sam@sco.com (Sam Sjogren) (02/09/90)
And here's a copy of my rec.autos.sport posting about our adventure at Sears. One thing that I failed to note in my posting was that after the weekend of excitement and, amazingly enough, reasonable reliability from the MG's, as we were about to drive out of the paddock (I drove my MGB to the track, Andy trailered his), I turned on the headlite switch and got nothing but darkness. Lucas!!! Larry was able to figure out quickly that it was just loose wires on the back of the headlite switch, and we were quickly on our way home. -------------------------------------------------- Team Fizzball has successfully gotten into road racing! We did some NASCAR oval dirt track stuff before, which we'll hopefully do again (love them bumper cars!), but this year Andy Banta and myself have committed to SCCA road racing and are currently half-way thru drivers' school. Andy drives an MGB-GT in E-Production, and I drive my MGB roadster in Improved Touring-B. Here's the story of last weekend's first track session at Sears Point International Raceway in Sonoma: Preparations on my car during the week before our first track session were frantic. Andy had gotten a head start on his car and only had a few details to finish up. I was still rebuilding my engine a week before the track session! We had a SuperBowl party at my house, and during most of that party I could be found in the garage, getting the car ready for the engine swap. At least my rollcage had gotten finished and was inspected at pre-tech the week before. I'd hoped that the engine would get in Sunday nite, but I didn't have it running until Wednesday nite. Without LOTS of help from Andy and Larry Colen (anohter teammate, who drives an ITC Cortina), there's no way that I would have had the car ready for the weekend. And my being ill that week didn't help one bit! Friday we took the day off so that we could get up to the racetrack and settle into the paddock. That morning I went to my friend Jeffie's house to use his arc welder to weld in the seat back support brackets that I'd fabricated just the nite before. Back at my house, I grabbed all sorts of tools and the like out of my garage and shop, and we loaded the truck with my compressor and Jeffie's generator (which ended up not working!) and Dave's oxy-acetylene welding equipment and whatever other tools and spares that we could grab. The patio set we ended up throwing on top turned out to be a nice touch. Altho we'd intended on leaving around noon for Andy's house over the hill so that we could take our time and get to Sears in the late afternoon and have lots of time to sit around and do more work on my car, we ended up not getting out of San Jose until about 7pm, and so got to Sears after 9pm. We set up in the paddock and I went out for some munchies. So, it's about midnite when Andy and Larry go to sleep, and I stay up another hour or two working on my car, hoping that in the morning there would be someone close by with a working generator nearby that I could run an extension cord over to since Jeffie's wasn't working and I still needed to drill holes to finish my seat back support. I used empty Castrol engine oil containers as catch tanks, which I mounted with cable ties and racers' tape to whatever half-reasonable brackets were convenient in the engine compartment. Come morning, it was totally overcast. Great, not only did I still have to do several things to my car to pass tech, but it looked like rain! I tried to get the chief scrutineer to waive a couple of requirements just for the day, but he was rather firm on my seat back having to be bolted into the cage. I got my pit crew (another one of whom showed up about 6am after not sleeping all nite and who took an hour's nap before getting into the frey) to do some things, like cut my numbers out of contact paper, while I drilled my seat and generally got more and more freaked out. Less than half an hour before my first track session we figured that the car was ready, and I went over to Tech. While waiting for a scrutineer to deign to come over and look at my car, I taped over the headlites and running lites (did I mention that I drove the car up, without benefit of a trailer? Is that ballsy or just plain stupid? >B-} ). The scrutineer checked things over, noted a few minor things like a missing SCCA sticker and some loose cables that would have to be cable tied, and said that I'd have to come back when they were fixed. Not wanting to waste time, I yelled over to my pit crew (definitely an advantage to be paddocked within spitting distance of the Tech area!) to bring an SCCA sticker and cable ties over. In a minute the scrutineer was satisfied and signed me off. I got them to quickly give me a tech sticker, reminded them to sign it after they gave me a blank one, gave it to my pit crew to put on the roll cage with directions to put the car in pre- grid while I ran back to our paddock to put my Nomex on. I jumped into the car, got harnessed in, and basically was ready to go out onto the track literally a few minutes before the start of the session. Does the phrase "in the nick of time" seem applicable here? All my preparations had been toward getting the car able to pass tech inspection, which are basically safety requirements. I hadn't been able to put time or money into performance mods. The sway bar (yep, just one!) on the car, altho perhaps reasonable for street use, is just terribly anemic on a race course. My Armstrong lever shocks, altho they can be made to be fairly stiff, were in stock trim and tend to leak (turned out that they were low on damping fluid, until later in the weekend when I corrected that). The upshot of this is that even with non-race A008 tyres, I had a lot more tyre than suspension. We're talking serious body roll, enough to make the instructors and workers wonder just how soon I would crash! Altho I was able to handle the car OK, to outside observers it was quite a silly sight; I hope that the pictures turn out well, so that I can have a dramatic before-and-after comparison to frame. I intend to significantly improve the handling by the next track session (which is the 17th & 18th of this month). Sears Point is a really nice road course. I consider it quite a bit more challenging than Laguna Seca, the only other road course that I have experience with. There are some very fast sections: some rather straight and good places to check your gauges, others _very_ hairy were I felt that I was keeping the car from crashing by sheer will and testosterone as much as by skill. Two places that are very thrilling but also scary, to me, are turn number 4 and the Carousel (turn #6). Coming out of turn #3a, which you can't see most of from its entrance, you come over a crest, drift out to the left edge of the course, and stare turn #4 in the face. You're going downhill, and flat out. You then brake hard and prepare to turn in to the right. What I find scary here is that if your brakes don't work (arguably a problem anywhere on the course, but especially so here) you go into a hillside, head on and face-first. Even if you just brake too late or your brakes fade a bit too much, you go into the hillside. It's turns like this that make you REAL fucking serious about making your brakes as good as possible, and you don't delegate that work to anyone else. After turning in you squeeze on the gas, drift out thru turn #5, and head for the top of the Carousel. The Carousel is a long descending left-hander that you can't see most of until you're most of the way thru it. You can't see any of it until you crest the hilltop that more or less marks its entrance. You aim for a point on the hilltop, trust the flaggers to warn you of problems, crest the hill and get on the brakes as your suspension settles down (actually, I was being a chicken and braking a bit before the top of the hill, letting off at the top of the hill where I had very little weight on the tyres, then got on the brakes hard on the far side). You turn in to the left, settle the suspension, then cautiously start to squeeze the throttle. You apex the turn very late, down past the bridge, on driver's left. The road surface is rather ripply, especially during the approach to the apex. A couple of times I put a tyre or two off the pavement at the apex; that was rather exciting! After the apex you just keep opening the throttle and drift out to what is the right edge of the drag strip. You've got a fairly leisurely few seconds to check on the car's gauges again, and check your mirrors for people trying to pass you since this is a very good place to do it. Satyrday afternoon the clouds looked more and more threatening. Altho right before my first session the clouds had parted and the sun shone and the angels sang Hallelujah right as the skys saw that my fine British Racing Automobile was about to go out on course, my first afternoon session was marked by the beginning of rain. Great, it's a British car, so someone thought that it would be appropriate for it to rain! So, you wanna know what it feels like to drive a 600hp race car? Drive a 100hp one in the rain! I definitely found that the A008's work quite well in straight line braking, but they do get a bit slippery in lateral acceleration. The problem mainly shows up in standing water, altho even on a surface that is just wet you still slide around a bit. I fishtailed a fair bit at first, but soon got pretty comfortable driving at speed in that soup. The reduced visibility was actually more of a problem than the lowered traction, most of the time. I will note that coming out of turn #7 (a right-hand hairpin) I ended up swapping ends; that's the only time that I've ever gone down a race course backwards! VERY exciting. Andy did the same thing, altho I forget just where on the course he did his spin. There were a fair number of cars that slid off the course, even more so in the session after mine that turned into the last session of the day when the steward(s) called the rest of the day off because there was just too much carnage. The day's mechanical problems had consisted of my hood latch coming loose (thank goddess for that second safety latch!) which was fixed by adjusting the hood and using a tie-down as a bonnet strap, and I temporarily lost a cylinder when a valve clearance adjuster came loose which resulted in a valve clearance of 1/4 inch! The engine ran fine again after setting the clearances, and since I didn't loose power until the final lap of my session I didn't really lose any track time over it. Sunday turned out to be a beautiful day. We were well rested because we'd spent the night with friends in Sonoma, as opposed to wallowing in the lake that the paddock turned into that nite. That's the first time in a long time that I've been able to fall asleep by 9pm! Altho the skies were clear, in the morning the track was still wet and there was mud in spots that had been scraped off but was still slippery. There was one spot around turn #3 that was described as having had been crawled over by the world's largest slug! We run our sessions without much incident, aside from Andy mowing the lawn on the inside of turn #10 and having his hood pop all the way up (fortunately at low speed!), and I overheated on my last lap of my last session. I tell you all, this is really fun stuff! It may be some of the most expensive fun that I've ever gotten, but I think that it's worth it. Now that I've got a car ready I can see running a number of races a year. Since I'm running an IT car I can still drive it on the street, which lets me keep very familiar with it and I don't feel that I've committed the money tied up in it purely to a racing vehicle. I can just pop over to an autocross and do that thing with minimal hassle. I do want to get a trailer for taking it to road courses, tho. I haven't got a lot of money tied up in the car; funny, I originally bought the car in barely running condition for about $800, and the rollcage alone cost about $900! All told, I've probably got about $3,000 tied up in the car, which seems rather reasonable for a street car that I can also race. Altho these little IT cars may not look that fast to a spectator, I assure you that the view from the driver's seat is something else! This weekend I did some of the most demanding and exciting driving ever in my life, and had a blast. Now I just have to improve the car's suspension so that my instructor doesn't have to tell me not to overdrive the car! Oh, yes, and I have to agree with Parnelli Jones: if you're in control, you're not going fast enough! But be sure that you can recover when you do find out where the edge of control is by crossing it. -me (Mr. Motorhead, Team Fizzball, #6 in SFR ITB)
tam@uunet.uu.net (Tim Massey) (02/13/90)
nice book