turn 3, keep in mind that you don't want to rush it. Let the track come to you. Point the car at your chosen brake marker, probably between the 3 and the 2 board, and just let it come to you. Turn the car a fraction before braking, and then apply a very light, trailing brake pressure as you enter the corner. The whole thing from braking to the exit is one big sweep.

In your average road sports car, braking is probably between 20 and 40%. It's just a moderate brush. Turn 3 is big on initial rotation. Get the car to the angle you want soon, and it will carry it through the corner very easily. It's easy to over-slow, because it looks tighter than it really is, so be sure to work on really carrying the speed through.

There is a lot of track to use, because it's wide. Make sure you use all of the inside rumble strips. Whether or not to use the rumble strips on the entry depends on what you want in the car. All of the entry rumble strips will destabilize the outside of the car if you turn-in while using them. So if you don't feel like the car is turning into the corner with enough gusto, try using the rumble strips on the entry. It will help get to that ideal angle early.

Turn 4.

Turn 4 is great for spectators. It's always a crowd favorite. It's high speed, the grand stands are nicely positioned to see everything, and there are always porta-potties right nearby.

Turn 4 is probably my least favorite turn on the track. For a driver, the rest of the course kind of spoils you. Mazda Raceway is flattering for a driver. The banked, flowing turns really make you feel a bit invincible.

Turn 4 brings that all crashing down. It's flat, just like turn 3. It's the highest speed flat corner on the course, and that really brings home how much you're gaining with all the banking in the rest of the high speed corners.

It's really similar to turn 3 in many respects, just faster. The same rumble strip destabilization trick applies, as does the light braking (if any). It's really got no foibles beyond that. It's flat, it's smooth, it's fast, and it's unflattering. Turn in can be a bit snappy if you like, just a little bit, and that seems to help set the car fairly well. Setup permitting.

Turn 5.

Turn 5. Back to flattering. It's lying straight to our face, but we don't care - we like banking. Turn 5 begins the mainstay of Laguna Seca: the hill.

Braking for turn 5 is lighter than you'd expect. It's not a threshold braking corner like turn 2 at all. Turn 5 relies on huge entry speed which will later be useful as we transition to the banking. Braking later and harder just doesn't allow us to maximize that entry. So I brake with about 70% force, and really roll the car into the corner. There isn't much trail brake action in turn 5. If you're braking for turn 4, you'll probably have a similar brake release as you begin turning for turn 5. The car always seems to turn in really well on it's own here, so it's not even required.

You're going to want to shoot for an early apex here. At first glance it looks like a late apex corner, but remember that we're transitioning onto that huge banking. As we do so, the front end is really going to hook up and respond with renewed enthusiasm. So to maximize that effect, we're gonna want to apex a bit earlier. That, combined with our early brake release, should have us at a pretty good clip going into the corner. If you really hustle into the corner, you'll probably feel a wash of understeer as you apex, which will quickly dissipate as you reach the banking.

From there the exit should be pretty automatic. Most cars should be finding the edge of the road just as the white part of the rumble strip is beginning, or thereabouts.

Turn 6. My favorite.

Turn 6 is undoubtedly my favorite turn on the circuit. Tons of banking, very high speed, quick and dirty.

The approach is fast and blind. You're going uphill, so your acceleration won't be too killer, but you'll still be hustling along pretty good. You'll see the brake markers on the right before you see the corner. If you've got a lot of power you'll even be braking before you see it. In fact you won't be able to pick up the apex until you are just about ready to turn in.

The turn in is definitely early. I turn the Miata at about the 1.5 board. Most cars probably won't be much later than that, some will definitely be earlier.

The key is to get your eyes transfixed on the apex absolutely as soon as possible. Memorize that point and look to it before you even see the corner, look straight through the ground. The car really needs to be eased into the corner and the earlier you can lock on to your reference points the smoother it will be.

The other key is to completely use that inside rumble strip. In the picture above, if you look to the rumble strip just behind the rider's inside knee, you'll notice it's irregular relative to the asphalt. All of the rumble strips at Mazda Raceway are like this. Almost each and every one slopes away from the race track. That's why the destabilization effect works in turns 3 and 4, and many other corners (including turn 6).

If one accepts that banking is good (yes, it is - banking is our friend, we like banking), then one can only conclude that this slopeage is helpful. So use it.

Also, due to the relative increased banking afforded to the inside wheels from the rumble strip, the further to the inside you run, the more banking you get. So use it all and get to where your inside tire is just skirting the edge of that big nasty red hump on the apex.

One other thing to keep in mind is that this is the first corner we'll encounter during that lap that features a road that falls away from you on the entry. That's the biggest reason for the early turn in. The car is going to understeer as you drop into the bowl of the corner. It's going to feel like you're going to crash, but you have to trust the banking to catch the front end and spit you out right where you want to be.

On the exit, you'll want to fight the tendency to come over to the left to set up the Corkescrew. Stay to the right. The race track will come right to you. You don't have to do a thing.

The Corkscrew.

Here we go. This is it. This is probably the reason why you're here - to experience the mighty, jaw-dropping, ball-clenching, roller-coaster-impersonating Corskcrew.

From the track-side, this thing looks unbelievable. When you really just sit and marvel at the beast, you can't help but wonder how the cars go through it so fast, and so reliably with such little drama.

From the passenger seat it is a unique experience to say the least. Your body feels weightless as you crest. The wind shield practically fills up with road as you begin the descent. To your right is a wall of gravel and sand. Behind you is nothing but sky. To your left, a driver who looks as calm as is he was simply negotiation a particularly vertical driveway.

Why?

I'll tell you a little secret. The Corkscrew is just a chicane.

Armed with this knowledge, anyone can tame the beast.

Oh, and don't forget the tree. No, not the big one with two trunks, the smaller one, on the right. Aim for it and stomp the gas. You'll be fine.

Other than that, just remember to mind the crest as you brake, and just like turn 6, pick up those reference points as soon as possible.

Turn 9, Rainey Curve.

Turn 9 is the real roller coaster ride. It's also the most nuanced corner on the track. It's the bumpiest, it's the vaguest, it's most definitely the longest, and, depending who you talk to, the most ununderstandable. If you ask 5 different drivers about it, you'll get 5 different techniques to nailing it.

My technique is to not enter it from the edge of the road. Rather, I'm about 1 to 1.5 car widths off the edge. The banking seems to work better on the inside, and I'm pretty sure the bumps are worse "out there". The turn-in point is a bit of a guess. There are some patches and seams in the road that you can pick up on for cues, however. The whole thing is one big sweep, and the actual "legitimate" turn in point is really just a slight increase in the amount of steering you're doing.

The apex is earlier than it looks. You'll want to pick up the rumble strip as soon as it begins. There's a tiny bit of transition to help you down here. The car will hook up slightly, somewhat similarly to turn 5, except you're coming off the banking rather than going onto it.

Be careful on the exit, as the road falls away slightly. And it's a bit bumpy. If you're off line, things can get a little hairy. I've seen cars doing full lock drifts through the exit. As I said, it falls off, so the car is easy to save. Even a slow turn 9 will probably see a lot of wheel action, so don't take it as the limit of the car just because you corrected the wheel slightly. It's probably a false limit incurred by bumps. Don't take too much heed of your hands. Your butt is much more useful here.

Throttle control is everything in Rainey. You'll be playing with it the whole way, trying to get the back end to do what you want. Unless your car has entirely too much horsepower, you'll probably be flat by the time you apex.

Rainey is scary. It takes big guts to keep adding throttle going this steeply downhill. Corkscrew is a great lead-in for the corner because it's a confidence builder. Try to carry that confidence into turn 9. You'll need it.

Turns 10 and 11.

Turn 10 is like a big turn 6 really. You're going to have to brake a little but the basics are the same - early turn in, early-ish apex, the track falls away as you enter and the banking will pick you up as you exit.

Don't be too eager to get back over for turn 11. Stay on the left side of the road until the white rumble strip ends. Really let the track flow to you. If you drop a wheel (easily done), and you try to get back over in a rush for turn 11 out of habit, you'll probably spin out.

Braking for turn 11 is a full on affair. Completely shut it down with full threshold braking. Turn 11 is a fairly typical corner. There is an odd dip in the middle which you probably won't feel unless you know it's there, but it doesn't seem to mess with the car much. When you're on the lookout for it you will probably feel the car kind of give a little scoot as you go over it. I'd imagine in higher horsepower cars that dip is more troublesome.

Now all you gotta do is avoid the astroturf on the exit past the rumble strip and you've completed a lap at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. That wasn't so bad, was it?

(146) Misaligned

2011-07-26T15:04:00.000-07:00

After the many hurdles of the last race, the Spec Miata Festival at Mazda Raceway, the car needed some work done. We had broken the legality seals on the engine trying to fix a stretched rod, and the right rear quarter had unibody damage from a hit in turn 3. The engine got re-sealed, and the body panels smoothed out. The bodywork ended up costing about a grand. And so the car was ready for the test day and regional race weekend at Thunderhill.

The July races at Thunderhill Raceway are generally the hottest ones of the year, or so I hear from around the paddock. Still, the temps decided to stay in the mid-90s which, depending on what side of the fence you're on, isn't so bad.

On the morning of the Friday test session, I headed out of the pits with new brake pads and new tires for the first session of the day. During the 5-MPH trip through the paddock, I noticed that the steering was not straight. I figured the steering wheel was put on crooked, since that's happened before. I would fix it before entering the race track. So I pulled over and pulled the steering wheel off. Nope, it was set straight and true.

Well now. We have a problem.

So I brought it back to the pits and had a more critical look at the rear wheels. Sure enough, they weren't straight. Sometime during the repair process the alignment must have got messed with pretty severely. The right rear was toed out (which means it was pointing towards the outside), and the left rear was toed in. That means the rear wheels were steering the car left (imagine rear-wheel steering on a fork lift or something) and to compensate I had to turn the steering to the right about 15 degrees.

We spent most of the test day playing with the alignment. No matter what we did we just could not get it to track straight. In addition to the alignment problems, the car was having trouble with the heat. The stock radiator, which is usually more than sufficient, just could not keep the engine cool. Car owner Ed Railton taped a duct around the radiator and that improved things to a bearable level for the car, but it was still getting warm. If the car got too hot, I had control of the heater, which would suck some heat from the engine and, obviously, dump it in the cockpit. It would also sap some power, but if it kept it from going pop, that was preferable.

The overheating issue wasn't just limited to the engine. I was having issues with it as well. The first few test sessions were double-killer, because not only was I dealing with a potentially killer car setup (it was very twitchy in left hand corners because of the alignment), I was also dealing with killer heat. The temps weren't too bad outside the car, but inside, where I had to wear 4 layers of heavy Nomex, a balaclava, a helmet, and suede racing shoes, it was about 120 degrees for my upper body, and about 140 to 150 for my feet and legs, since the exhaust runs very close to the pedals. You get a little airflow from the windows, but it's not a whole lot, and the fresh air gets quickly cooked by the sun beating down on the roof and the engine dumping heat through the vents and center console (where the exhaust runs). Thankfully the pedals themselves were not super-heated, like is usually the case with big front engined cars, but the air down there was more like an oven. It hurts just to sit in it, and I've never experienced heat like that before in my life. I drove the Skip Barber formula car on some hot days, but since it's an open cockpit car with loosely fitting body panels you get plenty of air flow in that car, so it's not anywhere near as bad as the Miata.

But all closed cockpit racing cars are like that. It's the same for everyone. It's just new to me. I think, if I continue racing closed cars in high heat, I'm going to need a cooling device more effective than a bag of ice shoved down my suit (which only lasts about 20 minutes anyway). An expensive, but refreshing Cool Shirt may be on order for next year. Still, the ice kept it bearable.

Saturday rolled around and with only a qualifying session left before the race, the setup situation was looking desperate. Thankfully, that morning, Tim Barber at TFB Performance had rolled up in his hauler with his laser alignment system. 120 bucks and 40 minutes and all of the handling problems (including some tire wear problems) on the car were shot dead. Unfortunately I had to qualify on the bad setup, but I would have a good car for the race. We added some front camber for a more aggressive use of the tire, and got the rear alignment to within 1/32nd of an inch of zero. Tim thought there might still be something bent ever so slightly in the right rear. But the car still went straight.

Qualifying wouldn't have benefited from the improved setup anyway, since I had traffic troubles and only managed to get 5th in class. All of the cars suffered in lap times, and few people were below 2:10. I myself never bettered 2:12. I think the Sealed cars were having more issues with the heat than the unsealed cars.

The race start was very hectic. The car I was following pulled off in the 2nd to last corner complex during the pace lap and left me with a large gap to close before taking the green. I got back up to the appropriate grid spot in time and the leaders stepped on it coming out of the final corner. But then they braked, hard, stacking up the rest of the field. The green finally flew and off we went.

I got a terrible launch and cars swarmed around my rear bumper in turn 1. I was timid, because this was the first hot lap on the new setup and I didn't know how it would react. Turn 1 is about 93 MPH on a fast lap. I had to drop to 3rd gear on the exit and three cars passed me. I was stuck on the outside line in turn 2, and up ahead I saw three-wide action. I scooted back up a spot through turn 5, and finally the field was single file.

At the end of lap one Fred Peterson in the red #9 car passed me in turn 10. This is important because he is another Sealed car, so it was a pass for class position.

At the start of lap two I saw a cloud of dust up ahead in turn 1. A number of cars were involved in some jostling and I think a couple spun. As I rounded the bend I aimed the car for the middle of the track, because I was going nearly 90 and I was fast approaching a blinding wall of dust. Surely cars were behind the veil. Experience told me that any cars involved in such a high speed incident would be to the sides of the track, possibly re-joining the pavement.

It turned out to be a good call because Juan Pineda was rejoining the track, and I was closing on him at about 50 or 60 MPH. If I had stayed on my normal like it would have been a very, very bad accident, as he materialized instantly out of the cloud and I would not have had time to avoid him. David Petruska was also rejoining the track to the inside. If that isn't a graphic example to do your best to think rationally on the race track I don't know what is.

At the end of the lap in turn 14 my team mate, David Allen in the silver 84 car, had some contact with a spun car which deformed his right front fender. The deformation formed a sharp shiv, which began to eat away at his tire in left hand corners. If I asked you to come up with a shape to shave rubber off a tire, you would draw this diabolical piece of body work. As a result, David's tire was coming to pieces and as I followed him limping through the front half of the course, bits of his tire were bouncing over my wind shield.

Later in lap three I finally found the limit of my new setup in turn 9 when I got a huge slide coming over the crest at 72 MPH. I held it, saved it, and didn't lose too much time.

A bit later and David's tire was giving up. He slowed through turn 6 and let everyone through. He did end up finishing the race though.

The rest of my race was scattered, but fun. I ended up chasing down Fred Peterson and took my spot back. I finished the race in 4th place in class, only about a second and a half behind the 3rd place car of Alan Gjedsted (the green #5 car), who I was catching rapidly. There was simply not time enough in the race to apprehend him.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy the footage. I worked hard for it.

Race #7 onboard footage.

The second qualifying went much better, and placed me 3rd in class on the grid. The race itself was less intense, and I finished where I started in class placing, though I did move up a few spots overall.

(145) Small world

2011-07-12T16:42:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I took a trip down to Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca in order to soak up the atmosphere of the Grand Am and SCCA Pro races at the Continental Tire Sports Car Festival.

Along the way I signed up to do some volunteer work for the SCCA. Nothing too heavy, just to spend a few hours manning a membership information booth in the vendor area.I spent a few hours there, although the foot traffic wasn't too heavy and I and the other volunteers only ended up talking to a few people during my stint. Most people were busy watching the Continental Tire Sports Car Challenge race that was going on.

One of my coaches from Skip Barber, Thomas Merrill, was driving for a new team (A.M. Performance) during the Continental Tire race, driving a Nissan 370z. Unfortunately the car had a mechanical failure and had to retire. They ran well though, inside the top ten. Not easy to do in a 60-car field.

The racing world is really small. I always used to think racing was more compartmentalized, but no, it really is small, with all kinds of drivers and team members crossing over from region to region, genre to genre. I'm still new to this world and it still seemed like I couldn't go more than 200 feet without bumping into someone I knew. Some people I hadn't seen in a long while, others just from the last month.

The SCCA is also a very huge part of that small world. The SCCA provides most of the volunteers, corner workers and safety personnel for most of the road races in the US. That includes Grand Am, IndyCar, and IMSA. Many of the same workers who volunteer for the club races also volunteered for Grand Am last weekend. Which is really cool.

Here's some pictures I took.

MX-5's during the SCCA Pro Racing playboy MX-5 Cup race. These are the grandsons of my racing car for this year (20 years their sire).

The view from the grand stands.

Grand Am Rolex Daytona Prototypes and Grand Touring cars in the feature event.

San Francisco Region SCCA members working hard to keep everyone as safe as possible.

(144) Gentleman's club

2011-06-30T18:48:00.000-07:00

It's the middle of the San Francisco SCCA season, and that means it's time to look at points. Here are the top ten drivers in the championship for Sealed Spec Miata after 6 rounds (25 drivers in total):

1. David Petruska: 154
2. Michael Niemann: 154
3. Alan Gjedsted: 114
4. David Allen: 104
5. Gregory Evans: 86
6. Fred Peterson: 78
7 Bob Murillo: 76
8 Joe Kalinowski: 64
9 David Anderson: 62
10 Joshua Fine: 60

The rest of the points can be found here: regional championship points standings

The reason why I'm occupying the fifth spot is because of last weekend. I got no points in the Sealed class because of the fact we had to break the seals in order to fix the engine. During the season we are allowed two drop races, which means only the highest 11 points earnings will count towards the championship. I've now used both of my drop races. Everything from here on goes on the board.

I'm finding racing with the SCCA most enjoyable. My fellow racers are a friendly bunch. Most racers are friendly, but the guys in Spec Miata take it to the next level. They're extended family. If you need a part, or a helping hand, they will share. If you need advice, they will share. Gentleman's racing is definitely still alive and kicking. Obviously in SCCA club racing there isn't that professional bent, but that also removes the win at all costs attitude that tends to go with it.

I wanna help the club along a little bit so I'm volunteering to man a new member signup booth at the Grand Am event at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca on the 9th next month. I won't be deskbound all day so I will be able to roam around and take photos for you guys, as well as talk to some teams and network a bit. Grand Am is a real option for me to move up the ranks so meeting people in the paddock will be important.

Finally, I'll leave you with the 6th regional race onboard footage. It's not terribly exciting but it's still racing. I mostly chase the white #40 driven by Kyle Gayman. He was proving really tough to get by and I ended up only having one chance to do it in the whole race. Unfortunately it wasn't enough.

There is a full course caution behind the safety car in the middle of the race for a beached car in turn 6. Again, I'm racing in the SMT class this time due to the broken seals situation. This was after the car was fixed, and I was able to qualify for the race. I started 13th overall, and finished 13th overall (12th in class).

Race 6 onboard footage.

(143) Hardship lap

2011-06-21T14:39:00.000-07:00

Back to Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca for races 5 and 6 in the San Francisco Region SCCA Sunoco Challenge. This weekend was a bit different due to the inclusion of the Spec Miata Festival race, as well as a rare test day at Laguna Seca. It was going to be a big weekend.

We started out early on the test day by meeting Ric McCormick for another day of coaching. We started off by driving around the edge of the circuit to talk about some lines and reference points. The test day was going to give me a ton of track time, about two and a half hours of green flag running. We slapped the test set of tires on after a thorough briefing with Ric and off I went under the fog.

I immediately set the fastest time I've had on the dash lap timer, which was a 1:49.2. Unfortunately, the tires started to fall off later in the session and I never got better than that. Ric continued to work with me through the day and we made a ton of progress on my driving, though my times got slower and slower as the day went on because of the tires. They were completely cooked at the end of the day and the right front had cords showing. That's not the way to get the best stick out of them. By then it was hard to get a 1:51.

In terms of what Ric was teaching me, we mostly focused on driver smoothness, footwork, and using all the track. Mazda Raceway has very gentle curbs. Actually they're not curbs, they're just chatter strips really. Figuring out when to use them and when to avoid them is still a little puzzle to work out. Sometimes using them as you enter a corner can destabalize the car, or it can give you an extra 2 feet of track to work with. After Ric's coaching, I felt like I was ready for the weekend. Ric said my turn 6, a very fast, blind left hander at the bottom of the hill that goes to the Corkscrew, was pretty much perfect. Makes sense to me because I love that corner. I gained time on every car that I was behind when we would go through turn 6.

On Friday, we went out for practice in the morning. We put my newer race tires on the Miata with the optimized pressures we worked out on the test day. As I pulled out of pit lane, I noticed the car sounded slightly raspy, and a little louder. More like the fully built cars in the class above me. I decided to wait and see what it sounded like in another lap or two. I didn't have long to wait.

On lap 3, heading up the hill to the Corkscrew, I heard and felt a loud knock coming from the engine. I immediately pulled it in, it sounded pretty serious. Back at the pit, we decided to break the seals on the engine in order to find out what was wrong. The cams and valves looked fine, so owner Ed Railton pulled the head in order to look in the cylinders. He found a connecting rod had stretched, and the piston head was hitting the cylinder head.

The further away of the two piston heads shows signs of hitting the cylinder head. Who ever thought a lack of build-up was a bad thing?

The hitting wasn't bad. It wasn't enough to damage the valves. Really all it did was clean off the edges of the piston head. But if allowed to continue it would have caused serious problems.

I thought my weekend was going to be over. But Ed, being awesome, suggested he trailer it the two and a half hours north, back to the shop, where he would spend the night rebuilding the engine. I asked him if he really wanted to do that, if it would be too much trouble. But he said no, it would be nice, because he could take his time and do it right. He said he'd enjoy it.

It's times like these I'm really glad I walked into that shop with the race cars out front many months ago. I couldn't ask for a cooler car owner.

The only other session that was scheduled for Friday afternoon was qualifying. Obviously I wasn't going to make that. So a bunch of us from around the paddock pushed the car onto the trailer (with me steering, since I'm the lightest), and Ed headed homeward with the little Miata in tow after he was done qualifying in his Spec Racer Ford. Either the car would be there in the morning, and we'd know things went smoothly, or it wouldn't, in which case my weekend was over as far as racing was concerned. I was confident in Ed.

At the end of the day of racing, a special Spec Miata photo was to be taken of all the running Miatas near the Corkscrew. I hitched a ride with my team mate, David Allen. Spec Miatas have no passenger seats so I had to crouch as we went around the track at 35 MPH. We took a number of photos.

During the evening we held the party for the Spec Miata Festival. All the Miata drivers came over to our end of the paddock, where Cook Motorsports had set up a fantastic dinner and raffle. Most of the drivers brought raffle prizes, ranging from wine to books to gloves and everything inbetween. SCCA had a bunch of prizes, including free test days and race entries, and of course Mazda brought some prizes, in the form of $2,000 to be split among many prize winners. There were so many prizes and winners I began to lose track. Just about everyone got something it seemed. I myself got a case of beer (yes, I'm 21) and a free test day at Infineon!

In the morning, we drove into the paddock, waved at the gate guard, and peered into our pits for a silver and yellow striped car as we drove up. We didn't have far to look.

There was the little dude, in the same spot we pulled it's heart apart, with a small puddle of coolant underneath. We went to find miracle worker Ed to get the sitrep.

Ed had stayed up till about 3 AM putting the engine back together in a tremendous show of commitment to his machines. The only remaining issue was to get a new clamp on a coolant hose that had a small leak, which was the source of the puddle. 5 minutes later and the 78 Miata was ship-shape and ready for a shakedown. I trotted off to find the chief steward to get approval for a "hardship lap", which is a lap for a single car in order to check that it is running smoothly. I would be released at the end of a session while the cars were making their cooldown and victory laps.

Before I went out for the lap, coach Ric came by and presented me with a loaner radio. We would use the radio in the race so that he could spot for me as I made my way from the back of the pack, since I missed qualifying. The hardship lap would be a good time to test it.

A little bit later I was released from pit lane to start the cooldown lap. Ric was in my ear testing comms in each corner. The Miata felt really good. It felt like it had more power, and the engine was running smooth as silk. When I got back, we found that the mild oil evaporation issue with the last engine was gone. No more topping it up between sessions.

I could hear Ric in the radio except from turn 5 to turn 9. Kind of a big dead spot but he couldn't see me there from the tower anyway.

Unfortunately, since the engine had to be rebuilt, that also meant I had to change classes. Normally I run in the Sealed Spec Miata class. The engines have seals put on them, ensuring a level playing field in terms of horsepower and reducing the cost to compete. The problem is, the Sealed cars have less horsepower than the "fully built" SMTs, which run at the same time as the Sealed cars (SMT is Spec Miata - Toyo). Since we had to open the engine, the seals were broken, and I was no longer legal for the Sealed class. So I became a "smut". The points from Sealed were forfeit, and I was now competing against cars with 10 or 15 more horsepower and in some cases, a lot more torque.

Now it's time to race. This was going to be my first time, ever, starting where I "should not have". That is to say, in the back, by virtue of no fast time. 60 cars were ahead of me. I should have been starting ahead of at least 45 of them. This was going to be interesting. Have a gander at this footage.

Regional #5 footage, from the back. And yes, that is from the very start. The back of the pack is always a mess because there isn't enough time for the entire field to get properly gridded up.

Dramatic. Disappointing. Surprising.

This is what I've pieced together after talking with the other drivers and reviewing the footage in slow motion. The silver 08 car driven by John Grillos missed a shift. He was having transmission issues all weekend. My exhaust is quiet. We shifted at pretty much the same time, so when I let out the clutch, his motor revved in neutral. I thought it was me. So I looked down at my gear stick in order to fix it (I can't really just put my hand on the stick while racing and have enough mental precision to feel it in neutral versus 3rd gear, with such a short-throw gearshift). When I verified I was good to go, I looked up, and I was on a collision course with John.

The blue 10 car of Christopher LaBouff was in the process of going by John to the inside. All I saw were cars on the right side. I figured, in a split second, that the left offered the clearest track. So I went left.

Once I was along side, John must have looked up from fixing his transmission and, like me, saw Christopher to the inside. He steered left, only the left side of the track wasn't clear. I was there. So, we collided, lightly. The only damage that was done from the initial impact was some rubber donuts down my door.

Once we were both off-track, we spun. I spun around 180 degrees to face backwards. John spun 360 degrees. As I came to a rest, and as John was getting straight, his car hit mine fairly hard in the right rear. Since I was facing backwards, his right side hit my right side.

My suspension was bent, the car would barely corner, and at speeds above 60, it was wiggling the rear end fairly severely, as well as not tracking straight. So I retired.

Back in the pits the damage, apart from the bent suspension components, looked pretty cosmetic, and it was limited to the rear quarter panel and suspension.

The damage. This was taken after we cleaned most of the marks and things off.

The damage was quickly repaired by Ed, who has really had his work cut out for him this weekend.

Next was qualifying. Thankfully we got two qualifying sessions, with the second qualifying determining positions for both regional 6, and the Spec Miata festival race.

I started out by going a bit slowly down pit lane. I wanted to build a gap to the cars in front. Normally everyone just charges out all at once and they get all squashed. I just went a bit slower and got a gap. Unfortunately the stewards didn't take to this idea, and I got reprimanded when the session was over. Just a slap on the wrists, but I know not to do it again.

With Ric in my ear, the qualifying session went really well. I hit very little traffic, took some time in the middle to cool off the tires, and I ended up setting my fastest time ever at Mazda Raceway, with a 1:48.48 lap, which put me 13th overall on the grid for race 6.

Race 6 went fairly well. I lost a couple of positions on the start due to my lack of horsepower relative to the other SMTs with fully built engines. Sealed Spec cars always have trouble on starts due to that discrepancy. A really good start for a Sealed car just means you don't get passed by SMTs going into turn 1. But due to a couple of spins I made those positions back up.

Most of the race was spent chasing the number 40 wheeled by Kyle Gayman. His engine was a 1.8 liter, mine a 1.6, but he had a weight penalty. I would catch him in the corners but he would pull me on the straights, especially going up the hill to turn 8, the Corkscrew. In the end I never quite got an ideal opportunity to get by, and I finished 13th overall, 12th in class. Man, I wish I was in the Sealed class. I would have finished 2nd. But that award went to team-mate David Allen.

In the Spec Miata Festival race, a number of cars did not start. So I got moved up a little bit right away from my starting position. Sadly, most of my race was spent alone, with the only real racing excitement coming when cars spun in front of me and I caught them. I ended up finishing 9th overall and 8th in class. Again I would have got second in Sealed Spec and a nice trophy. But oh well.

All in all, it was a fantastic, if trying weekend.

A real adventure.

(142) Tire kicker

2011-06-08T15:51:00.000-07:00

I like test driving cars. I like comparing them, and the sense of discovery you get when you explore a car's traits.

So far the cars I've raced have all been very different, from the kart at Jim Russell, to the Formula 2000 car at Skip Barber, to now the Spec Miata under Ed Railton's ownership. Going from the kart to the F2000 was a big jump. But going from the F2000 to the Miata doesn't seem so different.

The very first thing you notice when you start to push the Miata, when compared to the F2000, is the weight balance. The F2000 has a lot of weight in the rear, like a Porsche. That makes it kinda iffy when entering corner, as you try to rotate the car with that big mass back there. It does rotate, you just need to finesse it more using your feet (brake and gas inputs) to get it right.

The Miata, at least from the factory, has even weight distribution front to back (once you strip it out and add a roll cage that changes a little, but it's sill mostly "perfectly" balanced). That means it behaves very similarly when both exiting and entering corners. It's like the difference between trying to balance a pencil on your finger, and a screwdriver. The screwdriver is very uneven in it's weighting. It's harder to manage balancing it there. The pencil is easy, because front to back it's basically the same. It's pretty similar principle when you're switching to "balancing" a car while entering a corner, using the brake. Just more complicated.

The Miata also has more physical grip than the F2000, thanks to the slick tires (the F2000 has street tires). But it weighs more, almost twice as much as the formula car, so the actual G forces while cornering are about the same (about 1.3 G, maybe 1.5 with good banking). The F2000's suspension is also very soft for a formula car, so both cars move around under you much the same. There is one dip, right after the apex of turn 11 at Mazda Raceway, that feels and affects both the cars in pretty much the same way. Speaking of weight, with much less horsepower (113 as opposed to 150), that added weight really saps the acceleration. At Mazda Raceway, the Miata will only graze 100 MPH on the main straight. The formula car will do about 108.

The biggest difference, though, is the addition of fenders and the sheer size of the Miata. Yes, it's a tiny car, and the roofline is at my belly button, and it only takes about two strides to go from one end of the car to the other, but it's still massive to me, because most of my racing has been in the kart, and the F2000 was pretty miniscule as well. Nevertheless, I do overestimate the Miata's size in racing conditions some times. I do that towards the end of this new video and a car driven by Cameron Rogers squeezes by on the main straight, which was during race 1 from last weekend at Laguna Seca.

Race 1 from Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca on May 28th.

I really didn't think he could fit through there.

The next race is going to be on June 18th. It's a big one, the Spec Miata Festival. 4 days of driving, including a test day with a bunch of hours of running, and 3 races over the weekend. I've got myself a bigger memory card for the Contour so I'll be able to catch all the action on camera.

(141) Return to Laguna

2011-06-01T12:37:00.000-07:00

I knew race #3 was going to be interesting the moment I learned it was to be a 2-day event at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. Normally SCCA regional events are double-format, three-day affairs, with two "sanction numbers" being run on each weekend, such as the last weekend at Thunderhill which held races #1 and #2. During the weekend you get one practice, two qualifying runs, and two races of course.

But, track time at Laguna is at a premium this year. The club is so tight on scheduling that we actually only get one test day in the entire year, which is going to be in front of the Spec Miata Festival event next month, which is, thankfully, a 3-day event minus the test day.

The track time constraints are only part of the equation though. The other half is the stringent sound policies in place at Mazda Raceway, since there are lots of homeowners nearby. The sound level limits actually change during the day, with under 90db in the mornings and late afternoons, and more open 103db levels in the midday.

Combine the two factors, lack of track time and the need to fit certain classes into the appropriate sound window, and you've got a nightmare scheduling job.

Unfortunately, there was simply not enough time available to get everyone the normal amount of sessions, so one qualifying session was dropped. That means both races would have the same grid order, so you had only one shot to get your spot for the races. And now we have yet another problem.

Normally Spec Miata has so many entries that the club separates practice and qualifying sessions so that odd numbered cars all run one session, then the even numbered cars will run a session. This effectively splits the field and allows you more space on the race track.

This time, there was no room for that. All 50 cars had to be on track at the same time for both practice and qualifying.

So, combine all these factors, including the fact I've never driven at Mazda Raceway in the Miata, and I have one busy weekend. I needed to get up to speed very quickly.

The Miatas were the first guys out. The track wasn't terribly "green", since the Skip Barber schools run there as well as plenty of track days, so the track still had some rubber on it. The weather was gorgeous even at 8:30 in the morning, which, in Monterey, can sometimes be fairly fogged in.

Good morning, Mazda Raceway.

On track I immediately realized that traffic was going to be a real problem. In 20 minutes of running, I got maybe 2 mostly clean laps. In those laps I set high 1:49 times, about 2 seconds off the pace of the fastest SSM piloted by Michael Niemann. Without more clean laps, improvement was going to be real difficult. But I was happy I was able to get decently quick times in the first session. All the running with Skip Barber in the F2000 there last year helped a ton.

The Miata really likes Mazda Raceway. Or, at least, mine did. The car was set up fairly "loose" from the get-go, and it was easy to make the tail come around. It seemed to like it that way, and especially here, with very few bumps or sudden camber changes, the car can really take a set and dig in. I was ready for qualifying.

Or so I thought. I didn't manage traffic properly and I got stuck in a big wad of cars. My best qualifying time put me in 17th overall and 5th in class. I had work to do if I was going to make it up the field.

The first Miata race was the last during the day, at 4:35, because of the sound restrictions. The Miatas are able to run very quiet so they go first and last at Laguna. My start was good. I held my position (which is always the primary goal on race starts or restarts), and I got a little lucky, since one of the cars in front of me did not start, I got to move up a row, although I was now on the outside rather than the inside.

The first couple of laps were interesting. The 6 car of Matt Rose took me going into turn 5, and I stayed behind him in the hope that he'd carve me a path. Then on lap 2 my investment paid off when the 74 of Cameron Rogers took a little dive down the inside of the Corkscrew and got into a big slide, lost momentum, and I shot down the inside into turn 9. Cameron tried to come back at me in turn 10 but I stuck to the outside and held on to my new position.

I continued to hold onto my spot for a number of laps longer. I was chasing the 55 of Joe Kalinowski, who had previously lost his rear bumper from contact with Matt in turn 3. Like at Thunderhill, with his bumper gone, I found it very hard to get a draft and catching up was proving a bit difficult with Cameron applying pressure behind me.

As the race progressed I noticed the light getting dimmer and dimmer. The clouds were getting more and more threatening. I half expected it to rain at any second.

In the middle of the race Joe had a bad exit coming out of turn 11. It was a pretty unstressful pass down into the Andretti Hairpin. I was now in the lead of our little group.

This continued with Joe pursuing for a little while, until we hit lap traffic going into turn 2. There was a "standing" yellow flag, meaning there was a car off track (waved yellows usually mean a car is spun or crashed on-track). The lapped car attempted to run wide and let me by in the middle of turn 2, but since we were not yet past the incident, I had to hold off on the pass. In doing so I scrubbed some speed. Cameron also tried a move to the outside of Joe, which I can see in the rear view mirror on the onboard footage, but I didn't notice it inside the car at the time. Cameron got penalized 3 class positions for passing under that yellow. The SCCA marked the penalty as "passing under double yellow", but there was no safety car period save for the pace lap at the start of the race. I think it's just a mistype.

Later that lap we caught more traffic. They were embroiled in a battle and I saw one car go for the pass in turn 9. I figured I could get in there and follow him through, or capitalize on any mistakes made. Unfortunately the passing car got cold feet and slowed up, forcing me to do the same. I still had a run though, so I punched down the inside into turn 10. I was left just enough room to squeak by, but I had lost my momentum and Joe pounced on the outside of turn 11. He carried a bit too much speed, and it spat him out into the sand a little bit. That was what I needed, so I swept by on the run up the hill. The yellow in turn 2 had been lifted, but the spun car was still there, stuck in the gravel. Cameron also got by Joe under brakes for turn 2.

The next lap Cameron got a stonking run out of 11 and just managed to squeeze by at the start/finish line. I didn't think he had enough room, but I underestimated how small the Miatas really are. In the middle of that lap, at the Corkscrew, Cameron outbraked himself and went bouncing down the inside of 8b, which has a nasty dip at the bottom. That sent him into a huge slide across the track and into the sand. That took him out of the fight and now Joe and I only had to worry about each other.

2 corners later and I'm worrying. Here comes Joe again, inside for turn 11. He throws it in, but he outdoes himself and runs wide again. I think he might actually be able to salvage it and make it stick, but then... *crunch*, he botches a shift into 3rd gear and I take back my position.

I look up, and there's the checkered.

I didn't even know it was the last lap. I just had one of the most dramatic finishes to a race in my career, and I didn't have a clue. Maybe it was for the best. I ended up 4th in class and 13th overall. Not bad!

It was an awesome race and I have the full video recording of it, unfortunately I'm not allowed to upload more than 1 high-def video per week to Vimeo, so I will have to choose 1 race to upload now and save the other one for next week.

The one I will upload is the 2nd race of the weekend.

Race 2 full onboard footage.

It's hard to keep track of all the cars, but I actually finished 3rd in class in this race! My first podium in Sealed Spec Miata!

This race had a lot in it as well. My team-mate David Allen in the silver #84 got ahead of me and stayed there for a number of laps, until his motor had trouble. I figured he had a bad exit in turn 11, so I gave him a push, but when he didn't accelerate with me I went around him.

I also had a really good battle towards the end of the race with the black #50 car driven by Tupper Hull. I really recommend you watch the whole thing. I know it's half an hour, but it's pretty exciting I think!

It was a great weekend. Unfortunately on the trip home I came down with food poisoning. That put me out of action for Monday, so this post is getting out there a day late. I'll finish it off with a fun picture I got on the coast while climbing rocks.

Thanks SCCA Volunteers!

(140) Hooked on driving

2011-05-20T10:22:00.000-07:00

Dedicated readers may remember the tire situation during the season opener at Thunderhill. I had a set of test and practice tires that I was using for, well, testing and practice. These tires had a good amount of track time on them. I used them during the test day prior to the race weekend, and then I got a new set which would be my "competition" set, used for races and qualifying.

Unfortunately I did not know one key characteristic of the Toyo RA-1: they take a while to get to optimal grip. About 5 sessions, in fact. That's a downside, but the upside is they last absolutely forever and they will only get faster and faster as more and more "heat cycles" (cool to hot then back to cool again) are put on them. Most guys set their fastest laps as the cords begin to show.

I decided to run the faster test set during the races. The race set only got 2 heat cycles on them and at that time they were about 1.5-2 seconds per lap slow.

This leaves me the task of running in those new tires. And since there is no test day before the race at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca on the 28th, I needed to find something to run in the meantime.

Enter Hooked on Driving, a track day company. They provide venues for you to run your car, street or race, in structured sessions for much less than it costs for a full test day. They had an event at Infineon Raceway so I signed up, simply to run the track a little bit and get my tires run in.

Track days are days set up primarily to run non competition licensed drivers in street cars on race tracks. Ferraris, Audis, BMWs, and Porsches are fairly common sights. There is usually absolutely no competition, and very conservative passing rules, such as mandatory wave-bys and designated passing zones such as the front straight.

Fortunately for me Hooked on Driving has more liberal passing protocols in the race car group. A wave-by is all that's required.

The goals for the day were fairly laid back. Learn the track, get data for mental imaging, get the tires up to snuff, and do a 2:01 lap time or under.

The first session I took it really easy. I had it set in my head that I wouldn't really push past about 90% for the day, more like 80 or 85% in the first session. That would get enough heat in the tires to start affecting the compound and getting them to come in. I got the lines set in my head and made sure my steering inputs were right the first time as much as I could. And I avoided the turn 11 pit wall.

Throughout the day I just started working the cornering speeds up, then the throttle-on points sooner (to provide more exit speed), then moved the braking in closer in most corners. In the middle of the day I started taking turn 8, a pair of 90 MPH esses, with my foot flat to the floor. The car loved those turns and felt incredibly stable through there.

Around lunch time I met up with some of my past coaches, Andrew Shoen, Jeff Sakowicz and Mike Hill who were instructing an Audi event. It was good to catch up with them and share some stories.

In the afternoon the track started getting really grippy, and the tires were feeling really good. I eventually got down to a 2:00.9 lap time. That's about 3 seconds off the quick guys in Spec Miata but like I said I wasn't really trying to push too hard. A bit more effort and I could see a full second coming off that time fairly easily.

It was a very enjoyable day since there was no competition to worry about. Just driving and having a ball.

I think I'll do more track days at some point. I just don't have a road car that's suited to it.

There have been some developments in the Spec Miata field recently. A hole in the rules has been closed.

Sealed Spec Miata requires that the engine be dyno'd by MCE racing at Thunderhill. The cars have to be below 115 horsepower. The engine is then sealed and everyone forgets about it. This used to be a one-time deal, so naturally people found a way to get around it and boost their horsepower after the engine gets sealed.

A change has been made to that. Cars can now be disqualified for being over the power limit. SCCA will be doing more dynamometer testing. Some cars have been found to be over the limit, and so can no longer compete in SSM until the power is brought back down. It's resulted in one particular very fast racer switching classes.

It's a good change in my opinion. Why wouldn't you continue to enforce the horsepower limit that you set for when the engine was built and sealed?

The field might be shaken up a little bit on May 28th, which is the date for the next race, at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca.

(139) Porsche test drive, plus one

2011-05-13T13:42:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago, my dad got a letter from Porsche. It was an invitation for two. The occasion was the Porsche World Road Show. Naturally, we RSVP'd with all due gusto.

No one is really sure where the invitation came from. Might've been through something at SCCA, or possibly Skip Barber, or perhaps even something he signed at a car show.

In any case, the event was an invitation to drive many of Porsche's best sports cars in an autocross-type event in the parking lot of Candlestick Park in San Francisco (home of the 49ers, that's American football for the rest of the world).

The only downside was that we had to get up at 5 AM to beat the traffic to our 7:30 registration time. Not too bad, since we're used to it.

Being San Francisco, it was foggy and cold and windy when we arrived. Arrayed out in front of us, to drive, was a selection of Porsche's lineup; the benchmark 911 Carrera (in base, S, and 4S trims), the sophisticated Cayman (in S and R trims, the latter having not even hit showrooms yet), and the frisky Boxster (in base, S, and Spyder trims).

I thought what I would do, since this is basically supposed to be a test drive +1, I'll devote a section to each car and compare them. I'll also throw in some technical specs just to get an idea of where they fit in the lineup, since Porsche makes so many cars (there are over 20 versions of the current 911 alone).

Two Porsche 911 Carreras and a Cayman exiting the "pits".

Porsche Cayman

MSRP: $65,520
Engine: mid-mounted 3.4 liter flat six cylinder
Horsepower: 320
Weight: 3031 lbs
0-60 MPH: 4.6 seconds

The first car up is the Cayman, both the S and R versions. The Cayman is basically a Boxster with a roof, and is the middle model in the sports car line. All of the cars were equipped with Porsche's 7-speed Doppelkupplung transmission. Loosely translated that means "dual clutch". We'll call it PDK for short, because if I try to say that one more time, my tongue is going to fall out.

Basically, the PDK has two half-sets of gears and two clutches. Both gears are engaged at the same time, so when you want to upshift, you simply pull the paddle and the car swaps clutches (and thus, gears) in about 8 milliseconds. There is an imperceptible drop in torque, and no jolt as with traditional e-gear systems with only one clutch. On the downchanges the computer is flawless in matching RPM and road speed, and is perfectly smooth.

The Cayman S itself was a very good car to drive. On the default suspension settings (that is to say, the softest settings), the car still felt very lively. The front end of the car is very "darty" on turn in and the overall feel is of extreme lightness and balance. On the exits the rear end had a skittesh tendency when on the power, but the amount of information the car transmits to the driver makes this virtually a non-issue. Not only does the car let you know very early when a slide moment is coming on, it also lets you know exactly how large that moment is going to be and that allows you to get on top of it very quickly.

The Cayman S feels playful, and has a little of that innocent "yeah, yeah, let's go!" kind of enthusiasm that dogs give you when they're about to go on a walk.

You needn't worry at all about getting too enthusiastic, however, since the Porsche Stability Management will kick in and save the car if you have a catastrophic collapse of talent. Normally stability programs interfere a lot with the driving, even below the limit. Porsche's program is purely a "save me" program. In other words, it won't kick in unless it thinks you need serious help. It will let you hang out around and even a little over the limit all day, but if it senses a spin, it will very capably and smoothly bring the car back into line.

You can occasionally feel the system make a very slight adjustment to the car every now and then, particularly over big bumps, but the changes are subtle and I doubt a novice driver will even realize they are being assisted. Unlike a lot of others systems, the program is also completely disableable, so you can spin and drift to your heart's content on the track.

The Cayman R.

The Cayman R feels much more serious than the Cayman S. The engine note seems a little growlier and the car is tuned to have a little more of a racecarish feel. There is more understeer in the R, seemingly to accommodate the extra ten horsepower, and the whole thing seems to have more grip due to the 150 or so pounds that have been pulled off the curb weight. I wasn't a huge fan of the R. It's very impressive and definitely a very good car, but I think if I were to choose one to own it would be the S. I just prefer the playful feel in road cars. Race car handling only helps you on the limit. Playfulness you can feel at any speed.

Porsche Boxster

MSRP: $51,520
Engine: mid-mounted 2.9 liter flat six cylinder
Horsepower: 255
Weight: 3009 lbs
0-60 MPH: 5.3 seconds

The Boxster is the baby in the Porsche range. It's the least expensive, it has the smallest engine, and the least horsepower. You might think it's the lightest, but it's not quite.

The initial impression of the basic Boxster is one of squidgyness. Even with the suspensions settings in their hardest mode, it feels like it rolls just a little too much and the result is a slightly sluggish feel at turn in and corner exit. It doesn't feel like it has enough torque, even though the horsepower number is perfectly acceptable for a car like this.

The Porsche Boxster.

All of these problems are fixed in the S version of the car, however. You'll pay another $11,000, but it's well worth the upgrade, since you get a 3.4 liter engine with 310 horsepower and much more usable torque, much improved suspension, bigger tires with more grip, and definitely the giddyest feeling Porsche in the range. While the Cayman S may have an excited feeling, the Boxster S feels absolutely inconsolable with untamed anticipation. It's really like riding a frisky horse, except you don't have the worry of being bucked off. The car is genuinely excited for you, not for itself. This is absolutely the purest sports car feeling I've ever beheld. The handling is very similar to the Cayman S, just with all this added feeling.

The next rung up the ladder is the Boxster Spyder. This is a fairly new version, and in my view one of the best looking Porsches ever made, though that seems to be a point of contention. It has a completely redesigned top and rear end. Inside it's a symphony of simple, as it doesn't even have door handles, just a cloth loop, and the soft top isn't powered - you need to build it, like a tent. The point of keeping it so simple is to save weight. The car only weighs 2866 pounds.

The Spyder is only slightly more expensive than the Boxster S, and you do get 10 more horsepower as with the Cayman R/Cayman S situation. Just like the Caymans, though, the Spyder has more serious handling than the S, with more understeer and stability, and much of that unbridled enthusiasm is gone. Horses for course, or somesuch.

The Porsche Boxster Spyder.

Porsche 911 Carrera

MSRP: $83,080
Engine: rear-mounted 3.6 liter flat six cylinder
Horsepower: 345
Weight: 3164 lbs
0-60 MPH: 4.5 seconds

And here we have it. The best for last. The legendary benchmark 911 Carrera.

I've had the pleasure of driving a 911 before, a 1983 Sport Classic, down a mountain road. It wasn't a race track, but I could still feel the various handling traits. It was quite an experience.

The modern 911, however, is in a totally different league. It has twice the horsepower of the old Sport Classic to start with, and the handling has been changed significantly, though many of the basic traits are still there.

In most ways the modern Carrera handles much like the Skip Barber F2000 race car I was driving last year. With so much weight in the rear, it produces some interesting effects. The throttle pedal becomes the major stabilizing force, and hard trail braking becomes a very precise affair. Slightly too much brake, and the front tires get easily overwhelmed and you understeer heavily, even before you hit the anti-lock brake system. Too little brake, and the car gets very squirrely as you turn into the corner.

The throttle pedal acts in a similar way. If you sensitively push the acceleration to the absolute limit of adhesion while exiting a corner, you get a tremendous amount of understeer, just before the tires start to spin and the tail steps out. Not enough throttle, or turn while off the throttle, and the car will want to spin. The whole setup is designed for maximum launch coming out of corners, while sacrificing the entry. If you're looking for a car to learn how to go "slow in, fast out", a 911 is probably your best bet.

These traits culminated in the reputation the early 911s gained as widowers. Inexperienced Porsche drivers would enter a corner faster than they meant to, and they would sharply lift or tentatively rub the brake. This would cause the car to spin out with little warning. The proper way to do it was to keep at least 20 or 30% throttle and motor out of the corner with the weight loaded on the rear wheels.

The difference these days is that countless hours have been spent by the Porsche engineers to minimize the dangerousness of this kind of handling. The result is that the modern Carrera now gives you plenty of warning, if you know what to listen for. If you don't know what to listen for, the Porsche Stability Management will sort it out for you.

Needless to say, the 911 is a very different beast than the cars we looked at earlier. The 911 Carrera feels much more mature than the other cars in the lineup, but it doesn't feel as serious as the Cayman R or the Boxster Spyder. It sort of feels like a Cayman S that's had a few more years and a few more pounds put on. It's wiser, more experienced, but it still seems to enjoy the fun of the journey in a kind of reflective, more thoughtful mode. It's not a pretender, but it's not arrogant and it doesn't make a large fuss. It still works out 3 times a week. Does that sound like babel to you? It kinda does to me. That's what the car drums up for me, anyway.

The legendary Carrera. Jeez I'm short.

The S version of the Carrera feels very similar to the base model, but a little more capable in terms of outright grip and a lot faster on the go pedal - it literally surges forward, very hard. Which it would do, because it's got the 3.8 liter engine with 385 horsepower. It's got bigger rear tires, but it also weighs a little more, both of which add a little to the already pretty severe understeer. All that for a $12,000 upgrade.

However, for $19,000 over the base model, you can have the Cerrara 4S at $102,380. And yes, you would be right in assuming the 4 means all-wheel drive, which is pretty much the only real difference between the Carrera S and the C4S, save for even larger 305 mm rear tires. The Carrera 4S has nothing of the original's corner exit understeer. It feels slightly slower to respond at initial turn-in, but my lord it grips when you use the go pedal. Amazingly, mid-corner grip is no lower than the two-wheel drive S, since they both weigh the same, despite the supposed extra weight of the all-wheel drive system in the 4S!

The C4S is by far my favorite car that I drove during the Porsche World Roadshow. Considering it was a no-cost event, we got tons of time in the cars and we got to push them fairly hard. We also got solid instruction from the Porsche Driving School instructors. Porsche just gained huge kudos points in my book.

(138) Fitting my fitness

2011-05-04T19:37:00.000-07:00

Last time I talked about my mental training, working with setups on the simulator. This time I'll talk a bit about my physical training.

My PT is still evolving, but I'm starting to zero in on what works for racing drivers.

At the moment I'm on a daily workout. I do about 10 minutes of very fast-paced, varied exercise when I wake up. My basic workout is:

3 sets of 30 pushups
2 sets of 60 lunges (30 each leg each set, and I usually start with these because it gets my heartrate going)
2 sets of 45 situps
1 set of 35 bicycle crunches

It doesn't sound like a lot, because it's not. The point is to do it every day.

I rarely stick to that exact schedule, though. Doing it every day, it would be easy to get into a groove and improvement would stagnate. So I randomize it. Some days I'll do more of one thing and less of another, sometimes I will pace down, or pace it up, or even just focus on one exercise altogether. One thing I always do is vary my pushups. In each set I will set my hands at different widths to get different muscle groups - closer together usually yields better tricep results, further apart gets more of your chest. Sometimes I do pushups with my feet up on a chair just to change things a bit. I also do all of my exercises at different speeds. Sometimes I'll do lunges or pushups incredibly slowly, sometimes taking as long as 6 or 7 seconds for each push or lunge. Racing drivers have a lot of constant resistance in their physical strain - corners can be very long some times. It's good to train the body to get used to it.

I also really like bicycle crunches because they get a lot of muscles in your middle, plus they're really hard (which is why I only do 35 or so of them in 1 set). Regular situps get the rest of the ab muscles. Core strength is really important for a racing driver.

After I get done with my workout, I do a balance exercise. I just stand on one leg with my eyes closed and count to about 100 seconds. Then I do it on the other leg. I can't do a full 100 yet, my record is about 35. My balance is actually pretty bad, I think. That's why I'm working on it. Coach Ric suggested that one to me.

Then there are two extra things that I do randomly throughout the day. One is working with Power Putty. I only recently got this stuff. It's basically silly putty with a stabilizing agent added to make it more viscous. I got the maximum strength and I just work it when I'm not doing anything with my hands for a while. Within a week of using it I noticed increased hand bulk, especially in the palms. If you use it right it gets your forearms too.

The second extra random thing is simply pushing on the side of my head. Building neck strength is hard, and I don't trust any of those crazy harness contraptions. So I just push on the side of my head and try to resist. It works fine.

But this is still an evolving program. It's actually about time I added another routine to my daily workout. I might bump it up to 15 minutes soon too.

(137) Engineering pixels

2011-04-24T15:40:00.000-07:00

Today I'm going to do a good session on the simulator. My task? Engineer a setup for Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca on the iRacing.com simulation driving the Ford Mustang FR500S.

iRacing.com has a very accurate recreation of Mazda Raceway and I know the track fairly well, so I decided to see if I could get myself some fast laps and improve the car mechanically.

The Mustang is a good choice for this exercise, I think. It has odd suspension design, it's heavy, and has temperamental handling.

The Mustang FR500S.

I'm starting with the factory base-line setup for the car. This includes an already fairly aggressive stance on the car, with higher rear ride height, a decent amount of camber, low tire pressures and toe-in/toe-out already set on the car. These more aggressively tuned settings are offset somewhat by the lack of a rear anti-roll bar, slightly higher front tire pressures and soft damper settings. These settings should make the car a little slower to respond.

The first thing I will do is drive the car for 20 minutes at the base-line settings. This will do two things. For one, it will give me a basic lap time to work from so that I can ensure the settings I change are making the car faster, and for two, it will allow me to feel out what exactly this car needs improved for the track.

The first session was uneventful. I ran laps in the 1:37.7 to 1:38.4 range, and I found that while the base-line setup does handle fairly well at Mazda Raceway, it is sluggish during the corner entry and mid-corner phases, though it puts the power down fairly well on the exits of corners. The big problem is occasional chronic understeer. If you're not on top of your pedal inputs, you can easily find yourself sliding off the edge in turns 4, 5, and especially 10. I'd like to try and control that.

The first change I'm going to make is to add the rear anti-roll bar. Currently the front anti-roll bar is set to medium, so I will add the softest (thinnest) anti-roll bar in the rear to keep the rear of the car from rolling over in the corners. Normally a stiffer roll bar reduces overall grip, but I can't stand the idea of not having at least a soft one back there.

15 minutes later and I'm happy with my change. My lap time gaps got tighter, and my best time got improved by 0.060 seconds. The car responds much better at turn-in and in the mid corner, and the exit speeds weren't negatively affected - in fact, I gained a mile per hour on almost every straight. I probably won't do any more roll bar tweaking.

Diving into turn 6 at about 90 MPH.

The tire temperatures indicate that the tire pressures and camber are set well. That may change once we start adjusting suspension components though.

The next change I'm going to make is to the toe settings of the car. Currently the rear has some toe-out, which will make things a little more "loose" feeling - the rear will want to step out a bit more. So I'm going to remove some of that looseness.

The change didn't really affect the times, but it felt better to drive anyway. That massive wash-out understeer problem is going away.

Now I want to play with the dampers. The track is very smooth, so the dampers are really only going to control the balance of the car, not really provide any bump relief. So I'll stiffen the bump (compression) settings of the dampers and leave the rebound (extension) setting be - I don't want to change the balance of the car.

5 laps later and I think I'm going to make them even more stiff. I'll put the fronts up to +30 clicks and the rears to +26 clicks.

2 laps later and I've broken my lap record by two tenths, with a 1:37.406. That time would put me 8th on the world record leaderboard.

Turn 8, the Corkscrew. Fun fun fun!

The stiffened dampers made the car much more responsive, and more stable with my driving style - the understeer issue is almost nonexistent, and fixing it hasn't made the car devilish to drive either. Most of my laps landed in the mid to high 1:37s, and the tire wear became much more even, both across the surface temperature wise and over all four tires in terms of tread depth.

Tomorrow I'll play with the ride height, but I suspect I won't find much time.

These simulators sure are helpful in learning how to set up a car.

(136) Bowling for dollars

2011-04-12T15:34:00.000-07:00

So. The first race. How did it go? Read on my friends.

The first thing on order for the weekend was a full test day on Thursday. Test days are usually conducted in an open-track format, but since this was prior to a race weekend the quantity of cars dictated that the day was divided into sessions. The Miatas were all gobbed into one group so traffic wouldn't be a huge issue. Faster traffic like Formula Mazdas and D Sports Racers aren't a problem, they just zip by in the braking zone or on the straight and neither car is affected that much. The issues arise when you get very powerful cars that handle badly running with very good handling cars that don't have any power. It can get frustrating for both parties.

Anyhow, that wasn't an issue. What was possibly going to be an issue was the weather. For the week preceding the test day I was watching the weather carefully. But, even the night before the test, the report said rain was inevitable. I was hoping to be able to learn the back portion of the track in the dry, but rain wouldn't be a deal-breaker, just mildly annoying.

Turns out I needn't have worried. The weather was gorgeous if slightly cool.

Ric McCormick met me as the day began and we talked over my goals and how to go about coaching me. It felt good to work with him again after a few years of experience since the first time we worked together 3 years ago. I think, now that I have more experience, I can better appreciate and understand his wisdom. With a plan I hopped onto the track for the first of my 5 sessions.

Strapping into the Miata. I really fit well in this car. Check out the monster of a rear view mirror I have.

The Miata felt pretty good right out of the box. Some pressure tweaking was required throughout the day but mechanically the car is set up very well. I used my "test" set of tires, which already had a few hours of running from being used in the driver school last month.

I wasn't too lost on the back portion of the track, fortunately. It's fairly simple, and I've watched tons of onboard videos showing it, plus I got to drive around it at slow speed during driver school.

Ric adjusted a few of my lines and my times dropped. I have a device on the car called a Rumblestrip. It's a little display that shows my speed, and when I pass the pit wall it shows my lap time if it can find a "ping" device, kinda like a transponder. It also shows my "split" time, whether I am in the process of setting a fast lap or not. If I'm ahead of my best lap, it shows a minus number. -0.35 means I'm going 3 and a half tenths faster. 0.30 means 3 tenths slower. It's incredibly useful when trying to diagnose the optimal line or gear for a corner because it gives instant feedback on how much time and speed I gained or lost. It's also shocking how much time you can gain and lose on an average lap, corner to corner.

A big point of the test day was gearing. The gear selections around Thunderhill are strange in a Miata.

Conventional wisdom says that if a corner falls directly between two gears, say, 6800 RPM in 3rd (200 away from the shift point) versus 4900 RPM in 4th, then the driver should use the higher gear since not only will it eliminate two shifts from the corner (eliminating possibilities for mistakes), it also encourages the driver to carry more speed through the corner. Trust me, you'll work your butt off to carry that extra 100 RPM in 4th to be "on the cam" at 5000 RPM on the exit.

In a car with reasonable torque, that is. The Miata has very little torque, and almost no power below 5000 RPM. You can take turns 2 and 9 in 4th if you really want to, but it's geared just high enough that you have reduced torque on the exit. During the test day, I ran turn 9 in 4h. Once I got totally up to speed as the race weekend went on, however, I started using 3rd. I gained 2-3 tenths doing that. Basically, 4th gear acted as a training wheel, encouraging me to push it harder and harder until I surpassed "gear selection equilibrium" and started going even faster by downshifting.

This isn't the case with turn 14 however. In turn 14, you can use either 2nd or 3rd. I always use 3rd. 3rd gear has enough punch coming out of there that, if done properly, gives you a good shot down the front straight.

Ian Cook of Cook Motorsports to fellow racer Mike Niemann: "I can't believe it! These Miatas are so light they just try to fly away!"

The other thing Ric encouraged me to do is left foot braking. I've been doing this on the simulator for years, but I've never used it in a real car outside of karting. I started using it in the corners where I didn't need to shift and, apart from braking a little bit too hard the first couple laps, it started working well for me. My left foot is more delicately tuned than my right is. Plus you can use the throttle while braking, giving you a smoother transition from brake to gas in those high speed corners like turn 1 which are very sensitive to jerky pedal work.

The other thing we talked about was my preparations, both mental and physical. I have a daily workout routine that I've been using for a number of months now. It's really helped me a lot more than the typical "30-minute workout every 2 days" schedule. Nevertheless Ric had a few things for me to add to it, including some balance exercises.

In all, it was a very good test day and I learned a ton from Ric. I dropped into the 2:09s in the final session of the day. Just as the last session got off track, a hail storm struck. Better timing there could not be.

Friday was practice and qualifying day for the first race, which would be held on Saturday. I continued to refine a few things that Ric told me to work on during the weekend. It was a fairly uneventful day, save for one thing - the tires.

On Thursday we bought a new set of tires to use in the race. The idea being that the test set I used in driver school and the test day were probably past their prime. I would "run in" the tires on Friday during qualifying and practice, and they would then be prime for the race.

Unfortunately for me, the Toyo RA1 tires we use in Spec Miata are street DOT tires that we shave down until nearly slick. That means that while they look like a race tire, they are still very much a street tire. Street tires are very hard rubber, designed for long life, and I totally underestimated how long they would take to "come in".

My fastest laps in morning practice were 2 seconds slower than on the test day. No ringing bells went off in my head because it was cold and everyone was setting slower times. I figured my car just didn't like the cold. There was a very loud squeaking noise coming from the right rear every time I went through a left hand corner. I figured something in the suspension was making the noise, and nothing felt wrong so I ignored it.

I mentioned the squeak when I got back to the pits and it turns out my right rear tire was rubbing the body work. How did I know? The tire had a little river of molten rubber running down the side wall and plastered on the inside of the fender. I touched it and it came off on my fingers like tar.

The tire in question. The darker blueish part just between the tread and the side wall is where all the molten rubber pooled and cooled into this super hard substance. You can see the streaks on the edge of the tread where it was rubbing. That's the trouble with running tires twice as fat as the ones from the showroom.

A quick roll-in of the bodywork and the issue was solved.

Then came qualifying. I figured my tires would be good to go for this session, but boy was I wrong. I ended up setting a session best time of 2:11.8. If I had kept my worn-in test set on the car, I might have done a 2:09.8, which would have put me 12th on the grid and 4th in class. Instead, I got landed in 20th overall, and 7th in class. Ouch.

Still, for the first race, that's not bad.

Saturday rolled around and it was time to grid for the race. It was early and cold, but I had my "good' set of tires on, the track had plenty of rubber from Friday, and I was ready. My team mate, David Allen, was just in the row in front of me. My plan was to carve myself a space to work on the start, and then I would follow David for a few laps to see if we could work together to advance through the field. I was warned by a number of racers that the field usually stacks up pretty good until about turn 5, which is where things get more single-file. I planned to start working through the field after that.

The Cook Motorsports/Premeir Auto Service and Team MiataKa paddock area. Richard Avril's yellow and black car in back going topless due to a broken rear window. In my opinion all the Miatas should be topless.

At the start everyone got stacked up exiting turn 15. This was good for me, because I knew what the leader was trying to do - brake hard, and then take off while everyone recovered. Once I verified that the leaders were on their way, I stepped on it and carried their advantage to the mid-field, leaving the guys behind me for dust down the straight, though not gaining much on the guys in front of me.

I held my line through to turn 5, where I linked up with David and started following him. I did this for a few reasons.

1. He's my team mate, and team mates taking each other out due to hard racing isn't cool. I wasn't going to push him hard unless I had a legitimate reason to go by him.
2. He's much more experienced than I am, and I would be able to emulate his demeanor and keep myself calm. The first race in a new car at a new track is very exciting. You have to do as much as you can to keep it from going to your head and making you act like a nincompoop.
3. The draft is huge in these cars. Plus I could keep serious competitors off his tail while he worked through.

Simply put, teamwork is better in any situation.

Fred Peterson in the red 9 car had other ideas though. He passed me going into turn 10, but I was able to get him back in turn 14 and continue watching David's back while he tried to get by April Halliday in the blue 36 car.

After watching this for a while, I realized David was having no luck. So I decided to go by him in turn 10, and hopefully he'd be able to follow me past April. Unfortunately that didn't work out as intended, since there was a spin in turn 14. I only barely saw the yellow as it was raised out of the corner of my eye. I had gone into turn 14 pretty hot, and that extra tiny little bit of pressure on the brake sent me into a big slide. I've recovered from big slides before. I had a full lock drift once out of turn 6 that I saved. But turn 14 has a little bit of banking, and the car decided to come around right as it caught extra grip from the slight banking, and it sent me shooting off the other way, thankfully avoiding the spun car, as well as the barrels on the outside. I lost the spot I had just gained from David, and now the purple 95 piloted by Bob Murillo was on my tail.

I pushed hard to keep Bob behind me, but as I caught back up to David I realized that I would not be able to hold Bob off if I stayed behind David. So I passed him in turn 10 again, despite David being very pointed about his defense of that corner. I shoved it up the inside anyway.

I then focused on catching back up to April since she had checked out with all the passing and battling going on behind her. Bob was pushing me hard after getting around David and I soon found myself close enough to start dueling with April. She ran wide in turn 14 and I tried to capitalize on it, going 2 wide through 15. That didn't work, and in hindsight it was kind of a dumb move, because Bob was able to capitalize on my mistake and motored by.

Bob's rear bumper was missing, and I found it very hard to get any kind of draft from his car. That bumper must provide a lot of the drag on a Miata.

Bob got by April later that lap, and then I squeaked by as well in turn 14. The chase was on. Bob had an SSM car just like mine, and I really wanted his spot.

I caught him up, but couldn't pass because the draft didn't work. After a few laps we caught lap traffic. I tried to stay with him but he used it more to his advantage than I, and he pulled a gap that I never recovered.

I finished the race 5th in class and 16th overall. David finished 6th in class and 21st overall.

I actually have a little treat for you guys. During the test day my GoPro actually died. It just stopped turning on, even with fresh batteries. Luckily, my instructor from driver school, Juan Pineda, was racing (incidentally he also got his first class win this weekend) and he offered to loan me one of the Contour HD cameras he sells.

So, I've got a full HD onboard film of my first race for you!

Race #1 onboard footage in HD! Be sure to click the "HD" button and watch it in fullscreen to get the best quality.

It really is a quite nice camera, and after figuring out how to edit the files it records I think I may buy one. We'll see.

I'm quite happy with my results from the first race. I think getting top 5 in a field of 17 cars in the class the first time out is a good start. 16th out of 47 cars overall is also very good.

The second race of the weekend was much less dramatic. I re-qualified 5th in class and 16th overall, the same as my finishing position in race 1, incidentally.

Unfortunately the camera ran out of juice on the pre-grid just before we rolled off for the race. Fortunately for you my race wasn't terribly exciting.

The start was much more organized, so there were more cars around me and I wasn't able to carve out a spot to work as effectively. I passed a couple cars and then got re-passed by a couple cars. Eventually things strung out and I mostly just raced on my own until a full-course caution came out. We re-started and again I got left mostly alone. Sad face.

My afternoon was livened up somewhat by another large slide in turn 14. Just as before, the banking caught my car and spat me out the other way. I went bowling and nailed one of the plastic barrels on the outside. My momentum carried me into the grass, but I didn't lose any positions because I was all alone. More sad face.

I finished the race 1 position better than I started, in 15th overall, but still 5th in class.

I've never been in a race with that many cars and I tell you, it was something. Seeing the field stretch way into turn 1 ahead of you while also seeing the field stretch way back into turn 14 behind you is something. And this is just an "average" size field. Next month at Laguna the field is likely to be even bigger.

It was quite an experience and, I think, a good opening to my career in SCCA.

Thanks to all the dedicated volunteers of the SCCA from car #78!

(135) The first car race...

2011-04-01T15:57:00.000-07:00

On April 6th I'm leaving for my first race weekend in full size cars.

It's been about 8 months since I've taken the green flag in a "real" race with points and trophies on the table. Seems like an eon ago.

This will be my first time on the full Thunderhill layout. During the driver school, we only got to run the first half. Luckily, there is an open test day on Thursday that will give me a few hours to learn the back half of the course. I also want to hire a private coach to help me with refining the track. Update: Ric McCormick, the very first instructor I had at Jim Russell 3 years ago during my very first introduction to kart racing, will be coaching me during the test day. Ric has been teaching for over 15 years. It'll be very exciting to work with him again.

Then things get underway. On Friday we have a practice session and a qaulifying round. Then we race for the first time this year on Saturday. There will be another qualy session in the afternoon, with the final race being conducted on Sunday.

At the moment there are about 35 cars in the Spec Miata group which I will be running in. There are two Miata classes in the San Francisco SCCA region: Sealed Spec Miata, and Spec Miata T.

Spec Miata T is the faster class. The fastest SMT will probably be about 1 or 2 seconds per lap faster than the fastest SSM. The SMTs are built to the same specifications as the Spec Miatas in the rest of the country, with one provision: they must use Toyo RA-1 tires.

Sealed Spec Miata, the class I'm racing, is exactly the same as SMT in terms of suspension, tires etc, except for the engine and the chassis. SSM is limited to Miatas with 1600cc engines, so that means only the first-generation Miata is eligible. The engines are built and then sealed by MCE Racing based at Thunderhill. SSMs have about 110 horsepower, and SMTs have about 125.

SMT and SSM usually race together in their own group. There probably won't be any faster traffic for me to worry about as long as I keep my pace brisk. According to the entry list, at this point, there are 14 entries in SSM. Much of the SSM field will overlap with the SMT field. From what I've seen, SMTs and SSMs still race fairly hard even though they aren't really competing against each other.

I rate my chances for the races pretty high. I was fastest in driver school and I have a ton of racing education to draw upon, so I feel like I will be on the sharp end of the field. I'm very confident that I can learn the rest of Thunderhill quickly and place well in the races.

I have some more pictures from my weekend at driver school, take a look. See you after the races!

Exiting turn 8.

Following Juan Pineda, my instructor, over the crest of turn 5. From this angle it looks shockingly similar to the Corkscrew.

On the grid, being dwarfed by the Mustang and Porsche 930 next to me.

Racing hard with Juan.

Heading into turn 15 flat out.

Running wide in turn 8, but it's okay, it looks cool on camera!

All images credit Chuck Koehler.

(134) Why I don't care about numbers

2011-03-21T23:34:00.000-07:00

What? This chump doesn't care about numbers? But he drives racing cars! Performance sheets should be his life!

Yes, it's true. I do not give two beans about performance specs, horsepower, skid pad Gs, 0-60 times, or any of that nonsense. I care about lap time and the data from the data acquisition system, but only as a reference. Those are pretty much the only numbers I pay attention to, except when I'm looking at a rulebook.

Why? Well, let me try to answer that. I suppose I should begin with a story.

Recently, Ford released the Mustang Boss 302 edition. It's a very stunning car. It's very performance oriented. It's lighter than the regular GT. It's got bigger tires, more power, brighter paint. It's even got an option to remove the rear seats and fill the space with a strengthening beam.

You can also have a ridiculously large front spoiler fitted.

MotorTrend tested the car at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. Everyone wants to know if it's faster than the Shelby GT500.

It's pretty safe to say that it is. By some four seconds. It set a 1:40.2, which is seriously quick. Just how quick? Well, let me put up some performance stats and you can see if you can guess which cars it beat and which it didn't.

First, the Boss 302.

Ford Mustang Boss 302

Horsepower: 444
Displacement: 5.0 liter V8 naturally aspirated
Torque: 381 lb/f
Drive Type: rear-wheel drive
Curb Weight: 3630 lbs
Weight Distribution (front/back): 55/45
Gearbox: 6-speed H pattern manual
0-60 MPH: 4.0 seconds
Top Speed: 155 MPH
Power/Weight ratio: 269 hp/tonne

Nissan GTR (R35)

Horsepower: 472
Displacement: 3.8 liter V6 twin turbo
Torque: 434 lb/ft
Drive Type: all-wheel drive
Curb Weight: 3828 lbs
Weight Distribution (front/back): 54.8/45.2
Gearbox: 6-speed double clutch
0-60 MPH: 3.3 seconds
Top Speed: 192 MPH
Power/Weight ratio: 271 hp/tonne

Audi R8 4.2 FSI quattro

Horsepower: 414
Displacement: 4.2 V8 naturally aspirated
Torque:318 lb/ft
Drive Type: all-wheel drive
Curb Weight: 3432 lbs
Weight Distribution (front/back): 44/56
Gearbox: 6-speed H pattern manual
0-60 MPH: 4.3 seconds
Top Speed: 186 MPH
Power/Weight ratio: 266 hp/tonne

Chevrolet Corvette Z06

Horsepower: 506
Displacement: 7.0 liter V8 naturally aspirated
Torque: 471 lb/ft
Drive Type: rear-wheel drive
Curb Weight: 3161 lbs
Weight Distribution (front/back): 50.7/49.3
Gearbox: 6-speed H pattern manual
0-60 MPH: 3.6 seconds
Top Speed:198 MPH
Power/Weight ratio: 352 hp/tonne

BMW M3 (E92)

Horsepower: 414
Displacement: 4.0 liter V8 naturally aspirated
Torque: 296 lb/ft
Drive Type: rear-wheel drive
Curb Weight: 3562 lbs
Weight Distribution (front/back): 51.9/48.1
Gearbox: 7-speed dual clutch
0-60 MPH: 3.9 seconds
Top Speed: 173 MPH
Power/Weight ratio: 256 hp/tonne

So, give these cars a mull over. Which do you think is the fastest?

If I had to pick a winner, on paper, it would be the Z06. It's got the most power. It's the lightest. It has really good weight distribution. It's not as fast to 60 MPH as the GTR but it's pretty quick. The top speed is also the highest. But who cares what I think, lets get to the times.

These times are according to MotorTrend.

BMW M3 (E92): 1:42.96
Chevrolet Corvette Z06: 1:40.90
Audi R8 4.2 FSI quattro: 1:40.75
Nissan GTR (R35): 1:40.45
Ford Mustang Boss 302: 1:40.21

And there you have it. One of the weakest-looking cars on the spec sheet is the fastest.

Now, I admit, these times are all very close (except the M3, it got annihilated). You take 2 different drivers and have them drive all these cars and you'd probably get two totally different orders. Ambient temperature or weather may have a part to play, but I really have no idea about that. For the moment I'm assuming these times are fair.

Reading a spec sheet to ascertain how fast a car is has fatal flaws. Humans are terrible calculators. Humans tend to see large/good numbers and it will adversely effect the calculation in an emotional way. I love big engines, so I saw 7 liters on that Corvette, immediately assumed the engine had what we call "usable power" (power down low as well as up high in the RPM band), which, in reality, it may, or it may not. On top of that the rest of the numbers looked swell. The big parts that were not shown were tire sizes (you need big, grippy tires to put that power down, especially in a lighter car) and gearing (if you have really tall gears, such as in the case of fuel economy, it saps some of that acceleration)

That's why it's really, really important to drive a car to figure out how fast or good it is. Case in point, the new Mustang V6 versus the Nissan 370z. I've test driven both. The Nissan has 30 more horsepower than the Mustang, but the Mustang feels faster when you put your foot down despite being heavier. This is because, I think, the 370z has slightly taller gearing. Both cars have more or less the same 0-60 time (5.1 seconds) according to the journalists I've read. Incidentally, I do like the Z more than the 'Stang overall, but that's just me. I actually don't know which would be faster on a track. They might be fairly close, but they might not.

There is more to it than just gearing, though. Engine map and torque curves have huge roles to play in acceleration, especially from low RPM. It's really hard to quantify those effects on the speed of the car on a track. Maybe an engineer could, but you or I? Nah.

Even harder to quantify is car setup. Put simply, how does it handle? The car could be set up to generate skid pad numbers but if you try and take a proper corner with trail braking and throttle application, what happens then? It could be a complete dog. What about bumps? Off camber, or banked corners? How's the aerodynamic balance, does that little wing that pops up at 70 MPH do anything or just make more drag? Can the brakes go for more than two laps without getting cooked? And tires, oh my lord don't forget about tires. Compound, size, construction... a car can gain or lose 5, 10, 15 seconds per lap with tires, depending how long the course is. Really awesome tires might not even raise the skid pad numbers that much.

In the end, my ultimate point is that performance numbers tell you almost nothing about the car. Paper and asphalt are completely different surfaces.

(133) What came first, the license or the school?

2011-03-17T18:31:00.000-07:00

SCCA driver school was a scream!

We arrived at the track on Thursday afternoon to unload the car. Thunderhill Park is in some absolutely gorgeous country, with big sky dominated by dramatic clouds and sun, set amidst rolling green hills dotted with cows and set with a backdrop of snow covered peaks to the west. The weather report indicated the possibility of rain, but only towards the end of the weekend. For the first couple of days, at least, we were fairly safe from falling sky.

Loaded up, let's roll!

We got up bright and early to get to the track, get registered and get my gear and car teched. Technical inspection is a big part of the SCCA. With so many people bringing such a vast variety of cars to a race, you need a good system in place to make sure those vehicles and the various pieces of gear are safe and legal per the racing regulations.

Tech went more or less smoothly, except for one hiccup - we didn't have the car's log book, which needs to be filled out for every event the car attends. We eventually managed to get a temporary log book until we could get the permanent book updated. Crisis averted.

Next up was a good old fashioned driver's meeting. David Arken would be supervising Group 2, my group. Juan Pineda would be my instructor. Group 2 was composed of mostly more experienced drivers, and some faster cars - there were a couple Mustangs, two big Porsches and an oddity called a Qvale Mangusta. The rest were all Miatas. During the meeting, David encouraged us to make a list of areas we wanted to develop over the weekend. These were mine.

Day 1: learn the line and the gearing, learn the car's basic handling traits on street summer tires, work on getting a feel for the apex speeds of each corner, learn the passing zones on the track.
Day 2: mount and adapt to the shaved-slick Toyo RA-1 tires, pick up the apex speeds considerably and really work the tires, work on shortening braking zones at the end of the day.
Day 3: dial in the final braking distances for each corner, push the trail braking going into the corners, work the passing zones and become fluent in their use.

Can you tell I've done this before? Basically, my overall goals for the school were to learn a new car and a new track. I got much more out of it than that.

The first activity after the meeting and introductions was to conduct drive-arounds in street cars at slow speed to familiarize ourselves with the track. None of us had actual cars with enough seats, so we used Juan's V10 dually truck. This offered a unique view of the track, as you can imagine. It was very informative and I got my first taste of V10 power at the wheel.

The configuration we would be using was the original short course of Thunderhill. It essentially splits the track at the halfway point and cuts back onto the front straight in turn 8.

I decided to start by driving the car on a set of treaded tires Ed gave me in case it rained. These were not full on rain racing tires, rather summer tires designed for street use, so they wouldn't get completely wrecked by high heat in dry conditions.

Suited up, strapped in, let's race!

This turned out to be a good choice because they provided a lot of feedback. And when I say a lot of feedback, I mean the tires were screaming louder than the engine. Many of the corners at Thunderhill are pretty high load - turn 4 and turn 5a both torture the tires pretty good.

The first session was nice and slow, and I followed Juan to learn the line inside the car. The car was fairly loose on these tires with less grip. I ended up using those the whole first day. The only real problem with the car surfaced as I pulled out of pit lane and made my first hard shift into 3rd - crunch! A used up synchro gear in 3rd. The synchro is the device that ensures the teeth of the gears mesh perfectly. Without it, you really have to move your hand slowly if you want to avoid crunching things. That's hard to do when you're racing.

I talked to Ed about it, and he said I should just "use it up" and he'd drop a whole new transmission in when we got back. So I tried to baby it as much as possible. It got steadily worse as the weekend progressed, but it held together. Tough car.

Racin' hard with Juan.

Thunderhill itself was proving very fun. The track produces some really good racing, even if it's not quite as interesting to me to drive as Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca or Infineon Raceway - lots of long sweepers that are really good for passing and race craft, but you kind of find yourself looking at cloud shapes if you go through them on your own. The passing, though, is mostly unconventional. Passes on the outside of turn 3, an off-camber increasing radius corner, are my favorite.

During the first day I learned that this little Miata is really a great handling race car. It's cooperative under brakes and turns in positively. The road car has a lot of body roll, but the racing spec car doesn't. Lots of camber means lots of grip in high load corners. The interesting dynamic is that with such little power, you need to rethink your lines. I was turning in much too late at first and leaving too much room on the exit of corners for the car to work. The Miata only has 110 horsepower, so with grippy tires, even at full throttle, the car isn't really burning rubber while accelerating. That means you can (and should) turn in much earlier and take a more "geometric" line.

On the second day we put on the shaved RA-1s. These tires had a bunch more grip than the street tires, and less tread squirm. I could no longer break the back end loose with the throttle unless I really hustled the car into a slow speed corner. To my surprise, the shaved-slick tires still gave off plenty of tire noise. They were also much more durable than I expected. I figured they would peak during the first session and then fall off all weekend, but instead they continued to gain grip and never seemed to get baked and fall away. They should last a good long time. We just adjusted the front pressures by 1.5 pounds and the car handled really good.

The SCCA continued to test us through day 2. They covered all kinds of situations on track, including a simulated red flag situation. The instructors were constantly drilling us on flags, especially the yellow, and going over any mistake thoroughly. Juan was pushing me on race craft and we had a couple of pretty cool battles out on track.

Cookin' going into turn 1 at about 90 MPH. Seen here apexing too late - walk that apex back a few feet and I'm golden.

On day 3 we ran two more practice sessions, and then it was race time. We were to have two races, 20 minutes each. The twist was that the instructors were going to place us on the grid in such a way that we were challenged. They wanted to see us sweat, and how we dealt with it.

The first race was fairly intense. I started about mid-pack, and I followed my row mate, Duane Polsley in his red Miata. He advanced through the field and I followed. The lead Miatas all got by Filip Trojanek in the Mangusta into turn 5 - I just barely squeezed by with them. Filip re-passed me down the main straight, but I got a run on him through turn 2 and re-re-passed him on the outside into 3. The Mangusta had a lot of power, about 3 times as much as my Miata, but the Miata handled about 3 times better. The Mangusta had street suspension, and was rolling over in the corners like a lazy whale. Filip was working really hard to make that thing corner.

Then the chase was on to catch the other Miatas scrapping over the lead. I caught Cameron Rogers in his black Miata, and we proceeded to have a multi-lap chase. I tried him a couple of times on the outside of 3, again, my favorite place. But he wouldn't have it and always got away from me in turn 4. I eventually tried an optimistic pass in turn 8, but he stayed to my outside and took the position back going onto the front straight. The next time, I got a better run and did it again, only this time it stuck.

Cameron fighting the good fight.

I could see Duane up ahead battling with a big ole black Mustang piloted by Jim Gillespie. They were having quite a fight so I just put my head down and took off after them. I eventually caught them, and I waited for Duane to either pass Jim or to make a mistake.

I followed them for a good number of laps, then we caught lap traffic. I tried to capitalize on it but the timing didn't work out that way. I passed two cars on, you guessed it, the outside of turn 3.

Then came the last lap. I knew my only place to pass Duane was turn 8. I decided to pass there. It wasn't wise. I threw it in, and Duane moved over to protect his line. I didn't expect this, so I jinked sideways. My tires locked briefly (turning the wheel while threshold braking is not good) and I went into the grass on the inside. I was going to shoot across the track, and I was praying Duane saw me and slowed up enough to not peg my passenger door. He was heads up and missed me, but I lost a position to Cameron and finished 3rd of the Miatas. Lesson learned. Don't be greedy.

Rather than typing out the 2nd race, just watch it!

Race 2 footage. Wonderful view. Not.

This is the first time the GoPro has really let me down. It just tried to light up the interior of the car too much, and by doing so really overexposed the view through the windows. You can't really see the track, but you can see the cars that are close to me. I need to find a new way to mount the camera inside the car. I may have to put it on the dash, but I would like to get as much of my wheel and pedal work as possible.

The transmission was getting very bad by this point. Hard shifts were wearing down 3rd gear and it was hard to get the gear to go in at some points.

As the footage ends, a full course yellow comes out. The clouds had been threatening rain all afternoon, and it started to come down. Not hard, but just enough so that as I went through turn 3 at 50 MPH, I could feel the traction loss. I retired to the pits, since I was on slicks, just as the race restarted. Most people followed me in.

All in all, a really good weekend. I survived, the car survived (though the transmission was toast), learned much. I absolutely can't wait for the season to start in April. As Juan wrote in my evaluation booklet, "this is going to be a fun season!"

(132) Car tailoring

2011-03-05T19:16:00.000-08:00

Today I met with Ed to get the Miata fitted to me for the SCCA driver school. Fitting a race car is a precise thing. You need to be positioned to effectively use the controls, to see out the car, to not get tired while driving, and to be situated as low as possible so that the weight balance of the car is affected as little as possible. It's even harder when the seat isn't on rollers and you have fifty bolts to undo to move it. It's all a big compromise.

Needless to say I didn't fit right when I first got in. Ed's going to readjust the seat and we'll try again Wednesday. If it still doesn't fit right and we can't just use pads to correct it, we'll get another chance on Thursday just before we leave for driver school.

The school itself is going to be held over three days at Thunderhill raceway. The school is going to involve all of the normal flag, starting and grid procedures of an SCCA race weekend and we'll be put through our paces to demonstrate that we understand all of them. As a licensed driver, I will have a single instructor assigned to me for one on one coaching all weekend. I should get about six hours of track time, and at the end of the weekend there will be two races.

A big part of SCCA is managing traffic, and that means the groups will have a few wild cards in them. My group is mostly Miatas (like I've mentioned before, Spec Miatas are extremely popular here), but there are a couple of Porsches and a Mustang from what I can see, so I'm going to have to look in the mirrors occasionally.

The groups themselves are small, around 20 cars or less, and Thunderhill is a long track, so we are running the short configuration. It's going to be awesome. I'll grab lots of GoPro footage.

(131) Ground school

2011-02-26T19:53:00.000-08:00

Today I trekked down to Redwood City to attend Ground School, which is basically the pre-school for SCCA driver licensing school.

I wasn't required to attend, since I already have my license, but I decided to go anyway, just to make sure I didn't miss anything. It was a 3-hour classroom session with instruction ranging the gambit from how to register on arrival to how to pre-grid and read flags. I'm glad I went, because, in addition to meeting some of my competitors and the volunteers, I also got a number of things cleared up regarding specific operations and regulations.

Since this is a short post, I should probably add some more content eh? But I can't really think of anything I want to write about at the moment.

(130) Seated

2011-02-12T11:54:00.000-08:00

Good news! I have a car to drive for 2011.

I ended up staying local. Ed Railton owns a pair of Sealed Spec Miatas in a nearby town called San Ramon. One (a 1.6 liter) was available for the season, and it's in prime condition, so I jumped on it. The other car is piloted by David Allen, who will be my team mate.

I'm really excited to work with Ed. I know I'm in good hands and I'm positive this year's going to be a blast.

My first outing in the car is going to be in mid March, when I go back to school in the SCCA Licensing school. I already have my SCCA license, but the school is going to be held at Thunderhill raceway over 3 days. Thunderhill is the only track on the schedule that I haven't driven. So it will be good to learn the track (and the car) in a more controlled environment. SCCA is running a special program for licensed drivers anyway, with 1-on-1 instruction. It should offer me plenty of track time for a reasonable cost. I'm going down to the shop a week before to get the car fitted.

Then the season gets underway good and proper in April. There will be 13 rounds over 7 weekends at Thunderhill raceway, Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, and Infineon raceway.

Having already driven the Spec Miata on track, briefly, I know more or less what to expect.

(129) Breaking the budget

2011-01-30T18:48:00.000-08:00

You probably expected me to update sooner than this, and I do apologize for the blank period.

Unfortunately there is a bit of bad news. Like I said in December, I was looking at racing Formula F in the SCCA this year. Sadly, my preliminary cost predictions were off by about $10,000. So, as a result, I need to find something much less expensive to race.

Formula F is really the only formula car I was capable of running in SCCA. Everything else with wheels on the outside is either much, much older tech, or is much more expensive. The next class up from FF is Formula Continental. I would be stretching it if I tried to drive one of those cars for less than $35,000 per year.

Remember, I don't have the space to own my own car, and in many cases (though not all) having someone store and prep it would cost just as much as renting it. Not to mention the fact that even used open-wheel race cars are about 20 grand and up. The car is not worthless, of course, and can be sold for minimal loss on the actual machinery, but that's still money I don't have.

So, it seems I will be racing some type of sports car this year. A switch from formula cars to "sedans" (sedan in racing circles means a production-derived, closed-top car rather than simply a 4-door) puts new learning goals into priority. Where racing a formula car I would have focused on refining my car control, racing a sedan is a better place to work on my race craft. I want to end up racing sports cars and/or sports prototypes anyway, so it's not a crippling blow to my career. In many ways this could turn out to be for the better.

In any case, the most populated sedan class in the San Francisco region is Spec Miata. I've contacted a few teams who provide cars and it looks like I can rent a car in the sealed class for between $10,000 and $15,000 per season. Don't worry, I crunched the numbers properly this time. I already have a few candidates who seem like a good fit, but I will hold off on saying for sure what I am going to do this year until the dust settles. There are other classes to consider as well, but Spec Miata is the biggest, and big fields matter when you want to learn better race craft.

(128) 2010 in review

2011-01-01T16:59:00.000-08:00

2010 was a year of transition. Climbing the step from karts to cars is a pretty big one. Probably the biggest one. And I'm glad I took a year to set up and execute it, it's a huge adjustment. My transition is not totally complete. I still haven't taken part in a race in cars. But I got a lot accomplished this year.

I, obviously, got my first runs in a full-fledged open wheel race car. I also crashed my first car. I got my SCCA racing license. I entered my first shootout, at Skip Barber. I drove for a private car owner for the first time. I drove a race car in the rain for the first time. I had my first interview with Bob Varsha. I met a ton of well-known people in the racing world.

I am my biggest critic, and even under my own tremendous expectations of myself, I feel like I've done well, especially considering my relative lack of experience compared to most of the other drivers I met this year, at the Skip Barber shootout in particular.

My plans for 2011 are more or less laid out, now all I have to do is follow through and give it the effort needed to really develop myself into a winning race car driver.

(127) 2011

2010-12-23T10:17:00.000-08:00

Christmas time has arrived, and I find myself without a single item on my motorsports calendar. The off-season has officially begun. Luckily, motorsports down-time doesn't last long. So I need to get started in setting up 2011's activities.

But what shall I do? I didn't win any of the prize seats in the Skip Barber Shootout, so the sky's the limit.

From my experience at the Shootout, I've concluded what I need to improve as a driver - lots of track time, a slightly more public environment without over-exposing me, and, as always, at a relatively low cost. The choice seems obvious. SCCA.

The Sports Car Club of America is one of the USA's oldest sanctioning bodies. There are lots of experienced and newcomer drivers. Old and new cars. Regional and national competition. Moving to the SCCA, for me, is not a career choice, it's a driver choice. The SCCA will help me further assess where I am as a driver. I also already have an SCCA Regional competition license.

But what class to choose? The SCCA has a lot of classes. That choice, too, seems obvious. Formula F (formerly Formula Ford).

I need a class that meets only two criteria: cost less than $20,000 to run for a season of racing, and it must be an open wheel formula car. The two categories which meet those criteria are Formula Vee, and Formula F (it's going to be a real struggle not to put -ord after the F). Formula Vee is less expensive than Formula F, but you also have a lot less horsepower and grip. I think I can learn more from Formula F than I can from Formula Vee.

The 2011 San Francisco SCCA region's race schedule will span from April to October, with 13 races arrayed in a double-header format (the final race weekend is regional #13 and the Enduro). 3 weekends at Thunderhill Raceway, 3 weekends at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, and 1 weekend at Infineon Raceway.

There are a few teams that provide Formula F services in the San Francisco region. "Renting" a car is the most expensive way to go in the long run, but I don't have the space or the expertise to store and prep a race car, and buying one outright and then hiring someone to store and care for it would cost much more than a season of renting. By racing someone else's car, I can focus on driving. I'll also learn how to work with a team. This is how it will be in the professional levels anyway.

All that's left to do is sign a team.

Happy holidays everyone.

(126) 14th Annual Skip Barber Karting Scholarship Shoot-out

2010-12-09T16:09:00.000-08:00

The Skip Barber Shootout was a blast.

I and 43 other young drivers arrived at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca on Friday morning to fairly decent weather, for December. My anticipation was high as we all piled into the paddock classroom and conducted the first meeting of the weekend.

The theme of the first day was pretty simple. The FIA Institute of Motorsports Safety is, of course, highly concerned with safe driving. As a result, in addition to the competition for the scholarships from Skip Barber and Mazda, the first day of activities is devoted mostly to motorsports safety. What better way to do that than Skip Barber's One Day Driving School program?

I myself did the two day program when I got my street license. But we can all use a refresher here and there. The first day's activities centered around learning safe driving principles in Mazda MX-5s on the autocross and Mazda RX-8s on the skid pad, as well as lessons on street and race track safety. My personal favorite was the MX-5 on the autocross. The latest iteration of the car is so light and responsive, it doesn't really feel like any other car I've driven. Mazda has definitely got the MX-5 recipe down to a fine science. I'm sure the grippy BFGoodrich sport tires were also a big factor there.

Driving the brilliant Mazda MX-5 on the autocross. I want one.

After getting a healthy dose of fun in the Mazdas, our group was up for driver interviews. Conducting the interviews were Bob Varsha of the Speed Channel, and Jeremy Shaw, President and Founder of the Team USA Scholarship. I was interviewed by Bob Varsha.

It's somewhat cruel circumstances. This was my first interview ever. I don't think I could have had a better interviewer: Bob made me look much better on camera than I actually am. I made pretty common mistakes - talking too fast, rambling a little, and some of my talking points were missing so I had to improvise a bit. I was pretty nervous. All things considered, I don't think it was that bad for my first interview. Definitely a few things to work on before I go on TV.

After the interviews and a van ride around the track, we settled into our F2000 race cars for the evening on the supercross. Business as usual here, except that half of the paddock was watered down from the skid pad, so half of the track was wet, and half was dry. This was my first time driving the F2000 in properly wet conditions, and it was a learning experience. I'll get to that in a minute.

The last group came off the supercross just as the sun went down. During my second session the sunset was in full glory. There was a massive cold front moving in and it made for a spectacular sunset. Driving an F2000 race car around at Mazda Raceway with a dramatic sunset like that as a back drop was pretty special.

The first day was a day to remember, and at the end of it I took home a voucher for a One Day New Driver School - the FIA is focused on spreading motorsport safety so all participants got vouchers to give to a teenage driver. We were encouraged by Mazda to distribute them in a stylish way, so I'm still working on that. Maybe I will find an interesting way to raise safe driving awareness.

The morning of day two was all about seminars. There were three in all: one from Barbara Burns about the media and the driver's role in it, one from Dean Case of Mazda about sponsorship and motorsports business in general, and another from Derek Daly, focusing on driver careers and what makes a champion. They were all incredibly informative and I took away a lot. However, none of us could wait to get on track once they were over.

After lunch, we did. And it was an interesting introduction for those of us in group 2 (of 4). The track was rather wet. It wasn't raining hard, but it was raining enough that a dry line wasn't cutting it. I tried to give and take with the rain line, most of the time only putting half of the car onto the grippy areas of the track. That didn't cut it, and my lap times were over 2 minutes (!).

Water! Water everywhere!

It's rather amazing how much grip Mazda Raceway loses when it gets wet. It's something to do with the surface I think. In any case, throughout the weekend, it was necessary for drivers to use full rim-shot rain lines if the track was even a little wet, and times in the wet generally stayed above 1:55.

Luckily for me, the rain was only a small part of my time on track - the rest of my sessions were nice and dry.

Day three and day four were all dedicated to track time in the F2000. Day three was pretty uneventful for me, driving wise. I took my feedback and applied it as best I could, and I got myself up in the time sheets. The weather continued to stay unpredictable - most of the time we just stood in pit lane shaking our proverbial fists at the sky in an effort to scare off the impending rainclouds, which almost all miraculously missed the track. It did start raining in the middle of group 4's session, but everyone else got clear running.

During my second session of the day I had an issue with the car. It was handling brilliantly and had plenty of power (all cars, even mechanically identical ones, have differing traits), but around about lap 5 I got a "false neutral" going into turn 9. I don't usually mess up shifts in the F2000. I thought nothing of it and continued down into turn 11, which is where the fun began.

Turn 11 is a full-on braking corner. You brake as late as you can, as hard as you can. It's easy to get wrong and run wide. I usually don't. But it's a lot harder to get right when your car won't stop, and mine didn't.

Well, it did stop, just not very well. I swung out wide through the hairpin and missed the gravel by the skin of my teeth. I came off the brake pedal and the car accelerated on it's own, hard, down the main straight. I continued down to turn 2 with the car driving itself. It wouldn't shift out of 3rd gear using the normal "lift sharply and pull the lever" technique, so I put the clutch in and shifted - the engine wailed as if it'd been stabbed.

The throttle was stuck wide open.

I got on the brakes very early and put my hand in the air, a typical "I'm going way slower than normal, please miss me" signal. I limped around very carefully in 4th gear to the pits. I did make it.

Evidently, someone had gone off the track right before I took the wheel. When you do that, gravel tends to get everywhere. A rock must have found it's way into an inconvenient spot in the throttle linkage and lodged itself in there, holding the throttle open most of the way. I switched cars and continued my session without incident.

Chilling out in pit lane, waiting for the next randomized car assignments.

Day four was crunch time. Time to assemble all of our learning in a last ditch attempt to impress the judges and get a leg up on our peers. The track was very grippy, my car was handling fairly well, and the tires were worn in. It was a good session, and I set my fastest lap time of the weekend - a 1:42.5. It was slower than I went on my 2-day Advanced school, but the weather wasn't quite as good and there was a puddle being kicked up on the exit of turn 4 that hurt everyone's times.

After everyone had completed their sessions, the judges deliberated. And deliberated. And deliberated. We waited hours for their decision, and finally, as the sun was close to setting, it came. I'll list the awards here.

Winners of the 2011 BFGoodrich/Skip Barber National Presented by Mazda scholarship:

Trent Hindman, 15

Danilo Estrela, 17

Tristan Nunez, 15, half season

Winners of the Skip Barber Regional Race Series scholarship:

Stefan Rzadzinski, 17

Kenton Koch, 17, half season

Scott Hargrove, 15, half season

Kyle Kaiser, 14, half season

No, I didn't win any of the prizes. But I don't feel bad about it. The competition was downright fierce, the level of talent shown incredibly impressive. And I understand why I wasn't picked - I am much older than the winners, and have less experience.

Still, I learned a lot, about driving, and about myself. I learned how much further I have yet to go, and how much work I'm going to have to do to get there. But most importantly, I had a ton of fun doing it.

Before I forget, here we all are standing on the front straight, along with the instructors and judges. I'm more or less 12th from the right, first one with the gray suit in the 2nd row.

Thank you Skip Barber, Mazda, BFGoodrich and the FIA!

All images credit Kelly Brouillet courtesy of Skip Barber Racing.

(125) 14th Annual Skip Barber Karting Shoot-out preview

2010-11-30T10:36:00.000-08:00

On Thursday, I leave for the 14th Annual Skip Barber Karting Shoot-out at Laguna Seca.

This is the reason why I've been doing so many Skip Barber schools. This will be a culmination of the last 3 years of training. This is a pivotal moment in my career. I thought I would be terrified, but I'm so excited I could burst.

First, a run-down.

The shoot-out is based on a simple concept - take some of the top karters from around the country and put them all on the same track on the same day in the same car to see who is best. The best two drivers each get a free ride in the Skip Barber National Presented by Mazda, worth about $50,000, and various other runner-up prizes for Regional Race Series seat time. In total, $200,000 in prizes are up for grabs.

The shoot-out involves no actual karting. We aren't out to determine the best karter, we're out to determine the best race car driver out of the 44 drivers who are signed up.

The program is 4 days long. On the first day, we are going to be driving mostly street cars on the autocross and skid pad. There will also be interviews by none other than Bob Varsha, the voice of Formula 1 on the Speed channel. Skip Barber isn't just taking driving into consideration - media talent and professionalism are also key criteria at the shoot-out.

On the second day the meat of the competition begins. Seminars will be presented in the morning on day two. There will be a media training seminar from Bob Varsha and Barbara Burns of Burns Media Group, a sponsorship seminar from Dean Case, Communications Officer at Mazdaspeed Motorsports, and Derek Daly will be doing a seminar about what it takes to be a professional driver.

After the seminars, we will begin our on-track sessions in the F2000. These will be 30 minutes long, and afterward we will be put through a points scoring system to help the judges decide who to pick as the winners. We will get 4 sessions during the competition and at the end, the panel will decide the winners.

Like I said, I'm so excited I could burst. I have no doubt that I can win this competition. There are lots of fast drivers competing, and I've met a lot of them. It's going to be tough competition. But I believe I can do it.

(124) Wrecked

2010-11-25T16:34:00.000-08:00

My test day in the Spec Miata didn't go so great.

We arrived early in the morning and got the car ready to go. It was very cold, and the track was very green - almost no rubber was on the track.

Roger took it out for the first session since he's driven these cars before. If there was anything wrong with the car he'd be able to find it more easily than I. He drove it for about 10 laps and all seemed well, so I hopped in for the next session. I rolled out of pit lane and took to the track.

Being a new car and a new track, I took it conservatively for the first few laps. The car was being patient, no dramatics even in the freezing cold, and so I started picking up the pace.

I started to get used to the limited visibility in a small sports car, which is hard to live with at a place like Infineon - lots of hills, dips, and blind corners. Also walls.

Unfortunately I got to experience the walls in a way I don't want to repeat.

As I completed lap 5 I was nearing my self-imposed limit for that session - I wasn't going to push the car as hard as I could the first time out, so I kept it under 80% of what I thought the car could do. I was braking a bit early, being gentle with the throttle, just becoming accustomed to the car and the track.

As I approached turn 11 on lap 6 I set the car on the line, looked for my braking markers on the inside, started braking... and then hit the wall.

Which wall? The wall that separates the track from the pit lane entrance, on the left side of the track. Fortunately it starts as a tire wall. What happened was, I actually hit the wall with the left front wheel of the car. The tires stick out from the body a couple inches due to camber, the vertical attitude of the wheel. When the tire hit the wall it pulled the whole thing sideways, bending the suspension. It then sucked the car's nose to the inside, against the wall, and then spat me out into the middle of the track. The suspension was massively bent, the upper body panel above the wheel was bashed, and the wing mirror was folded in. A lot of the paint was gone from the front. The wreck crew had to get a flat bed for the car.

Basically, I placed the car where I thought it would be safe from the wall, and then ignored the wall while I hit my marks, which were on the inside of the corner. I don't know if I misjudged, or the car wandered a little during the half second I was on the brake. If I was 1 or 2 inches to the right, I would've cleared the wall.

Either way, I just drove into a (soft) wall at about 90 MPH. And that's a big mistake.

The hit didn't hurt. The belts were tight and my thumbs were not hooked into the wheel.

Larry, the owner of the car, wasn't too mad at me. Or at least he didn't show it. He was surprisingly cool about it. I felt really bad regardless. This wasn't like being dive bombed, or having something fail. It's just totally my fault.

Physically I'm fine. My shoulder is a little stiff, but nothing else. Like I said, it wasn't a bad hit.

A disappointing day. Time to move on.

(123) Just call me Hans

2010-11-22T16:28:00.000-08:00

Today I picked up what should be the final piece in my racing wardrobe. Only this has absolutely no fashionable bearing whatsoever.

It's called a HANS Device. And it's pure safety.

The Head And Neck Support Device.

What it does is somewhat complex.

It sits on your shoulders, around your neck, and the two tethers attached to the top are then attached to the back of the helmet. The seat belts go over the "tongs" on the bottom and hold it in place.

It's design is to eliminate the risk of basilar skull fractures and other head and neck injuries by tethering the driver's helmet to the shoulders and belts.

Basilar skull fractures are quite rare for the general population. Street cars are now so good at dissipating energy in a frontal impact that there is very little risk of it in passenger cars, even at very high speed. Outside an automobile, basilar skull fractures are even rarer.

Racing cars are different. Racing cars are very stiff, and because of that don't dissipate energy very well with respect to the driver. Plus, the driver is strapped in extremely tightly, in addition to wearing a heavy helmet. Without proper measures, neck injuries are to be expected even in a light impact. Before the deployment of widespread head restraint, basilar skull fractures were too common in motorsport - most of you have heard of Dale Earnardt Sr.'s crash and death, and Roland Ratzenberger, Greg Moore and far too many other drivers from various forms of autosport have been killed by basilar skull fractures. When they occur, they are usually instantly fatal. Few people have survived them.

So, now, we have the HANS. The tethers keep the head from hyperextending forward. It's still possible to have a neck injury while using them, but the risks of most forms of hyperextension injuries are virtually eliminated. The energy exerted on the head and neck in a frontal impact is reduced by about 80% while wearing a HANS Device.

While reassuring, this post makes me fairly melancholy.

(122) Perspective

2010-11-17T11:44:00.000-08:00

In 7 days I'm going to be doing a "test day" in a race prepared MX-5, suitable for SCCA's Sealed Spec Miata class, at Infineon Raceway. "Test day" is code for "driver development".

I've already met with the car owner (Larry Oka) and it seems like I'm in good hands. Larry's been running racing cars since the 70's and has had his fleet of 12 or so Miatas for a number of years.

During the day I'm going to share the car with Roger Eagleton, one of my racing buddies. If you have a good memory you'll recall he was one of my team mates for the karting enduro in 2009. The reason for pairing up being that, for one, it makes the day a little cheaper since we split the cost, and we can help each other learn since we both did a bunch of Jim Russell classes and races, so we know each other's driving. Larry is also a driver coach.

The car is a mostly-standard first generation Mazda MX-5 Miata. The engine makes about 110 horsepower, and has near-slick racing tires.

Why would I want to drive a car like this? It's not a bad question considering what I've been driving (karts and formula cars).

Well, a long time ago I did a Skip Barber driving school in street cars. That was just after my first year of karting if I remember right. They were street cars, but I still learned a bit about karting. By racing with suspension and differentials, I learned about what it means to not have those things, and my karting improved.

And so I adopted my firm belief in the importance of driving a variety of cars. It's one thing to learn that your car does a particular thing, and how to use or avoid that thing, but if you drive a car that does the opposite, you gain more insight into that thing that your normal car does. Perspective is a powerful thing. If the highest number known to you is 100, and one day you discover 1,000,000, suddenly 100 doesn't seem like such a big number.

So, it's a good idea to do a similar thing with cars. If all you've ever driven are cars with low power and limited slip differentials, it may be a good idea to get yourself into a high-power, locked-diff stock car for a day or two.

That's what I'm doing with the Miata. These past months I've been driving a rear-engined, 1,200 pound, sequential transmission, street-tire shod formula car. The Miata is a front-engined, 2,200 pound, H-pattern stick transmission, semi-slick shod GT car. It's going to change the way I think of the F2000 for the better. Which is good, because I'm going to need to be in top shape for the Skip Barber shootout in December.

(121) Lapping in the fog, more fun than singing in the rain

2010-11-06T14:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went back down to Laguna Seca to get a final day of driving the Skip Barber F2000 before the shootout in December.

The weather was quite cloudy, and the morning had a lot of fog. During the first session, patches of fog were drifting over different parts of the track. It was really cool to enter thick fog at the top of the Corkscrew and emerge from it down in Rainey curve. Fortunately the cars have rain lights on them, not unlike Formula 1, so visibility wasn't much of an issue.

The fog left plenty of dampness on the track and it lost a ton of grip as a result. The cars were all in race trim since the first races of the winter series are this weekend. This meant the cars were a bit twitchier than I was used to. That, combined with the low grip, meant I was working the wheel pretty hard. About the best times we could hope for were low 1:43s or high 1:42s.

Still, I learned plenty. There were a lot of people there getting practice for the first races. We had 36 drivers I believe. A lot of them were also going to be competing in the December shootout, so I got to meet many of my competitors. It's going to be a great exhibition of talent.

We each did two very long sessions of lapping, with 3 groups taking part. Each session was about 35 minutes of driving. I didn't find that it beat me up too much. If I did 35 minutes straight in the kart I'd be somewhat beat, but this formula car is much less demanding. Still, I felt it this morning. A workout handles your stamina just fine, and I still had energy at the end of the day, but if you don't drive every week the little muscles you use won't stay conditioned, and I didn't drive at all in October. So I'm a little sore in certain places. Not as bad as driving the kart though.

The fog burned off for the 2nd session and we had some sunshine. The track didn't feel any better though.

Session 2 footage, with traffic.

I had two cars during the day. A white one for the first session, and then the blue one for the second, because the white one got repurposed. The blue one felt pretty nice. The gearbox was shifting especially smooth. It had more oversteer in it, though.

So what now? Well, while I'm waiting to compete in the shootout, I'm going to be testing an MX-5 with one of my friends at Infineon the day before Thanksgiving, now that I have my SCCA race license. Sharing a car for a day is more cost effective. Plus I want to get some experience in a race prepped sports car. There are a couple of issues with my driving I think can be solved by driving a street-derived car.

Next week I'm going to meet the owner of the car and figure out our goals for the test day.

(120) Shootouts and licenses

2010-10-06T12:10:00.000-07:00

Now that I've done my car-racing schools, what's next?

Well, the first thing I'm doing is I'm getting my SCCA regional competition license. Basically, since I've done the Skip Barber school I have now met the requirements for a license, and all I have to do is send in my medical exam and my letter of recommendation from the school and I should be all set.

If I didn't go to Skip Barber I would have to apply for a novice permit. To meet the requirements for a full license, I would have to do 4 races and two SCCA schools. By doing Skip Barber, I've skipped that step and I can get my full regional license right off the bat. All you have to do is pass a medical exam, which I've already done.

The regional license will allow me to participate in semi-private test days at any track in north America (test days are race-car exclusive track days, usually with only a few cars on track and only race licensed drivers are allowed to run), and it will allow me to race of course.

Now, as far as my immediate racing future, what's next?

As far as Skip Barber goes, I'm going to be doing a lapping day at Laguna in early November. This is just to get some extra seat time in the car before I go to compete in the 2010-2011 Skip Barber Karting Shootout, which is happening on December 3rd, also at Laguna.

The other interesting thing is that the end of SCCA's season usually involves an endurance race. This particular one is happening on October 15th. Why do I mention this? One of my racing buddies offered me a spot on his team.

Now, this may end up being too tight, since we do have to find a car to race (the car he was planning on running won't be available). But if we can find a car to drive and if SCCA grants me a license within the next 6 days, we'll be racing in a 4-hour endurance race at Laguna Seca in some kind of tin-top car (most likely a Miata MX-5, since there are billions of those in the San Francisco SCCA region).

Hopefully all of that works out and we get to drive. It's going to be tight. If it doesn't happen, then I will probably do a test day or two in the coming months, just to get the experience of driving different cars.

Quick update: it looks like the enduro isn't going to happen. The guaranteed grid spot date is behind us, and we still haven't got a car. If we entered now we might not even get a spot in the race, and the entry fee would be forfeit.

So it looks like I'm going to do a test instead.

(119) Skip Barber Advanced Racing School

2010-09-26T16:10:00.000-07:00

My advanced racing school in the Skip Barber F2000 went really well, I think.

The first day started off with more autocross sessions. Actually we ended up doing more autocross than the 3-day - we spent all morning dodging cones. Not very manly or dangerous, but it was fun to chuck the car around. I had some pretty large drifts, "large" being a relative term, since formula cars don't have much steering ability and thus can't hold a 90-degree slide like a dedicated drift car with special suspension geometry.

The on-track sessions in the afternoon started with lead-follows behind the Mazda 3s. When you're riding in the Mazda 3, it feels like you're going a lot faster than you actually are, since the car is a lot less capable than a race car (even though it has the same BFG G-force tires on it, which makes the car a lot faster than stock). Following the Mazda in the formula car, you realize how slow you were going before, since it's a breeze to keep up. It's still quite a capable family sedan, though.

Laguna Seca, how I missed thee.

After the lead-follows were done, and we were re-acquainted with Laguna Seca, we started turn 2 braking drills. I'm still not 100% comfortable with the brakes. I'm getting very close, but getting that perfect threshold pressure every time is a bit hit or miss. At least I'm not locking up any more.

The brake pedal on these cars needs to be felt to believe. My mom tried sitting in the car, and I walked her through getting threshold pressure. I told her "push the brake really hard, until you feel the throttle under your foot" (since the throttle is positioned lower than the brake, so that at threshold pressure the pedals are even with each other and it's easy to blip with heel and toe). She pressed hard, and didn't feel it. I kept telling her to press harder. The harder she pressed, the greater the expression of disbelief on her face. The brakes really are that stiff. After 2 days, my foot was by far the sorest part of my body, which isn't saying much because I wasn't that sore. But even still, I was walking a little funny the next day. All my braking in the kart was done with the left foot. Now I have an even stiffer pedal, and I must use my unconditioned right foot.

I had a few things to fix with my braking, mostly line and timing sort of things, and I made sure to cure them quickly so they didn't become a problem. A session of free lapping ended the first day.

The corkscrew, turn 8. It's quite steep. From here, it's a 300 foot drop down to the bottom of turn 10.

The following day was spent entirely on track. The morning started out foggy, but it cleared up pretty quickly. Standard coastline weather. The order of the day was instructor lapping.

The instructors would get in their race cars and would drive around with us, watching us, showing us, and sometimes passing us for practice. I and another karter were paired up with Lonnie Pechnik, one of the instructors from my 3-day. He spent a lot of time chasing me, and I received a ton of good feedback as a result.

The car I was using was understeering quite a bit. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say the front ride height was too high, since it took a good bit of effort to rotate it well with the brakes and when I got back on the power the understeer kicked in. This was a problem in the high speed corners, where you are on the throttle from entry to exit to keep the rear end under control. I had to limit my speed through turns 4, 6, 9 and 10 to keep from running off the road due to lack of front grip. Lonnie was having the same problem, and his suggestion to "drive around it", as he put it, was to let the car roll into the corner before applying the throttle.

Normally in the fast corners you need to get on the power before you turn for the corner, that way the weight stays on the rear of the car and it stays stable. If you have understeer problems, you stay off the power and allow more weight to transfer to the front of the car, giving you more front bite and less understeer.

Learning how to tame my turn-in with the throttle rather than the brake is totally new for me.

Lonnie Pechnik chasing me into turn 11. This car is red, and the other is white, because the pictures with the white car are from the 3-day that I just now got in the mail. I drove this car in the 3-day when the white one had an issue.

In general I was going a lot faster. During the 3-day, I was being fairly conservative. I wanted to really feel the car out. During the 3-day, my lap times were in the 1:45 range, which is a little slow for this car. Now, my best times are in the low 1:41s. Amazing what just a little bravery can do.

So lets see what that bravery did eh?

Advanced school roll bar footage.

The camera is still having issues. I tried stuffing the housing with paper, since the camera was vibrating inside the case itself, but it only helped a little bit and made the audio worse. The next time, I will get some foam to place under the roll bar mount itself. That should take care of it. I also didn't quite tighten the mount all the way, and a couple of bumps knocked it askew.

These two days really reinforced how much more I'm enjoying driving cars. Karts are really fast and exciting, but the car is more satisfying somehow.

There is not a whole lot on the calendar at the moment. Over the next few weeks I'll talk about what is coming up at the end of the year, and what the plan of action will be for next year.

(118) New body

2010-09-13T22:36:00.001-07:00

I've had a couple weeks to think about my 3-day school. I've thought about how I did, what I accomplished, and what I still have yet to learn.

In a week, I will go back for my 2-day school and learn even more.

But what am I learning exactly? What's new about this that's so different from karting? In some ways, my new body (the car, that is to say) is very different from the kart in some areas, and not so different at all in others.

For starters, the car has a transmission. It's not so bad, though. The pacing of the car is much slower. That is to say, the length of the braking zones, the length of the straights, the time you spend in the corners, is much more on a big track in a big car. So you don't feel as rushed, and even adding the shifting doesn't make it feel as frantic as the kart.

A lot of that is also due to the suspension. The car needs much calmer inputs just to keep from spinning out. You also have to be more "ahead" of the car. In the kart, if you get a slide, you just flick the steering and it's done. The weight transfers instantly, and it recovers right away. The car is more ponderous. Increased weight, and the addition of springs and dampers means that you have to be a lot more patient, and a lot more "pro-active" with your inputs. For example, in a slide, you can't just flick the steering quickly, then have it all over and done with. You need to get on top of the slide quickly, like the kart, but then it becomes a little bit of a contest. You have to hold the correction long enough for the car's momentum to stop it's rotation, then pre-empt the chassis by bringing the wheel back into line pronto, otherwise the car will snap again in the other direction. No matter how slow you are with the steering, that "tank-slapper" effect just doesn't happen in karts. I've never seen it, and I've never done it.

The other big difference is the way the rear wheels act. In the kart, the rear wheels are joined by a single axle. While this seems proper at first, it presents a physics conundrum. If the car takes a corner, the inside wheel will be covering less distance than the outside wheel. Because the chassis is between the two, the road will be trying to force the inside wheel to move (roll) slower than the chassis, and the outside wheel will be forced to roll faster than the chassis. This creates a rearward dragging effect on the outside edge of the car which will try to pull the nose of the car to the outside, creating understeer when no throttle is used. The solution in the kart is to jack the inside rear wheel up by having a flexible chassis and sheer cornering ability, but when you're using independent suspension in a car, this becomes very hard to do indeed (unless you're one of those short-wheelbase, front-heavy, oddly-shaped-suspension-geometry hatchbacks).

The solution for the car is a differential, which allows the two wheels to roll independently while still enabling power delivery. The basic type of differential is called "open". The wheels have an infinite range of speed difference. The outside wheel could spin at 100 MPH while the inside wheel could spin at 1 MPH and the car wouldn't complain much, and it makes normal turning quite optimal. The problem occurs when you try to get on the power.

The way the open differential has to function means that the wheel which loses traction first gets all the engine torque (it is popular to explain it as "the wheel with the least grip gets the most torque", but that is inaccurate, since the wheel needs to have very little resistance to warrant full torque to only that wheel, which generally means it has to be sliding first - if neither wheel is sliding or spinning, they get pretty much the same torque). This means that, since the car is leaning sideways and "unloading" the inside tire, the inside tire is going to let go first in a slide, at which point it will get most of the torque from the engine, pushing the rear wide and creating oversteer. This means that open-differential cars tend to have less acceleration ability coming off the corner. If the car were to have a "limited slip" differential, a differential whereby the difference in wheel speed is limited, this becomes less of a problem. The inside tire will still let go first, but with a limited slip diff, you can ensure that the outside tire is still getting a decent amount of torque from the engine.

So, at Skip Barber, I've gone from one end of the spectrum to the other. From fused rear wheels, to rear wheels that don't have any limits on how fast they can spin relative to one another. I seem to be doing okay with it, though.

(117) Skip Barber 3-day Racing School

2010-08-28T21:03:00.000-07:00

On the night of the 21st, my throat was itching.

I wasn't worried. It was probably just something I ate. My parents had been sick for a few days after getting some virus on the other side of the country. Since I hadn't shown any symptoms, I assumed I was immune. The itch wasn't itchy enough to cough, so I persuaded myself that it would just go away and tomorrow, on the way down to Laguna Seca, I would feel perfect. There was no way I could get sick just before my 3-day racing school at Skip Barber, my introduction to Formula cars.

Along came the afternoon of the 22nd, just an hour before we were set to leave, and the itch was still there. Nothing to do about it now.

The next morning in the hotel in Monterrey I don my nomex undersuit with my "civvies" over top. I looked a little bit like a hipster, with my acid washed blue jeans and brown T-shirt over my white turtle neck-ish nomex, only with worse color coordination. I do this because I don't like to feel rushed when I arrive at the track. All I have to do is pull on my overalls and lace up my shoes and I'm good to go. Normally I'd wear my full getup with my suit's top and arms tied around my waist, but that looks a little odd when you're sitting down to breakfast. As the days went on I stopped caring and just put it all on in the morning. The odd looks people give are amusing.

Upon arriving at the track and getting settled in at the Skip Barber classroom (which is smack in the middle of the paddock), we meet our instructors for the day: Jonathan Frost, Lonnie Pechnik, Jeff Rodriguez and Ricky Shmidt. We also get the order of the day- autocross.

The idea behind the autocross is just to explore what the car feels like under, on, and over the limit before we get out on the track and get up to high speed. No transmission, no big braking zones, just brushing the brake, turning, applying the throttle, a little bit of sliding and maybe a spin or two.

But before we could do that, we needed to have a look at the car we'd be driving. So we headed out to the grid to have a look-see.

Ricky Shmidt demonstrates the aspects of the R/T 2000, sans bodywork.

The Skip Barber R/T 2000 is a fairly simple machine, but not at first glance.

The first aspect is just getting into the thing. It's tiny. Once you've accomplished that, you have to do up the 5-point harness. The harness needs to be so tight it hurts, otherwise you can be in a lot of trouble if you crash at high speed. That's why street cars have auto tensioners and belt locks.

Now come the controls. Unfortunately, I didn't think to grab a shot of the dashboard, but I'll run you through it anyway.

The dials and lights, from left to right, are the water temp, the tachometer, the neutral light and the oil pressure. Just 3 dials. No speedometer.

The controls, from right to left, are the shifter stick (more on that in a moment), the steering wheel in the middle (obviously), the starter button just to the left of the tach, the master switch to the left of that, and down and all the way to the left is the neutral/reverse lockout.

Starting the car is more involved than just turning the key. First, you turn on the master switch (to the "up" position), which turns on all the electrics and cycles the fuel pump. Then you check to make sure the car is in neutral. If it's not in neutral, the neutral light will be off. To get it into neutral, pull out and hold the neutral/reverse lockout knob, and if you are in 1st gear, push the shifter stick half way forward until the neutral light comes on. Now you can push the starter button and it will come to life. You can still start the car in gear with the clutch in, it's just good to let the transmission get into it's groove. To get it into 1st gear, quickly press and hold the clutch and pull back on the stick firmly. If you hold the clutch in for too long before trying to get 1st gear, the transmission will lose synch and the gear won't go in, since this transmission has no synchro gears, unlike a street transmission.

1st gear goes to about 60 MPH, so no shifting is required for the autocross.

Waiting to go attack some cones. It's hot in here, wearing 4 layers of all-inclusive nomex.

After a few slow laps to learn the layout of the track (a sea of cones can be a little confusing at times), I finally got up to speed in my new toy. Oh man, what a blast! It's incredibly responsive, even with the addition of springs and dampers. I was quickly trail-braking and 4-wheel drifting my way through sweepers, switchbacks and hairpins alike. I was enjoying this much more than karting. So much more patience and smoothness is required, it's just a lot more rewarding to drive. Feeling a longer wheelbase pitch and pivot around you is much more addicting to me.

Attacking the cones. Being careful not to run over the megaphone.

Though, it is a much larger car, and I did clip a number of cones while I was sorting out my new "body". Make no mistake, these race cars and karts are very much a suit that you wear. A suit with wheels and an engine.

Lonnie Pechnik and his funny hat telling me not to brake so late.

After we all had our fun on the autocross, we headed back into the classroom to detail the next drill - shifting.

The idea behind the shifting, braking and downshifting drill was simple. We line up going backwards in the pit lane, and we'd drive out and make a left going to turn 11, the hairpin. We'd go down the front straight in 4th gear and when we got to turn 2, there'd be a braking point set up which was conservatively placed in front of the corner with plenty of time to slow down. During the braking zone, we'd downshift once, slow right down, take the corner nice and easy, then turn to the left and enter the pits backwards again. In the pits, there was another braking zone, again placed with plenty of time to slow down for the tight pit "entrance". Rinse and repeat. We had a rev limit of about 3500 RPM, so even in 4th gear we were only going maybe 65 or 70, at the most.

To upshift this car, with it's sequential transmission, all you have to do is lift the throttle and pull back the shift lever. It's not quite that simple though. You can't just yank it, you have to do it smoothly with your hand and sharply with your foot. To downshift, just brake, put the clutch it, push the stick forward, blip the throttle with your right foot, and release the clutch.

Blip? What's a blip?

A blip (like a small push) of the throttle while braking and downshifting is called heel and toe. It's called heel and toe because there are 3 pedals, and the only way to operate all 3 of them with 2 feet is to use part of one foot on one pedal, and the other part on another pedal. The heel and the toe are most convenient, so it's called heel and toe. But why do you have to do this in the first place?

Think about a normal upshift. If you go from 3rd to 4th, what happens that you can observe? The engine revs drop. You've switched to a lower ratio gear. In 1st gear, the engine might be turning 3 times for every 1 time the drive shaft turns. In 4th gear, the engine might turn once for every 1 turn of the drive shaft. It depends on the ratio of the gears installed on the car. In many cars, 5th or 6th gear actually means the engine crank is spinning slower than the drive shaft. That's called overdrive.

So if you switch from 3rd to 4th and the revs drop from 4500 to 3500, what do you think is going to happen if you switch back from 4th to 3rd? The engine will be moving slower than the drive shaft wants it to, and the rest of the drive line will drag the engine up to the proper speed. As you can imagine, this is quite unsmooth. It's also hard on the car. If you're braking hard, this will also probably momentarily lock the driven wheels.

To make a down change smooth, you use heel and toe. The process goes like this. You put the clutch in, you choose the gear you want, and while the clutch is still in, you use the throttle to rev the engine up to the proper speed for the new lower gear, and you release the clutch. If you did it right, you don't feel a thing, and your entire drive line will love you for all eternity.

It gets a little more complicated when you try to do this while braking. As I said before, 3 pedals, 2 feet. So, you use your toes to brake the car (or, more specifically, the ball of your foot), and you pivot your heel over to strike the throttle while you shift down. Heel and toe.

This whole process takes a fair amount of coordination to pull off, without missing a shift or adversely affecting your brake pressure, not to mention making it accurate enough to be smooth. That's the purpose of the downshifting drill. The Skip Barber car does have a sequential transmission, which can be both upshifted and downshifted without the clutch, but the only reason not to use the clutch with a sequential is if you left foot brake, and in this car the steering column is in the way. So you are literally forced to heel toe, and if you've got a spare foot, you might as well use the clutch and give the mechanics another few hundred miles before a transmission rebuild.

I did a couple of passes at the downshifting drill and I thought I was doing okay. I'm sure the instructors had plenty of notes for me, but all that was cut short when I crested the hill going back into the pits and saw a yellow flag. We pulled in, and I could see a car down at the end of pit lane that had crashed. I didn't see it, so I had no idea how bad it was.

It turns out, a young girl who didn't have a whole lot of experience had somehow missed the braking point, not slowed down, and hit the wall right in a spot with no tires. A helicopter was called in, because she was really hurt. We later learned that she hadn't tightened her belts all the way, and her helmet hit the steering wheel. She had a broken jaw, a broken ankle, and lost some teeth. The instructors said it was one of the worst crashes they'd ever seen at Laguna. A really terrible thing.

After a long wait for all the safety crews to finish, we eventually did get back out for a couple of lead-follow sessions to set up for the next day, which would be spent on the track. These were just slow speed recon laps to get us familiar with the layout and the line of Laguna, which, thanks to the simulator, I already had a good grasp of.

Day 2

The second day was all on the full track, though it was with a changing rev limit all day. At first it was 3500 RPM, but it ramped up to 4500 RPM.

The first sessions of the day were simple laps with a rev limit, only at the end of the lap you would stop in a cone box and get the feedback from the instructors over the radio. Then you'd be allowed to go on another lap with enough space from other traffic. I was starting to approach the limits of the car, and I was getting some really good feedback.

In between each group, the instructors would take students out in the vans to various corners to watch. They also did evaluation runs in the Mazda 3s so they could more closely observe our inputs.

Sitting in pit lane, running through the last session and mentally applying the feedback I got.

Then we started braking drills. The drills were simple. Accelerate with no rev limit towards turn 11 from turn 10 and stop as fast as you can. Get your feedback at the apex then continue on down to turn 2 and do the same thing.

I struggled a little with the brakes. In the kart, I'm used to oversteer telling me when I've locked up (since the kart has rear brakes, locking up is the same as yanking the hand brake really hard). In the car, you have to pay attention to the front tires with your eyes. Plus, the brake pedal is a lot firmer than the kart, and I had to recalibrate my foot to modulate at those high pressures.

I had a couple of attempts in turn 11 where I nearly went off into the gravel from locking up, then releasing a little too much, then locking again.

Then I went off down to turn 2 and there was another student still sitting on the apex getting his feedback. So I tried to run wide but ended up sliding off the track and getting beached. There's always a first time to use a tow truck...

Braking drills just don't seem to go my way. I learned a bit though.

The day was really hot, over 100 degrees, and right before the last session I got a throbbing headache and a slightly upset stomach. I immediately downed two bottles of water and some ibuprofin, which seems to work better for me than acetaminophen (Tylenol). Fortunately the headache went away before the final session and I was able to concentrate again.

The final session was a free lapping session with a 4500 RPM limit. I started exploring the car in a more natural way and gathered a lot of good data to carry into day 3.

Day 3

Day 3 ended up having fantastic weather and I was no longer sweating buckets. And even more good news: no more rev limits! We were now able to use the full range of the car, and that meant shifting at about 6k RPM. Unfortunately, I had to switch cars, because the white one I had been using developed a problem with the clutch and kept stalling.

I think now's a good time to give up a video.

Day 3 helmet cam footage. Sorry for all the wind noise, but there is action!

This is from the top of my helmet, and it really shows how much smoother the whole thing is compared to the kart. Also keep an eye on my right leg as it heel-toes on the downshifts and snaps off the throttle on the upshifts. At the end of the main straight the car is doing about 105 MPH.

And here is a more traditional roll bar mounted shot.

Day 3 roll bar footage. Much better audio, but the vibrations cause anomalies. Duct tape will fix that.

My laps at the end of the day were in the 1:45s, which isn't really quick, but I was trying to be a little careful. Even after 3 days I was still feeling out the car, and the 3rd day was really the only time I could really get on it and learn it the "normal" way. I can find more time in the high speed corners, and a tenth or two just about everywhere. I suspect the slowness is in part due to old tires.

As far as damage goes, it's not that bad. After 3 days of driving this car, I feel like I've only done a half-day of karting. If I ever have any stamina problems in this car, I'll know I've gone soft. The steering is more vertical, however, and I was definitely using new muscles for that. My cold did end up taking over right after I got home, that's why I didn't update for a couple days. Fortunately I only had a sore throat during the actual school, so the timing was pretty good all things considered.

Whew. That's one of the longest posts I've done here. I should get a laptop so I can update once per day on these multi-day trips.

Anyway, I had an absolute blast, and I really, really can't wait for my advanced school, which is next month.

There are a couple more pieces I want to do as a result of this, so there's more to read in the coming weeks. What? I can't just dole it all out right now. Then you'd have to wait even longer for new stuff. Also, there should be some professional shots coming up in the next couple of weeks, which I will post, naturally.

(116) Skip Barber 3-day Racing School preview

2010-08-17T15:31:00.000-07:00

I promised a full preview of my 3-day Skip Barber racing school at Laguna Seca on the 23rd, so here it is.

The car I'll be driving is the R/T 2000, and open wheel formula car not unlike an F2000 car. It has a 2-liter single overhead cam Dodge engine (even though it says Mazda on the side) that puts out about 150 horsepower at 5800 RPM and 126 lbs-ft of torque at 5000 RPM. The engine used to make it's home in the Dodge Neon. Linked to the wheels with a 5-speed sequential transmission and housed in the back of a chassis weighing 1,250 pounds in total, it will jump the car from 0-60 in about 4.5 seconds and go on to a top speed of 135 MPH.

Fore and aft wings, and a set of BFGoodrich g-force tires, means the car has plenty of grip to boot. I'm a little fuzzy on the exact numbers. It probably won't flex my neck as much as the kart.

The Skip Barber R/T 2000.

The course itself, being a 3-day school, spans 3-days of course. The first day should be mostly dedicated to learning how to upshift and downshift the sequential transmission properly on the autocross course. The transmission is a straight dog box, which means there are no synchro gears between the dog ring and the face of the gear. This allows a faster shift without the need of a clutch, but it also means it's a little harder to master and requires quick, precise timing. The transmission is operated by a lever that only has 2 positions - forward, which starts a downshift, and backward, which starts an upshift. So you can't skip gears in either direction, hence "sequential". Most racing cars use this type of transmission. Most also have a "throttle cut" system that cuts fuel flow when the lever is pulled back, for an upshift. The R/T 2000 does not have this, so I will need to sharply lift off the throttle as I shift up. The transmission will probably be the biggest challenge for me, but we will see.

The second and third days will be mostly track focused, and I'll be driving on the full Laguna Seca circuit in a variety of sessions designed to exercise my passing and other techniques.

As far as my preparation for all this, I have all of my fire gear, I've been keeping my normal workout going, and I've been using the simulator a lot (which actually has a laser-scanned version of Laguna Seca and the R/T 2000).

I leave on the 22nd, and I'm ready.

(115) White ninja

2010-08-07T19:57:00.000-07:00

I got the rest of my fire gear today.

The first items in question are the gloves. I had a number of options that I was considering from Sparco. I really liked the sheer grippyness of the Tide gloves, which have little gecko-like feelers on them. But, increased price and decreased life (the feelers would no doubt wear off quickly) meant that in the end I chose the Tornado gloves, since they still offered really good grip and fit.

Sparco Tornado gloves. If I slap someone does Oklahoma get destroyed?

The second items on the list are the undersuit parts.

Single-layer nomex undersuits being all but equal in terms of burn rate, the primary concerns are breathability and itchyness. Yeah, really.

I wanted to stay a nice, brand loyal racing driver, but since no one is paying me to wear this stuff I just went with whomever irritated me the least (literally).

Alpinstars nomex undersuit set. White ninja. Not irritating.

So there you have it. My superhero suit is complete. I feel like strapping a katana to my back and doing a wallrun.

(114) IndyCar 2012

2010-08-03T16:03:00.000-07:00

Last month the IRL released their plans for the 2012 IndyCar season.

You may remember, but a while back I wrote a bit about what I think the IRL should do about it. Well, it seems they read my blog because they sorta-kinda used a couple of my ideas (but not exactly).

First, the car. The IRL ran an open chassis design competition in which manufacturers like Lola, Swift, and Dallara offered up various concepts.

Dallara grabbed the contract. Dallara deigned and builds the current IndyCar chassis. It's good to go with the Italians, but I liked Swift's proposal a little more, aesthetically. The IRL had their reasons I'm sure.

One of Dallara's 2012 IndyCar concepts. Striking.

Don't take the styling too much to heart, though. Now comes the meat of the changes.

First, engine regulations are open. Teams will be able to use manufacturer engines. The engines themselves will be turbocharged, and will be limited to 2.4 liters and have a maximum of 6 cylinders arrayed in any configuration the maker chooses, be it boxer, V, or straight engines. The IRL expects horsepower to be between 500 and 700. Push-to-pass is, sadly, going to be a part of that, and it will offer an extra 100 horsepower for a limited time. I hope we see a good array of engine types, but I suspect they will mostly be V6 and I4 engines.

The chassis regulations are being opened up, too, but not quite as much. Manufacturers, be it a guy from his garage or Penske or GM, will be able to offer up aerodynamics packages for sale to the teams. The teams will be limited to two packages per season (presumably one for oval racing and one for road). The parts will need to be certified for sale by the IRL. The rest of the car, the tub, the shocks and suspension, and the tires still will be spec. It will be interesting to see how different the cars look.

The minimum weight is coming down, to 1,380 pounds, 200 less than the current car.

The price is also coming down. Quite a bit in fact. The chassis itself will cost $350,000 in what's called a "roller" configuration, meaning it has no engine. The "turn-key" configuration, meaning full package (chassis + engine) will be $385,000. That's about $110,000 cheaper than a turn-key Porsche 911 GT3 RSR (like you see in Le Mans GT2 competition). The price of the aerodynamics packages will be limited to $70,000, which sounds like a lot, considering that the engine only adds $35,000 to the price of the car. No word yet, as far as I'm aware, of who will be supplying the "official" engine (the one that comes with the car).

Finally, top tier American open wheel racing is going to be a Formula again. That, combined with the Formula One event in Texas, means a very interesting year is in store for American motorsport in 2012.

(113) Phasing

2010-07-19T17:04:00.000-07:00

I hope you'll excuse the lack of postings as of late. For the past 6 months I've been averaging 2 posts per month. I'd like to bump that up to 1 weekly post, but I wonder to myself if I can manage to keep that rate of writing interesting.

You see, in the beginning, I had a lot to talk about. In 2008 I had a metric ton of posts describing my learning process. This whole thing was very new and I was very excited all the time. In 2009 I had a very active year with a lot of very exciting racing, and I'm sure it made for some good reading.

This year has been, so far, pretty transitional. My karting phase is winding down, and my car phase is going to come to life in the coming months. I have a lot of excitement regarding my upcoming schools at Skip Barber. Just another month and a half to go. It's my next big step on the ladder. Rung number two. So, naturally, I don't find myself thinking about much of anything else with regard to racing. I'm sure you all don't want me to just endlessly repeat my anticipation. Before I go for the first class, though, I will make sure to write a post detailing all of that, as well as my preparations. I will probably do that a week or two before the class.

I tend not to treat this blog like a diary. Not only do I not want to fill the internet with my own personal emotions and inner troubles, but I also don't think that kind of writing is very interesting. But then, you're talking to a guy that is more interested in how much horsepower his car has than the world views of poets.

Nevertheless, a few glimpses into my mindset have slipped by a number of times. I suppose you might say my mindset right now is eager, with a hint of waryness. Eager to prove that what I have gained from karting for 2 and a bit years will serve me well in full size cars, and that I can handle and even excel at this new challenge, and a little wary because of the numerous warnings that I've received about the differences between a car and a kart. No doubt there are differences, but which ones matter and which ones don't I'm not entirely sure about. While I have driven at race speed in a full size car with suspension and all that, I've never driven a fully fledged race car and while I have many theories as to what I'll need to bring to the table, I have little to go on at this point.

Any way, the point here is to let you all know that the sparse streak will probably continue for the next 4 weeks, as there is really nothing on my schedule racing wise. I'll try to find something to do, but no guarantees.

(112) Off day

2010-07-11T15:45:00.000-07:00

I've never really had an off day before. Not in racing anyway. 2 and a half years of racing and no really all around not so great days (performance wise). A few mediocre days, but no real bad days.

So I suppose it's about time I had one, eh? And had one I did.

The morning started out alright. I was 4th fastest in the practice sessions which is about normal for me at the beginning of the day. I don't enter with a bang. I like to work up to qualifying pace. It just seems more consistent.

Then, in the 2nd practice session, something happened. Don't ask me what. I really have no idea. For some reason, something was wrong. Could've been the kart, could've been me. Either way, I was 2nd to last in the times. The whole field was setting really close times (the entire field was within 1 second of the fastest lap), so that might have had an effect. I'm usually fine on the sprint tack. I'm not bad at it. It's not my best track, but it's not my worst either.

My performance (or lack thereof) continued into qualifying. I qualified on the last row (but not dead last), in 7th.

The mechanics offered to look over the kart to see if anything was wrong. I agreed. They changed the spark plug just for the heck of it but didn't find anything wrong with the kart.

One of my friends, normally quite fast, was also slower and qualified towards the rear. It might not have been a problem with us, but an unusual surge in performance from a lot of the other drivers.

The race was delayed because of a kart failing on the pace lap. We circulated for a while, I got impatient and spun the kart while trying to keep my tires warm. Very embarrassing.

The race start was fast, but the first lap was slow. There's not much you can do about that, being in back. You're kind of stuck and your passing opportunities are limited since you have to contend with the accordion effect (karts compress in the braking zone, and a once large gap between the two karts ahead of you shrinks, and you have no place to slot in should you attempt a pass).

On the 2nd lap I got passed going into Sand. I tried to salvage too much exit speed, and dropped a wheel. This instantly sucked me out into the dirt and I had to back out of the throttle or spin. I just rode it out and rejoined. The driver who passed me claims he didn't leave me any room, but I reckon I had enough to stay on the track. I just had too much speed.

The rest of the race was spent sparring for 6th spot. On the 2nd to last lap, one of the karts ahead half-spun and stalled (much like I did last year). He had trouble restarting and went to the back. The fight for 6th turned into a fight for 5th, which, with only 2 laps remaining, I had little chance of winning based on the gap.

I tried my best to catch up, but it wasn't enough and I finished 6th.

Round 6 helmet cam footage.

I suppose the fact that I didn't do any practice the week before could have contributed, but I don't think that was the only factor.

Depending on what my schedule with Skip Barber is going to look like, this might be the last time I drive at Jim Russell. I think that's unlikely, as I do want to come back and do the season ending double header and I'd like to do the Enduro again this year, but we'll see how things shape up.

(111) Simulating

2010-06-28T10:39:00.000-07:00

Over the past couple of months, I've been stepping up my use of high end consumer simulators. Kind of more hardcore stuff, that not to many people play or use. The programs considered to be the most realistic things a person can use on their home computer.

It's been slowly changing my thoughts about virtual racing.

A while ago (a long while ago), I made an entry about the game "NetKar Pro". It was sort of unfavorable - I saw it as gimmicky and rough around the edges. While my opinion hasn't changed in a large way, a number of small things have.

Home simulators are still fairly primitive. They still have no real way of communicating G forces and a large portion of the other sensory factors. The computer wheels in use are still, on the whole, nowhere near powerful enough or subtle enough to capture the feel of a real car's steering. Very few pedals replicate the same behavior of real pedals (I'm thinking primarily of the brake in this case - simulator pedals tend to be travel sensitive rather than pressure sensitive). You can correct these problems with very custom, very specialized equipment, but it is hideously expensive. A few thousand dollars, at least. But mass produced wheels and pedals are getting better all the time.

But, there are a number of simulators out there that inspire confidence for the future. The three that do it for me are Live for Speed, iRacing.com, and NetKar Pro. All for different reasons.

Live for Speed lacks a bit of graphical polish by today's standards, but it's satisfying to drive and features a large stable of diverse cars.

But let's get something out of the way first. There are two extreme camps with regard to the usefulness of these simulators - one camp that thinks you can become Michael Schumacher by playing, and the other camp that thinks simulators are completely worthless and sometimes not even fun. The former tend to cite various examples of people that started on video games and progressed to real racing (I'm one of them), as well as technique similarities between the best sim racers and the best real racers, which I will get into. The latter camp tend to cite real world experience as tainting the simulator experience, claiming that a simulator can never do real racing justice and that, in the extreme, even the best simulators are frustratingly unrealistic. As you'll see, there are valid points to both arguments.

Most of the opinions in each camp are further split between the three games I just mentioned. Most people consider one or two to be good and accurate, while the other one or two are not accurate (to varying degrees). This is down to the individual style and focus of each game, which I will gloss over. As to which camp I belong in, I wouldn't presume to tell you. I think there are some things you can be introduced to and grasp on a basic level in a simulator, some things that you cannot, and some things which you can even get somewhat good at on a simulator. I guess you could say I'm kind of on the fence. I'm a firm believer that the truth usually lies between two extremes.

iRacing.com actually has the same Formula 2000 that Skip Barber uses in it's school program. Over the past couple of months, I've been driving it a lot in the hopes that what I learn in the simulator will carry over. So, in August, I will have a direct comparison to draw upon to tell whether simulators are actually useful. I've already learned a lot about the car, and the track, on the simulator. The virtual version of Laguna Seca in iRacing is actually scanned with lasers, so it is absolutely inch-perfect. I'll be able to compare both the car and the track.

iRacing.com offers a high degree of visual and track surface accuracy with laser scanning technology, as well as official online race series held on a weekly basis.

I actually do want to do full reviews of each simulator, but that's for another time.

I do like racing games quite a bit. If you've been reading since the beginning, you'll know that it was video games that got me interested in racing. And, while not directly relevant to my form of racing (there are very few karting simulators), I feel like racing games have helped me in some ways.

I think the idea of a person learning to race solely on a simulator and then becoming successful in the real world is quite intriguing. There are a few different programs at the moment with that idea in mind, and so far they haven't produced any flops as far as I know. It's certainly plausible that someone who is fast in a game could be fast in real life. Let me explain that.

Driving a real race car is all about feel. You feel the G forces, primarily, and that tells you what the car is doing. Vibrations also have to do with it. Your senses can be extremely highly calibrated.

When you step into the simulator, you lose all that. You lose the G forces and the vibrations. Any real racing driver worth his weight will likely become confused the first time he uses a simulator. It's natural. Learning to drive in a simulator is a slightly different skill, but not an irrelevant one.

On the other hand, if you take a good sim racer, you see that most of his skill is from learning to drive something that has little feel. Most of his skill resides in his head and his eyes. Rather than feeling that he has a few degrees too much steering and a slight bit too much brake and correcting it through instinct as a real driver does, a sim racer sees that his car is responding badly and uses his technical knowledge to correct it. He has a limited amount of feel to help him.

NetKar Pro does the best job of supplementing the limited feel you have in a sim car and is very intuitive to drive.

The result is, if you take a sim racer and put him in a real race car, he will probably do better than the real driver trying the simulator, because the sim racer can still use his technical knowledge and his eyes in the real car, while the real driver can't use all of his senses in the simulator. The sim racer may be overwhelmed or intimidated by the (comparative) sensory overload from the real car, but he would adjust to that. When I first got on track for real, I didn't have all of the technical know-how (conscious or not) that a top level sim racer has. I wasn't driving the right simulators, and I didn't have enough time behind the virtual wheel.

What I'm getting at is, simulators are important from a mental aspect. Very important, I would wager. It's a theory I'm going to put to the test in about two months.

(110) Patience pays

2010-06-13T16:28:00.001-07:00

It was over 90 degrees and very windy for yesterday's race.

During the morning we had a tailwind going down the front straight of national reverse, and the karts were hitting the rev limiter all day. The top speeds were probably the fastest they've ever been.

I was about mid-pack during the morning practices, about 3 tenths off the fastest guys in terms of lap time.

I gathered myself together for qualifying, though, and put together a lap that was only 12 hundredths slower than the polesitter. I landed in 3rd. 2nd was only 12 thousandths off pole. The top 6 were separated by only 1 second. It was going to be anyone's race.

I figured I had a very good chance of getting 2nd, and more than a decent chance at a win.

The polesitter started us kind of far to the inside of the track, making the inside row a little squashed going into turn 1, "Sand". We were able to slow down enough to make it through safely, but it was a little iffy.

Rolling into turn 3, "Monaco", I decided to pass for 2nd, but I braked badly at turn 4, "Kramer" and let him back by, and another nearly followed, but I had a good exit and passed him into the esses.

After that I decided to just let the two leaders cruise, hoping they would begin to scuffle and I would slip by when one or both made a decent mistake.

After a little over a 3rd of the race I saw that 2nd was falling back from the leader and was not able to keep up, so I decided to pass when he made a mistake coming out of the final turn. I could have passed in a less damaging spot (I lost maybe half a second), but I had a really good run and my passing instincts kind of took over. In hindsight I probably should have taken him in Monaco or Kramer.

Either way, I was now in 2nd, with 3rd breathing down my neck. Despite getting into 2nd, the leader was still pulling away slowly but surely.

This continued until the penultimate corner where I had a bad exit. I looked over my shoulder and 2nd was right on my bumper. I knew he'd try a last-corner ditch attempt, but when he didn't show up halfway through the braking zone I thought he'd backed off because of my defensive line. But, just as I turned in with full trail braking and slip angle in effect, there was his nose to my inside. There wasn't much I could do save jostle the wheel a bit in an attempt to scrub off some grip and slide to the outside slightly, but we still had contact and he half-spun and stalled behind me and lost a place.

I ended up 2nd, just 2.5 seconds behind the leader and with the fastest lap of the race.

Round 5 helmet cam footage.

A decently exciting race all around. I could've done way worse.

(109) All suited up

2010-05-23T15:40:00.000-07:00

Since I'm going to be driving full size cars in the fall, I need a new suit.

Why? Don't I already have a suit?

Well, the thing is, karting gear is mostly designed to be skid resistant. The risk of fire is very small, and even if an engine blows up right next to your elbow it probably won't involve much fire. So as a result my gloves and suit are made of a type of rip-stop fabric and if I were to turn over onto my head and ejected at 40 MPH I'd be well protected from road rash (my shoes are fire shoes, however).

Fire suits are made from soft, delicate materials like nomex. These protect against fire very well, but if I were to slide along a road at a good clip they would get shredded to bits. Horses for courses.

Fire suits are also very expensive. My karting suit cost about $200. A three-layer SFI-approved and highly rated fire suit will be more like $1,500 to $2,000.

So I was pretty thrilled when I walked into the Infineon pro shop (Wine Country Motorsports) and saw a very nice Sparco three-layer suit in my size and on sale for $1,100.

This is what a professional photo would look like if you removed all the talent.

It's a Sparco X-light, and it's got some very impressive features.

Firstly, it's very light, as the name implies. It's only a little heavier than my karting suit. Some of the other suits I tried on were just plain uncomfortable. Very heavy and warm. This is the lightest and the coolest one I could find.

It's also SFI 3.2A/5 rated. What this means is, each layer of the suit will last ten seconds under direct flame. So, being a three-layer suit, I will have thirty seconds to escape the burning car. Add another layer of nomex underwear and I've then got forty seconds. Tons of time. To be SFI rated the suit must also self-extinguish in less than 2 seconds. Now that's just plain impressive.

The other cool part of the suit is the "X-cool" treatment that Sparco gives it. It's a chemical treatment that helps keep you cool. It also releases a fresh minty aroma so you don't smell too bad after a race. Ain't technology great?

This is the single most expensive piece of clothing I own. And it's expendable.

But hey, it's got my name on it.

(108) Luggin'

2010-05-01T22:31:00.000-07:00

I suppose I've been lucky so far. I've completed two seasons of karting without a mechanical mishap under my drivership. Generally, I'm rather fortunate, mechanically. Things always seem to work for me. Yes, the enduro last year was a large blow to our team. I wasn't expecting a repeat offense.

Today was rather confusing. The morning started off a little cool, like most mornings around the bay. In the first practice session the kart was working really well, and I a little less so. Six months off the beat will do that to you. I was second on the time sheets by two tenths and the coaches had a couple of small notes for me, nothing major.

It started to go down hill in the second session. I felt faster, I could tell I was using the kart better, more consistently, more delicately, in a finer manner. Getting closer to that limit. But the times went backwards. I lost two tenths, and I was dropping through the field.

Qualifying was again even worse. I made a mistake passing another driver and I ruined both of our laps by getting in way too hot and making him back off. Usually I stick to myself in qualifying, but another driver was close enough behind that backing off wasn't an option. Again I felt like I was getting to a finer point of car control, nailing the trail braking, carrying early, precise angle into the corners and making the kart work hard. The engines loved this perfect 75 degree weather and they had a good pop coming off the corners.

Despite my efforts, I landed in 6th spot, out of 12.

Something really just didn't add up. Some value that I wasn't accounting for. I had the school verify that timing and scoring was linked properly with my transponder in case I had been registering another driver's times. The transponder was linked perfectly.

After mulling it over on the drive home, I think I've narrowed it down to a couple things, or a combination of things.

Either my kart was setup and balanced in cooler weather, and the increase in heat, friction and the resulting high pressure was giving me less grip, or there was something else wrong mechanically, or the track was full of incompatible rubber that I was struggling on (unbeknownst to me, but I think I would've sensed that), or radioactive space particles were interfering with my brain synapses, causing me to think I was going faster than I actually was.

My money is on the space dust.

It started to creep into the back of my mind that today was not my day. I didn't let this thought get far.

I had a blazing start to the race. I went as soon as the flag man twitched. The rest of the field, from my point of view, didn't seem to scoot until the flag was all the way up. At the time, to me, this discrepancy felt like an eternity. In actuality is was probably about half of a tenth of a second.

I jinked to the outside immediately. In classic Evans style, I broadened the field to at least 3 wide going into turn 1. I had to check up, because it was a tight fit, and people were banging wheels and sliding. On the way down to the 2 complex, a driver tried to blast down the inside. Rule number one in passing. The car on the outside of the corner on the exit of a corner will get a better launch. I dispatched him from the outside into 2.

From there, I took it easy. The lead pack wasn't getting strung out, and I was keeping pace. I planned to wait for one of them to get it really wrong and then I would pounce in a spot that had a minimal impact on my total race time.

This charade continued until the end of lap 3. Suddenly, at the entrance to kramer (the corner after the long sweeper) I noticed a slight vibration from the left rear. I thought I had picked up a clot of clag from someone's tire. The vibration got worse through the next 3 corners. Finally, whatever it was really let go on the entry to the final start/finish hairpin, and the kart seemed to fall over and go all soft in the rear. I thought my wheel had fallen off. I looked quickly, and it was still there. I took the next corner, and it fell over again. I decided to give up and pit (one driver had already lost a wheel at about 50 MPH). On the way back I didn't push the kart at all, but because the left rear was broken, it slides around anyway. The field streamed by as I entered the pits.

It turns out that one of the wheel lug nuts had shorn off and taken the bolt with it. It's a wonder why the whole thing didn't just fly off at the earliest moment.

The mechanics took a very short time in replacing the hub and giving me a fresh tire. I headed back out onto the track, now 3 laps down.

The rest of the race was simply spent lapping, with a lot of looking over my shoulder to make sure the leader wouldn't catch me by the end.

I finished 9th, in the end. There was a pileup while I was in the pits, and there were a number of DNFs as a result.

Onabord footage from Round 4 of the Jim Russell karting series.

I re-watched the video about ten times, and I'm still not sure what I did to make the thing let go. I hopped a curb the lap before, but if it was that it stands to reason that it would've let go immediately after. I think the most likely explanation is that it was simply a defective bolt. Ever had a screw head just pop right off in your fingers? It's happened to me before.

Well, I'm not in a championship chase here, so I'm not as disappointed as I could be. I still finished the race. I guess that's all we can ever really ask for.

Sometimes, the space dust just doesn't go your way.

(107) Rain school

2010-04-28T20:17:00.001-07:00

When I saw the "chance of showers" weather forecast for today, my first practice session of 2010, I figured it would be just a few scattered droplets and at most the track would get a little damp.

Look at how wrong I was.

A boat and oars might have been faster.

It was an absolute downpour. But all was not lost!

The first session was mildly moist. We went out on slick tires since the sun was out and things were drying out. It was my first time on slicks in the wet and boy was it slippery. I have newfound respect for Formula 1 drivers who hold out through wet conditions on slicks. A dry line started forming in most corners, though, and it became faster and faster to stop using the rain lines.

Then the track dried out nearly completely. There were a few scattered patches of light dampness, but it was not in any critical spots. In the 2nd session I set the fastest time of the day, 55.9 seconds, which, considering that I haven't driven in 6 months, and the track was totally green and cold, is kind of impressive.

Then the rain came back. And it let loose a pretty good shower. It got everything wet enough for rain tires, and kept a heavy sprinkle going. Rain lines came into full effect, and I struggled. My entrances were fine, but I kept apexing too early and as soon as I started hard cornering on the rubber line it would just suck me into a vicious traction loss slide that is difficult to overcome at best. I spun a couple times at the exit of tic-tac-toe just trying to put too much power down in the wrong place with too much lateral load on the tires. Our times were a good 20 seconds slower than a good warm day.

A technical malady popped up with all the karts, and mine went first. As I was exiting the pits after a damage inspection from spinning off into the dirt, my engine cut out. I re-fired it and realized that it was missing heavily. I took the half a lap to circle around to the pits. Turned out to be a simple fix in the form of a new spark plug. We were not spending enough time at full throttle and these engines hate that. The karts all started feeling and sounding much healthier after the service (which took all of 30 seconds, since the spark plug is right on top).

Then the vicious clouds really let us have it for the fourth session. It felt like a monsoon. I decided to use the rain oversuit, which made me look humongous since I was wearing my normal impact suit underneath. Kept me very dry though (my hands still got rather waterlogged).

In the fourth session the rain lines needed to be hugely exaggerated. At some points we were almost running a high-side dirt line. My turn-ins for a number of corners were just a few inches from running out of road. Forget simply staying off the rubber line, if you weren't in the marbles, you had zero traction.

Nevertheless, my times improved over the more tame 3rd session. My fastest monsoon time was a 1:13.2.

Still, my kart control got a real workout and I'm sure it helped me overall. I learned a bunch more on racing in the rain. In California, every second of rain time is precious. We just don't get a lot here, at least during racing season. It was fun, too.

(106) The next rung

2010-04-16T14:05:00.000-07:00

Over the past few weeks my dad and I have been planning and detailing my next forays into motorsports, primarily focused on getting me transitioned from karts to cars.

The result is this.

At the end of this month, I go back to Jim Russell driving the sprint karts. I'm going to do 3 race weekends from May to July. Originally this was to include 2 single race weekends and a double header, but a scheduling change has reduced that to just 3 singles. I'll get to the reason for this later. I'll probably do the Enduro again this year if it doesn't conflict with anything.

In late August, I'll be going down to Skip Barber at Laguna Seca for a 3-day school in the Formula 2000 and the MX-5 Cup (they will let me drive both cars). I'll mostly be driving the F2000, but I want to get a little bit of time in the MX-5 because I believe that driving a variety of cars is a must for every young driver.

Then late in September I will do the Skip Barber 2-day advanced school in the F2000 again at Laguna Seca to qualify me for the regional race series starting in October/November, of which I may do a full or partial season, I'm not sure.

Now is the reason for the karting races. Originally I had decided to not enter the Jim Russell series because I wanted to focus on cars, but then I got an email about the 2011 Skip Barber karting shoot out.

The Shoot Out is quite simple. 50 karters head down to Laguna Seca in December (2010), where they will be evaluated over 3 days of driving the F2000. The two drivers that show the most promise will get fully funded seats in the Skip Barber National race series in 2011 (worth more than $50,000), courtesy of Mazda and the FIA. About $100,000 in other prizes are up for grabs: regional seats, half-season seats, etc. In all they award about $200,000 in prizes. Read more about it here.

You have to be an active and current karter, so I need to do kart races in 2010.

I'm confident I can get one of those National seats, but even if there was no prize the coaching and seat time would be a great deal. Plus you get some media and sponsorship training.

Lots to look forward to. I'm going to be very, very busy at the end of this year. My career is really going to take off this fall. But, first thing's first, the karting starts at the end of this month with my first practice. Time to knock the rust off.

(105) Driving According to the Chump #5: Mental Imagery

2010-04-10T20:25:00.000-07:00

Driving fast is incredibly mental. Driving is also all about preparation. Your mental prowess and preparation before an event are probably the largest factors in determining who gets to win.

Combine the two, and you get mental imagery.

Mental imagery is simple. It's an image of you going around the track. A daydream. You sit down, you remember the track, and you "drive" around it in your race car. I do this every night, and it's helped me immensely.

A driver who is good at mental imagery can help himself with a difficult section of the track, he can run laps in his mind before he ever even steps into the car for race day having just walked the track, and he can even help figure out setup problems by running mental laps and recalling what exactly was going wrong. Learning how to do mental imagery will also make you infinitely more sensitive to what the car is telling you.

So how do we start with mental imaging? Well, the first thing it requires is seat time. You need to have a database of various feelings and behaviors from both the car and track. You need to memorize bumps, curbs, lines, and most importantly the visual elements of the track - your reference points. You also need to know how the car behaves in every situation. You can't begin to explore the finer points of car control in your mind if you don't even know what these points feel like. A few days of (attentive) experience is enough.

When you're next in the car, try paying some extra attention to what it's telling you. Try to focus on the information from your hands, or your feet, or the sound of the engine and the wind, or your reference points, or the way the G forces are pulling at you. Try to absorb and store as much information as possible.

The second thing it requires is an active imagination. Not because you're making things up, but because you need to be able to assemble the sensory information. If you are a very "aware" person, in other words if you pay attention to and remember your surroundings, you're already wired up to be good at mental imagery.

This is because the image you're seeing right now, your surroundings, the colors, the brightness (or darkness), is not actually light as it is, just light as your brain interprets it. The brain assembles a "virtual reality" space inside your head based on your sensory information, which is corrected for beforehand. Illusions, like seeing a face in a block of wood, exploit this. Your mind wants to see a face, because the reference points you're seeing are in the right range to be face-like, so your brain shows it as a face in the virtual version of reality inside your head. What you see is as much a factor of your mental disposition as it is the amount of photons passing the lenses of your eyes.

When you dream or hallucinate, the image that you're seeing is using the same vision circuitry that you use when you're awake. So too, when you're using mental imagery.

When you sit down for your first mental imagery session, there are a number of important things to get right.

Make sure you're sitting in as close to your natural driving position as possible. If you drive a formula car with a form fitted seat, it might be best to do this at the next practice day so you can actually sit in the car. It's a huge help at first, but not required once you get the technique down.

Make sure you also remember as much detail as possible. The texture of the wheel, the smell of the cockpit, the feeling of your race suit, the stiffness of the pedals, the way the sunlight reflects off your visor or windshield, the sound of little rocks or bits of rubber striking the bodywork. No detail is too small. Detail is far more important than continuity for your first few sessions.

Your first sessions will be short. Just snapshots of a lap. Don't get elaborate with the scenes. Just run laps, don't race anyone and don't do anything out of the ordinary. Choose the corner that you think you know best, and try a run through it or two, or even just sit in the pit lane with the engine running. Again, detail is important here, not continuity. Get the "simulation" feeling, looking, sounding and smelling right before you start to do full laps. Keep going through that same corner, try a few others as well. Slowly expand the section of track you're using until it encompasses the whole thing. This is how you learn whether or not you have enough information. Not enough visual information and you won't be able to see all of the track (a lot of the fences at Infineon were missing for me for a long time until I started paying attention to them out of sheer annoyance). Not enough car dynamics information and the car won't react or feel how it should.

Do this for a few days (I wasn't even running consecutive laps until I had done at least 4 sessions). Eventually, you'll start to be able to adjust your driving using only mental imagery. A very powerful tool.

[UPDATE] I suppose I should mention exactly what mental imagery is used for. I wasn't very clear about this.

Mental imagery is primarily a programming tool. When you're doing mental imagery, you're anticipating potential problems or imagining current problems and finding a good way to deal with them. Like a programmer typing in lines of code into a computer. Mental imagery is the mind's programming code. Example.

You need to take the kink flat. You know the car us capable of it, you've seen and heard other drivers do it from the trackside. But, every time you get to the kink, your foot just always lifts half-way, the rear end skates, and you just barely manage to hang onto the edge of the rumble strip at the exit. You've been lifting at the kink for so long that it's just muscle memory telling you that lifting the throttle is the only way to make it through alive.

Two ways to fix this:

1. Bravery (in which case it would have fixed itself years ago).

2. Mental imaging.

Run through the corner using mental imagery, imagine yourself taking it flat, feel the throttle pedal go to the floor, feel the rear end squat down and keep it's bite, hear the engine RPM stay high. Do this a good number of times and the next time you go out you might find that you keep it pinned in the kink just by second-nature. That's the precision drill method.

Mental imaging can be used like a shotgun, too.

Last year, I was about to go out for my race, and I endeavored to not muck up the start. The only way I could think of to do that was mental imagery.

I simply sat on my left front tire in the pits for about 20 minutes and imagined a number of scenarios. I imagined my row partner getting a better start than me, I imagined body contact, I imagined clean starts, dirty starts, mechanical failure starts, late starts, early starts, starts at various paces, all manner of different starts that I thought could occur on that day with those particular players. In each situation I worked out a game plan on how to get through it with maximum benefit.

Turns out, one of my situations did happen. And since I had done all that preparation, I knew exactly what to do to capitalize on it. In effect I was building pseudo-experience, which is better than no experience at all.

Some people find it helpful to program little arbitrary sequences into their programming. If you've ever watched a golfer you know what I mean - they make all sorts of funny little movements just before a swing that don't actually do anything. Whether or not they're put there on purpose I don't know, but for whatever reason they are part of their mental build up and they are largely the same every time. I once watched a professional speed shooter practicing his reloads, and he always made a funny little jaw movement at exactly the same point in the routine.

I don't think these are particularly useful myself, not for racing anyway. Still, some people may find their programming works better if they work in funny little movements that don't impact anything but help to set you up mentally, like tapping your finger on the wheel or working your jaw. These will probably pop up naturally as a result of mental imagery anyway.

10 tips for mental imagery:

1. Assemble as much information as possible from your real race car.
2. During your sessions, remember as much detail as possible.
3. Start small. Your favorite corner is a good place. Slowly expand the lap after that.
4. Be careful of false information. You can trick yourself into thinking the car is more capable than it actually is. Constantly reality-check yourself.
5. When you get good, try imagining another class of car that you've never driven. You can gain insights into your "real" mental imaging car and you may be able to improve the accuracy of it.
6. Sitting in the car or something that feels like your car helps a ton.
7. The mental imaging state is very close to sleep. Try not to fall asleep while running laps.
8. Try simply walking a track that you've never driven and then run some mental laps. It's a good reality check.
9. Running accurate lap times isn't actually that important. What's important is the ability to analyze your technique. Comparing times is for the real world. You'll be able to match your lap times with enough practice, but don't make it your goal.
10. For the love of God, do not make engine noises while you visualize! Everybody already thinks us drivers are insane, don't give them proof.

(104) Hoonage

2010-03-27T21:27:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of things people do in society that, to an outsider, appear quite silly, but in our little world have some form of significance to the masses. Smoking, for instance, does absolutely nothing for us and is probably the very definition of self abuse, but it's still socially acceptable - I've never seen anyone do anything about that to someone smoking a cigarette. No one dares to grab the cigarette and put it out, giving the smoker a good dressing down, even if it is for his or her own good.

In another vein, it is also popular to take a stance against a subject, say, smoking, only to admit that the anti-smoking individual actually knows nothing about smoking and has never smoked in his entire life. Sort of like what I did in the last paragraph - I have no data or experience to back up my stance. This is a common theme in almost all cases of extremism. One might say it's almost an angelic complex. "I abhor that, why would I know anything about it?"

A similar idiosyncrasy is occurring in modern car culture. Hoonage.

Now, this is a little different than your garden variety cruising, the stuff the kids in backwards caps do. That is irresponsible people doing irresponsible things.

Hoonage is responsible, capable people diminishing themselves quite a bit by doing irresponsible things. Hoonage is also backed by many motoring journalism websites, magazines and web shows. I've even seen a video by a reputable car site suggesting that everyone partake in hooning.

Example of hooning. Yesterday in Melbourne, Australia, Lewis Hamilton had his car (a Mercedes AMG C63) impounded by the Australian law enforcement. His crime? A 440 lb/ft burnout and a public display of drifting.

Now, obviously, I didn't see what happened, so I have no idea if it was safe or not. I do know that many of the responses on the internet were bravos. "Good on him for using the car as intended" was the general theme.

Still, it's an example of the strangeness of our western culture. If this was a kid in baggy jeans and a backwards cap driving a Nissan, I guarantee you the responses would be the opposite.

So what makes it acceptable in people's eyes for a journalist, or a racing driver, or even just a celebrity to drive over the edge on public roads, but if a teenager does it it's worse than Hitler? That's the first time Godwin's law has appeared in this blog, I'm pretty sure.

I enjoy a nice drive as much as anyone. A bit of acceleration and a bit of cornering with a bit of body lean is perfectly responsible. You can drive briskly and enjoy a good road without being dangerous, and the more capable car you have for this, the better, because it allows you the most latitude with regard to avoidance and emergency stoppage. My beef is with tail out and on/over the limit driving on the street. Capable car or no, safe area or no, this is incredibly stupid.

Fact is, times are very, very different now. There are more cars, the cars are faster (and heavier), they have more grip, and they're sharper to drive.

Years and years ago it used to be that, on a rather curvy road, 35 MPH was just about as quick as you could go without flying off. In a modern sports car with summer rubber, 35 MPH would barely challenge it at all.

You might say that you autocross every weekend. You might say you're SCCA licensed, nationally. You might say you've had tens of thousands of dollars of professional coaching by some the country's best drivers. You might say you're a Formula One world champion.

Joe Bob, coming the other way in his 20 years old Ranger laden with drywalling supplies, ain't.

Joe Bob's never seen an oncoming car at 45 degrees splitting the double yellows. Who knows what he's going to do? He'll target fixate and hit you, most likely.

So even if you can handle 70 degrees sideways at 75 MPH, realize that most other drivers have never seen anything like this in their entire lives. Driving is a very commune experience. And if we've learned anything from socialism/communism, it's that everyone lives by the rule of the lowest common denominator. Most drivers don't even know what countersteer is.

The lowest common denominator is many planes of existence higher on a track or autocross. Go there. 200 bucks will get you a full day on any track in the country, and probably about 2 hours of track time. If drifting is what you want, and track days are too stingy about it, there are drift days popping up here and there for similar prices. The track is where the real car culture is. That's where the real fun is.

So in the end, I suppose I was wrong about hoonage. Hoonage is not responsible people doing irresponsible things. It's irresponsible people doing irresponsible things after all. It's also blindness.

Don't hoon. You'll go blind.

(103) Buttonwillow is a tree, believe it or not

2010-03-16T19:18:00.001-07:00

Last Sunday I went down to Buttonwillow Raceway, partly because I was bored out of my mind (racing wise) and mostly because my coach, Jeff Sakowicz, was running his Formula Ford 1600 down there in preparation for the SCCA American Heart Association double national event in April, which is going to be a big deal.

Jeff's Formula Ford 1600.

My coach got pole for the race, which isn't surprising considering there was only one other entry for the FF class.

He had a bad start and lost his lead into the first corner, but stayed close on the opposition's tail for a few laps until they made a mistake, which Jeff capitalized on immediately, seizing the lead.

Coach Jeff takes and keeps the lead.

Jeff continued expanding his lead until it reached galactic proportions, and won the race without further incident (and nearly lapping the rest of the field).

Jeff sets off on his victory lap.

Buttonwillow is a great facility - by racers, for racers. I would say it's probably one of the better places I could go to learn how to race a full size car, seeing as there's basically nothing to hit. But the drive is a killer, about 3 and a half hours one-way on a good day.

Still, I had fun, scratched the racing itch just a little bit and met some cool people (including Jeff's family).

Formula One and IndyCar also kicked off last weekend, and I've watched the former but not the latter.

I'm not too terribly hyped about Micheal Schumacher. I think his decision to come back is asking for it to blow up in his face. In my opinion, he hasn't got a hope of winning the title, and I think it also extremely unlikely that he'll get into the top 3 in the driver's championship. I think he will score podiums, possibly a win, but I also think he will be outpaced on average by Nico Rosberg, his teammate.

Maybe the first race was an exception rather than the rule this year, but it was the first F1 race in a while that I've fallen asleep in front of. Speed TV also felt it necessary to cut and skip later portions of the race. It wasn't terribly exciting for some reason, which is odd, because the ingredients were all there.

Maybe Bahrain is just too hot of an oven and it burned to a crisp when we weren't looking.

(102) What to do about IndyCar

2010-02-28T15:53:00.000-08:00

IndyCar is in trouble. At least, that's what the stock car fans would tell you.

I do not agree. IndyCar is America's most attended open-wheel series. In the open wheel perspective it is quite successful. The Indy 500 is still one of the great spectacles of the world. Lots of money is still being made in IndyCar. The other road racing series all vie for spots on the calendar to run support races at IndyCar weekends. The only series to even come close to generating the kind of fandom that IndyCar enjoys is the American Le Mans series.

Yes, the Champ Car merge is a loss. Yes, interest is down from years past. However, IndyCar is far from dying. Still, they need something to revitalize the series and get interest to go back up again.

The IRL recognizes this. That's why they are working to develop a new car for the 2012 season. I have my own ideas about it that I'd like to share.

On the schedule side, they need to make sure that they have a balanced number of road/street and oval races. That they have. Two problems with it as it is, however.

Problem one. In 2010, on the road course side, there are 4 traditional permanent circuit races, 4 street courses and 1 airport course. Too many street courses. IndyCars are big cars by open wheel standards. Really big. They are the only open wheelers where the driver has to scramble over the bodywork to reach the cockpit. That's why you never see drivers getting into their cars on TV. It's ungainly. This also means that there is little room to maneuver in a tight street circuit. You have sedan-sized cars with no fenders. They have to be overly careful on street courses. Sturdy as IndyCars are, you can't keep banging wheels to nudge past in a short 100 foot braking zone. Less street courses, please. They're trains.

Problem two. They're too clumped. The first 4 races of the series are street courses separated by one road course. After that, you have a string of ovals including the Indy 500. Then 3 more road courses separated by a street course and the race at Edmonton Airport. Finally, a string of 4 more oval speedways.

Mix 'em up a bit. I know it sounds kind of pedantic, but you're trying to boost a brand here. Make it spicy and interesting. Make those drivers transition frequently, not just get into an oval or road course groove.

On the brand side things have to change too. IndyCar has a decent world perception, mostly riding on the 500 and the very multinational field of drivers. But I think IndyCar still has points to gain with the international community. I think they need to go a little bit more global, in two ways.

One, obviously, more international events. That's coming along. We've got the new Sao Paulo race as the season opener this year. Awesome. Keep doing that. Could you imagine IndyCars at Spa? That's a bit of a stretch, but I think the IRL should try to move a bit eastward with their events. An event in England wouldn't go amiss, I think. I think we also need one or two more events in Canada, or try for some more in the south. Mexico perhaps?

And two, get closer to F1. I know being swallowed up by the FIA is not on the IRL's to do list, but the Indy 500 has a long and glorious history with F1. F1 is kind of IndyCar's brother. If the FIA would agree to let the IRL run a support event in Montreal, I think it would be better for everyone. F1 would get closer to America, and IndyCar would get more international eyes on it.

Now the car itself.

In my opinion, the public consciousness is moving away from downforce. Downforce is so 2008. The latest breed of Formula 1 car has seen a reduction in the number of wings, and an increase in the mechanical grip owing to the reintroduction of fully slick tires.

I think downforce is fine. A bit of downforce makes for good oval racing. Just not too much of it. I don't think ground effects are a good idea. Wings first, but not too many of them. I actually think the oval car is pretty good as it is, but I'm not an oval racer, so look elsewhere for that.

I'm going to focus on improvements to the road car. If you're keen, you've already picked up that I'm alluding to two cars. One for road, one for oval.

In my mind, the road car should have less downforce than the oval car, not more. Bear in mind that most road racing tracks in the US were built for cars with zero downforce a million years ago. Many European tracks have aged rather well, but that's not stopping Formula 1 from building/using tons of new ones to suit the new cars. I think oodles of downforce is bad for road racing.

Know what else is bad for racing? Spec cars.

Sounds like blasphemy, right? Not really. Spec series are great for learning, and great for finding the best driver. But they make for kind of predictable races. Look at last year. Chip Ganassi Racing and Penske Racing won 16 out of 17 rounds (Dale Coyne won at the Glen). Allowing some degree of influence on the car's design by the team beyond setting up the chassis adds more variables and more variables means more unpredictable. This is the pinnacle of American open wheel racing, and a team sport. So why does the team just set the car up, change a few tires and fill the car up with fuel while the driver does all the heavy lifting? Let them build the thing. Let them really get their hands dirty. They're a motor racing team. That's what they do.

Make IndyCar a Formula again. But hold your horses, automakers. Instead of a team using a bespoke engine, supply the framework for an engine from the supplier (Honda, or whomever it is in 2012). The team acts as a tuning house, not an engine builder. Let the engineers fine tune various parts of the engine. Let them use some of their own parts. Let also the engineers figure out which parts those should be. It shouldn't be inconsequential parts, either. A fuel gallons per minute limiter wouldn't go amiss, either, I think. Lets see the engineers make as much horsepower as they can with a finite amount of fuel flow. Now that's a real test of efficiency.

Same thing with the chassis. Let the engineers have free reign over certain sections of the bodywork to allow distinction, and allow them to alter the suspension geometry (like track width within a certain envelope) and various other parts. Allow different differentials, gearboxes, and other big bits, like brakes or shocks. Not only does this increase the engineering side, it increases the business side. You get more manufacturers involved and more money is changing hands. That's a good thing.

Add a spending cap and now you've got a Formula.

But hold on, there's a few more key changes I'd like to see.

Some guys want to see some really small turbocharged engines. I'd say no. That's not we do in Americuh.

Big engines. Bump 'em up to 5 liters at least. V8s. Not primitive ones like in NASCAR. Very advanced, big V8 engines. Give them a billion valves per cylinder, whatever. Just make them rev really high.

Then supercharge the living snot out of 'em.

I'm thinking anywhere between 850 to 1100 horsepower. About 900 sounds about right.

You might say that it's too much for ovals. It's not. We removed downforce, remember? The cars will be wheelspin limited and won't generate any more Gs than they already do. And remember, the amount of horsepower required for pushing the car faster at 230 MPH is cataclysmic. I don't think you'd see straightaway speeds increase a whole lot. The cornering speeds would remain pretty much the same (on ovals), if not a bit slower because of increased weight and less downforce. I mean come on. The cars now are doing about 600 horsepower. Most supercars have more than that.

You see now how this is fitting in with my earlier reductions in road course downforce? Big engines in low downforce cars like to go sideways. Sideways is exciting. We like sideways. Give them softer sidewall tires for road racing to encourage those big angles. Make those cars look difficult to drive. An example of a series that does this very well is GP2. Those cars actually do look like a handful, and it's exciting just to watch them go around the track.

Another change that I think might (might) be good. Success ballast.

Don't burn me at the stake just yet. Touring cars have been using weight handicaps for a while, and it works fantastically. It keeps the field incredibly tight, and it stops complete domination from one team. I see no reason why not to try it with IndyCar. Try it, if it doesn't work, fine. Same as everything else I've mentioned.

Am I crazy? Do you really have to ask that? If I was anything less I would be ashamed. Most good ideas start out crazy, and then get refined by more sane (smarter?) people. Stop taking racing so seriously.

Either way I'll be interested to see what they come up with for 2012. There's already been some crazy designs popping up.