Endurance Racing at Thunderhill

Last weekend (the 2nd-3rd of June) we loaded the Elise up in the trailer for the drive up to Thunderhill. Rather than locating Thunderhill in a perfectly sensible location off the 5 south of San Francisco, they decided to build it over an hour north of Sacramento, that means from LA it’s over 8 hours away at trailer towing speeds.

Amy and I drove the Trailer up North with the two co drivers flying in to San Francisco. This race would be the first one for our new driver, Roland. At least Thunderhill is closer than the places we go in Mexico.

On the Saturday I’d managed to get us into a High Performance Driving Event at the track, none of us had driven there before, and although there’s a nice video of running the tack in the Thunderhill web site we really thought that we should drive it before we attempted to race it.

It turns out that running the track ahead of time is a good idea, but maybe we shouldn’t have been in the advanced group. Thunderhill has three very blind corners, Turn 3 is over a crest into an off camber Right hander, you need to be turning before the crest for the corner.

Turn 5 (bypass) is an incredibly blind corner, a sharp crest with nothing but sky in front of you. When you see the track on the far side, it’s all you can do to stop yourself turning right away, as you are facing a medium right, but the car is unloaded at the time and really needs to settle before attempting to turn.

Turn 9 is a chicane on the crest of a hill. The left to start it you can see on the way up the hill, the right is over the hill and again only experience at the track will teach you the right line coming over that.

So we went out with the Driving event, me driving and Roland passenger. It only took 3 laps for me to screw up. I came over the crest of 3 faster than I had done before to find that I was already too late to make the off camber turn. I braked as hard as I could in a straight line, and then got off the brakes to shoot off the track in a straight line. Slow down, turn back to track, wait for a gap in traffic again and get going.

In the after session meeting I got ridiculed (I deserved it). The Racer was the first to go off in session. The fate for the first to go off is usually a pink tutu, but luckily the group leader forgotten it and I was spared.

For the second Driving session, Roland went out with Gary Faules, a fantastic driver, who has won a bunch of events including The 25 hours of Thunderhill. If anyone can show us how to drive this track it’s Gary. Roland came in after the session feeling a bunch more confident. I went out with Gary in the third driving session and found out what Roland was talking about. Having someone like Gary in the car really gives you the confidence to aggressively learn the track. Before riding with Gary I’d been way too hesitant, especially at the blind corners.

About this time Rachel decided that she didn’t want to drive in the Sunday endurance. She wasn’t feeling up to it, leaving Roland and I to share the 3 hour race. Roland and I went out for the final warmup session of Saturday with Roland driving.

On Sunday, the race itself started at 3pm. Before that we had qualifying at 10am. Because I was taking the start, I took the qualifying also. I came in from that to find that the transponder on the car was out and because of that I’d be starting at the back of 30+ cars. More of a problem than that was why our transponder wasn’t working. It was wired into the Lotus running lights. We pulled the cover off the fuses and found the running light fuse was blown. Relief. We’ll just pop in the spare and turn everything on… Pop. Ohshit. Something in the running lights circuit is blowing fuses and taking the Transponder out. We have 2 hours to the start of the race and we have no transponder, we can’t find one to borrow. Time to start taking the car apart to get to the wiring.

With 1 hour to the start, the car was in bits, but I’d unplugged one of the headlights and plugged the transponder into that. The transponder itself was working, and the headlight fuse wasn’t blowing. I taped everything up as well as I could and tried to get it all back together. Time was really short. I got the car into the pits with 3 minutes to spare, stressed to hell.

The start was going to be a 2 wide rolling start with me firmly at the back of 31 cars. The density of the cars on the track at the time is more than a little nerve-wracking. There are 6 different classes running together, and in theory we are in the 3rd fastest, that meant I had a bunch of cars that should be slower than me in front of me. At the same time as trying to get past them, they are trying to get past others. Luckily, with it being an endurance race, there aren’t that many idiots out there. Everyone drove with real care.

There is a bunch of spec Miatas that that runs in the fifth fastest group, and as drivers those guys are phenomenal. As I started working my way through the pack, more than once I blew past the Miatas down one of the straights, only to have them pass me back in the twistier sections. I think that happened to me 4-5 times before I worked my way through the Miata group.

By the end of lap 10 I was up to 13th overall and feeling pretty good about myself. Admittedly, 4 of those places were gained from retirements, but I’d managed a number of passes and had one more guy in front of me before there was a nice big space on the track. I’d been running in traffic up to that point, some time in space would let me calm down and settle into the drive some. The car in front was slower in some of the twisties but on the straights was a little quicker than me, making a pass hard. I decided I could have a go into turn 14, a place where he seemed to be particularly slow. I wasn’t close enough on this lap, but maybe next.

I came round 14 to find that the guy in front had missed a gear or something, he was really slow. There was a gap to the inside of 15, and without thinking about it I went for it. I tried to hold a tighter line as I went past to leave him room on the outside. But as I pinched the corner the back end of the Elise stepped out in a big way. I caught it only to have the car swing the other way, and I didn’t catch that one. For an instant I was doing about 60 backwards, facing the guy I was trying to pass at a distance of about 2 car lengths. We exchanged a look of horror and I went off to the inside of the track. I got going quickly, that lap only being 7 seconds slower than my average, but the spin cost me 4 places.

By lap 22 I was back up to 12th. The traffic was more spread out on the track and everything was calmer. My only problem was that I’d lost my radio communication to Amy in the pits. That was actually a big problem. They wouldn’t know when I was coming in for gas, and Roland may not be ready to take the Drivers seat. I was thinking about that when I went round turn 11 and got a black flag.

Black flags are normally “Come into pits, you’ve got a penalty” so I came straight in wondering what it could be. It turns out my rushed wiring job on the transponder gave way and they were getting no signals from the car. I came in, Roland got my radio working again, and Amy managed to find a spare rechargeable transponder and zip tied it to the car in record time.

I got back out, but the Black Flag and efforts in the pits had cost me 1.5 laps and I was all the way down to 22nd.

From that point on I was more or less driving in a daze. I’d already been on the track for an hour. I had about 25 minutes to the pitstop. This racing business is hard work.

I came into the pits on lap 34 after getting through 10 gallons of gas. The Elise was beginning to suffer starvation. I jumped out of the car and Roland got in. Because of the rules of refueling, I was the only one in the team suited to do the refueling, while Amy pointed the fire extinguisher at me. I put in about 9 gallons (you are not allowed to spill a drop of gas, it’s a 5 minute penalty, with no automatic shutoff you have to be careful not to overflow the tank.) And Roland was on his way. The gas stop had cost us about 2 laps.

We hoped that Roland would be able to make it to the end of the race from what I had put in. It soon became clear though, that I could have put in more gas and Roland was going to have to stop again.

Roland did an awesome job in the second half, driving really consistent laps, and working the car back up to 15th overall, he says that he had his moments on the track, but from what we saw it was an amazing drive. But we needed to bring him back in again for gas. This time I put in 5 gallons, and the stop only cost him just over 1 lap. Roland brought the car come in 16th overall, 5th in class. Not a bad result for our 2nd race (1st time at Thunderhill), but looking at the results showed just how costly the transponder failure was. Simply taking out the 1.5 lap stop for a new transponder would have moved us up to 9th overall and 3rd in class. I guess it goes to show once again, that the most important thing in an endurance race is reliability of every part.

I think we can also work on refueling. I saw some teams had modifications to the gas cans to make refilling without spilling easier. We’ll do those for next time.

I’m also now convinced that Hoosier R6s will survive a race, and they would definitely gain us some time. I guess we have a lot of room for improvement.

The race was a real blast once again. A big thank you to Amy for being our pit boss and voice of reason in our ear, Thanks to Rachel for letting us race her car, and Thanks to Gary Faules for his track instruction. Without that both drivers would have struggled much more.