Endurance Racing,
This weekend saw the first outing of endurance team Bacon Racin’ (Rachel Larratt, Steve Warwick, Amy Lo, and Roland Pritzker) in the Western Endurance Racing Championship at
We are racing Rachel’s race prepped Elise. This is the same car that completed the La Carrera Pan Americana in
Of course in the Elise the floor isn’t made out of anything much, so last minute efforts by Qais and the Lotus of South Bay crew had the drivers’ belts mounted to the rail at the back of the drivers’ compartment with big backing plates under the car. This was so last minute that we picked the car up from Lotus of South Bay on Friday about 10:00am for a Saturday and Sunday race. The car hadn’t been teched yet, so we set off on an eight hour drive to
Saturday morning saw us talking to the tech guy, Tom of 7s Only Racing. The car passed without too much drama and we were ready to go out for the warm up. With only 20 minutes of warm-up available, the plan was that Rachel would take the whole 20 minutes to get used to the track and conditions, then take the start, so that I could learn the track and conditions in a slightly more spread out field.
It was a good plan, but it had a couple of fairly large flaws. In the rush to get everything ready to come to the event we had not really thought about conditions. We were now trying to race at Sears point in a cold downpour on A048 tires. The other large flaw is that due to the time that endurance takes up in a race schedule, this particular 3 hour race was split into two 1.5 hour races, one on Saturday afternoon, the other Sunday morning, and each of those starts were combined with the A class races (whatever that is) putting more than 60 race cars of all sorts of speeds on the track at the same time. This was going to be a real baptism by fire. Or rain.
Rachel went out with these 60 or so cars for the warm up and found out that
Time for a team meeting. We knew we had a single file rolling start, which is probably about the most benign start you can have, but it is still 60 close packed cars sent out in random order with very different power levels. Rachel didn’t feel happy with taking the start after her experiences in warm up, on the other hand I wasn’t wild about it because I would be attempting to learn a track I had never driven in anger in a car I had never driven in anger. In the rain. With 60 other cars.
In the end I took the start and even in the formation lap I was sliding badly. I came up with a strategy, which was, “Let everyone by until I’m in some sort of space and learn the track there.” Another good plan, although the name was a little long. After letting about 4 cars past I had a space I could work with and calm down some. The rain continued to come down, and I felt like I was trying to race on ice. I certainly wasn’t the only one with problems, every lap around the track there were more cars off. The lucky ones were just stuck in the mud away from the track, but there were at least a few who came into solid contact with the K walls. No one got hurt, but quite a few cars were bent or worse. Of course the problem with a fiberglass and aluminum car is that it doesn’t bend too well. I did everything I could to avoid walls and other cars.
I did spin though. I was gradually squeezing on the gas in a right sweeper and the back came round on me. I knew I wasn’t going to catch this one, but I was more or less following the track, so my Skip Barber training snapped into action “Spin, both feet in” and I came to a halt 90 degrees to the track, but still on the surface. Deep breath, let that car by, and off we go again.
The carnage became so bad that they put out the safety car with a full course yellow to clean up the mess. As we paraded round there were no less than 4 separate recovery vehicles working on different incidents.
The moment I went out for the first leg I found that the radio contact with the pit that we had tested and tested didn’t work. We had a contingency plan for when I would come in to let Rachel take the drive, but confirming it on radio would have been nice. Extremely nice given that when I came in for the driver change over Rachel wasn’t quite ready to go. We had decided before we even started that the important thing would be finishing the race, so the slow pit stop while the got Rachel in the car was not a big deal. Rachel went out for the second 45 minutes of the race and quickly got into a good groove. We got the radio fixed to that we could talk to her, and from that and the lap time it looked like her confidence in the car and herself improved lab by lap. She took the checkered flag for the first day of racing after 40 minutes of almost spotless driving. She clearly remembered her skip barber too, because she managed one 360 spin down the line of the track. She didn’t even come to a halt before getting going again. From the lap times that spin cost her less than 6 seconds.
I got some sleep that night. I don’t remember that much else about the evening except that it had really good chicken in it.
In the continuation of the race the next day Rachel was again a little nervous about the start, and I, now being a veteran on starts, was happy to take it. The rain had stopped, so although the track was wet, we knew that it would dry out fairly quickly. The grid was started this time in the order of finishing the previous day, this meant that due to the number of cars that had gone off the previous day, we started 18th out of 60ish. Not bad, but that meant a couple of really quick cars which had hit the wall were starting right behind us, now that the mechanics had sorted them out.
I followed the same plan as
Saturday, if they are quick they are going to get by me anyway. I may as well make it easy and let them by early. Again, that gave me a little room to work on getting used to the drying track and take some breaths. (note to self, when on the race track, breath.)
The conditions got better and better for the car. The track dried and I started to make serious headway on the guys in front. The car is fantastic for this stuff, higher corner exit speeds allow faster speeds on the straights, fantastic brakes and higher speeds in the next corner mean that passing cars on the straight is not that hard, even when they are running similar lap times. I really felt I got in the groove of things and the lap times came tumbling down. I passed the two cars that had started in front of me, and was feeling pretty good about the whole thing when we caught up to a whole mess of traffic, maybe 8 cars all fighting amongst themselves, but lapping 5-8 seconds slower then us. This was where my inexperience showed, I was really hesitant about passing back markers when they were busy trying to pass each other, The two cars I had passed were nowhere near as hesitant, passing me and back markers in big overtaking maneuvers.
One of the rules about this endurance series is that you must put at least 5 gallons of gas in the car during the race. With the Elises small tank and 10mpg on the track, that turns out to be a bit of a problem. We needed to know that when we stopped for driver handover we would be able to get the whole 5 gallons in the car, that meant that we started Sundays race with the tank about ½ full. It turns out that was too little, and around the 40 minute mark I got fuel starvation. With the radio working the pits had about 1 minute warning that I was coming in, and they were ready to do the refill. Here’s a tip if you ever wind up refilling a car in an endurance race, make sure you’ve cut open the breather hole for the can. What should have been around 1 minute of refueling became about 8 minutes because of that. Just one more thing we would have sorted out if we’d had time before this event.
I went back out expecting to do 10 minutes more running before handing over to Rachel. The car had other ideas. Halfway round that out lap the exhaust came off, and things got real loud in the cockpit. I know from experience that hot exhaust gas can damage or set fire to the fiberglass, so I called the pits and brought it straight back in. Sure enough, the recently installed stock exhaust was disconnected.
We decided the thing to do was to head back to the paddock to carry out real work on the car. We had about 35 minutes to the end of the race. If we could get out before that we would at least finish. Some quick pit work got the diffuser part way off, and left us trying to reconnect really hot exhaust piping with not much success. With about 5 minutes to go we decided to send the car out again with the exhaust not fixed. I short shifted everything, trying to limit the heat I was putting into the exhaust bay, this meant I was way off the pace and really having to drive my mirrors.
With one or two laps left I saw a fast Evo closing on me, to make things easy on him I planned to run the outside line in the corner to give him room on the inside, the only problem was he committed himself to the outside line. We came really close. Really, really close. Time to start breathing again.
One of the things about racing is that you know cars rather than people, so when you get out of the car you can be badmouthing a car only to find the person in the car is standing right next to you. Suffice to say the driver of the Evo was doing that with me about 6ft away. Before he stuck his foot further in his mouth I let him know who I was. He was a bit pissed because the thought I’d hit him. I argued a little, cos, it’s an Elise right? If there’s contact there’s broken fiberglass, right?
Turns out I was wrong and I owe the guy an apology. We did have contact, but if the paint on the Elise had been thinner there would not have been. So there you go, it’s possible to touch cars at 90mph and polish it out. If you’re really lucky.
Our final result was 6 out of 7 in class, and 16 out of 23 for all endurance classes. Given our refueling problems, and 20 minutes attempting to fix the exhaust we were pretty happy with that. Even better, we had got through our first endurance race in terrible conditions and finished with the car unscathed (it will polish out). I definitely consider that a victory.
Massive thanks to NASA officials and other endurance racers who made our first event easier than we’d hoped, to Amy and Roland for keeping two very stressed drivers as calm as they could, and especially to Rachel for trusting me with her car.
