Race Car Stuff

NASCAR races started the weekend, with Kevin Harvick getting wins in both the Busch and Nextel Cup races at Phoenix. Rumor in the garage is that Kevin is auditioning to drive a well-funded Toyota for next season. The bigger story appears to be the penalty handed to Kyle Busch during the race for running into Casey Mears’ car during a red flag. It was of course in a perceived retaliation for an on track incident. It would have been a non-issue, had Kyle Busch not already been on NASCAR’s bad boy list.

In Formula One Michael Schumacher won his first race of the season, and his first real win since 2004. It was actually a very exciting race to watch, event though there were no actual on track passes for the lead. Francisco Alonzo ran most of the second half of the race just off the rear spoiler of Schumacher. It appeared that Alonzo was a little faster, but he could not pass the Ferrari. Hope we seem more races like this.

The best race of the weekend was probably the Grand Am race. Mike Rockenfeller won after being in third place with about 1/4 (or less) of a lap remaining after the 2 hour 45 minute race. The racing was as close as it sounded with a last lap pass attempted by Scott Pruitt on the leader at that point of Max Angelelli. The two were wide by side through a couple of turns, when there was incidental contact and somehow Rockenfeller got by both of them in the very tight roller coaster section of the track. The Pontiac GTO-R of Andy Lally and Marc Bunting won the GT class easily.

In Saturday’s Grand-Am Cup Series race the rain played havoc with the entrants. It caused 5 full course cautions. The crash fest was eventually won by No. 33 Playboy Racing Nissan 350Z of co-drivers Blake Rosser and David Murry. The field consisted of 83 cars starting the race.

That’s right folks, available to racers only (must present racing license).

550HP Mustang racecar

I am not complaining about the motorsports involvement of the makers of Red Bull energy drink, but I have to wonder about a few things.

The actions of the company to sponsor so many grassroots motorsports activities is appreciated by everyone involved in motorsports, even if the casual fan doesn’t directly see it. They have sponsored everything from the local kart racing tracks, to a Formula One racing team that is spending large amounts of money to acquire the talent necessary to move from field filler to contender. Because of their sponsorship efforts I have tried Red Bull though I have little desire to try the genre of energy drinks. Every time I see Angel (the bartender at my neighborhood pub) open a Red Bull for a customer, I appreciate what that patron has unknowingly just done in the support of motorsports.

But with their astronomical expenditures I have to wonder if the current energy drink surge in marketplace is a trend for the future or if it is another fad that will pass within some given amount of time. The company is spending huge sums of cash, and their support will make motorsports better for it, but I have to wonder if it will dry up sometime. With the good for the sport, I hope it does not, but I have to wonder…….

Yes, it was April 17th 1964 that the Ford Mustang was introduced to the world. The Television commercials showed up on Sunday night April 16th, so everyone literally ran to dealerships on Monday April 17th and waited for them to open to get their first glimpse. It was like the introduction of the latest Star Wars movie or the Xbox 360 introduction. It was the first and last time that the introduction of a new car created such frenzy.

There are stories of one Mustang on a lift getting a pre-delivery inspection, and it getting such a crowd that they could not get the car down off the lift.

I clearly remember the TV spot airing during “The Wonderful World of Disney” on that Sunday evening. It was the spot we have all seen repeated at one time or another of the car on the pedestal at the Worlds Fair attracting a crow of young people interested. It was an introduction that fitted what the Mustang has been over all of these years. It is hard to imagine that there was nothing like the Mustang, or Camaro of any of the other cars that would come to be called “Pony Cars” before the Mustang’s introduction. It also was the start of a re-focus of all sorts of marketing and advertising. Before that time young people in their late teens and early 20’s were basically ignored as a target segment of the population. Madison avenue, as well as marketing departments focused on more mature people as who controlled the money. While this may have been true, it was brand loyalties that could be earned by giving a young person what they really wanted with their first large purchase. At times today I think that might be an overused strategy today, but I am far from an expert on that subject. But even with that trend, the day the Mustang was introduced was definitely an event that had a significant effect on the world, helping to shape it as we know it today, for better or worse.

Sunday night, here is what is on my mind tonight.

NASCAR in Texas

Kasey Kahne won the Samsung/RadioShack 500 at Texas Motor Speedway today. Near the end of the race he was the fastest car. I hope at some point he gets some respect from the motorsports media. They have basically called him the Anna Kournikova of racing because of his good looks and the fact that it took him about the same amount of time as Jeff Gordon to get his first win. He now has 3 wins and a rookie of the year championship to his credit, along with a nice run of second place finishes.

Do you realize they put 189,000 spectators in that race track this past Sunday? That is a huge crowd no matter how you look at it.

It looks like Kurt Busch has another driver he can expect to not get any Christmas cards from. He of course says that his contact that put Greg Biffle in the wall hard at Texas was unintentional, but even I, as a Kurt Busch fan, am getting skeptical.

ESPN has made it clear that they have grown significantly as a network since they last broadcast NASCAR races. They intend to provide a very rich multimedia experience for fans when they start covering races in 2007.

Melanie Troxel made drag racing history Sunday by opening the season with her fifth straight final-round appearance. Then she added an exclamation point by capturing the title of the seventh annual NHRA SummitRacing.com Nationals with a labored, but winning 4.834 at 285.65 mph to push her POWERade points lead in Top Fuel to a whopping 156 markers over runner-up Dave Grubnic, who closed with a 4.987 at 319.60 mph.

Katherine Legge’s first race in a Champ Car turned out fairly well. She apparently spun and stalled the car but was able to restart and continue on in the race. She finished 8th, the last car on the lead lap, but apparently ran well and got plenty of experience.

Sebastian Bourdais started the season where he left off, dominating the Toyota Long Beach Grand Prix. He won with his Ford Cosworth powered Lola after leading all but a few laps during rounds of pit stops.

In Saturday’s Inaugural Crown Royal Grand American Challenge of Long Beach race for Daytona Prototype coupes (cars I am growing to appreciate more all the time) Scott Pruett and Luis Diaz won in the No. 01 CompUSA Chip Ganassi Racing Lexus Riley. The only moment of racing I saw all weekend was an accident involving Burt Frisselle in which he was moving slowly in a crippled race car and moved across in front of Eddie Cheever on the main straight. A few other cars were caught up in the debris from the accident. The announcers (and Cheever) really blasted Frisselle, but in fairness these cars are very difficult to see of the back of the car. He should have had some help from the course workers. The accident was very close to a very bad one, but fortunately the cars hit at a glancing blow. Had Cheever hit more directly into the rear of the car, there may have been a second tragedy this weekend.

Also the no. 19 Playboy/Uniden Racing Ford Crawford driver Memo Gidley sustained a compression to the L1 vertebra and a minimal compression to the T12 vertebra according to Dr. Lawrence of St. Mary’s Medical Center in Long Beach. Gidley’s injuries were sustained in a crash in Turn 1 during the morning warm-up, but as of the end of the race, had been released from the facility and was resting in his hotel room.

This is the continuation of my series of articles about the early days of my family’s racing experience. Here are links to Part I and Part II.

In the last article, my parents and I had made some modifications to our car and my parents were getting to be in the ballpark. They had added a 4-bbl intake and carb, small diameter and wider rims, more sway bar, and a few other mods, still all total probably came to less than $300 including the tires.

Mom and Dad’s initial goal was a guy named Al Lowe who ran a 429 Torino Cobra. Al had done much to his car, and was pretty fast at the time. He wasn’t the fastest in the class, but he was close. The fastest two guys didn’t show up at all of the events. They were Barry Weurker and Stan Vann. Barry ran a 396SS Camaro. The Camaro was well set up with big wide rims, BFG Radial TA tires (the only wide radial available in a 60 or lower aspect ratio at the time, but way out of our budget). Barry was probably the fastest G/Stock car in the area. He was the Championship Points Series (CPS) winner from the year before. Then there was Stan in his gold Camaro. Stan’s Camaro had a stock 307 with the non-performance automatic. It also was ringing up some miles on the odometer at the time. Stan drove all the way up here from some place in North Carolina. It was hard for me to imagine traveling that far to an autocross. Because of the distance I guess, Stan didn’t make all of the events. Barry only came to the CPS events as I guess he has outgrown the basic week-to-week event. When these guys showed up, we counted on the best we could finish was 4th behind Barry, Stan, and Al. But we were determined not to let anyone else beat us.

The rest of the year pretty much ran to form like that. Mom and Dad were regularly placing just behind those people, but could pretty much count on beating everyone else. There were the occasional bad days and the occasional guy from out of town, but those were the exceptions.

That year there were some great places to autocross. The Ford Assembly Plant in Norfolk was a great place. It attracted a huge number of spectators, had a fence around the lot giving easy crowd control. The Mustang Club ran these events. We could always expect a big turnout of Mustangs at these events. Some were well set up, but none of them quite like the Shelby’s. Some events would have 6 or 7 Shelbys competing. The quickest was usually a guy named Lee Mathias in a ‘65 GT350 serial number SFM5s071. I had fallen in absolute love with this car and watching Lee drive it through the pylons. Lee is an incredible driver with more natural talent than just about anyone. But all of the guys running the Shelbys were very good. I wondered if it was just the cars making them look like good drivers, but I soon came to realize that they were all very good at what they did and just happened to appreciate how good of a car the Shelby’s were.

I looked closely at the Shelbys and then looked at my Mustang and started to notice all the obvious and subtle differences. Some of these things were just beyond my skills at the time. We were also finding that the convertible was not the best platform for much more in the way of modifications, at least with any sort of (low) budget in mind. So we just worked with what we had. We didn’t have the money for new springs, or the tools to put them in, so we tried some helper springs in the rear. The rear springs on the Mustang were sagging anyway and they needed to be lifted up some, so it couldn’t fail could it? Stiffer was better at this point.

From the helper spring experience, I learned much about handling. We added them to the rear and the car was now stiffer. I didn’t notice right away, but the car was now experiencing quite a lot of wheel spin coming of the corner. We didn’t have a limited slip of any kind in the car. But the body lean had been reduced significantly. Mom and Dad both said the car was now much more balanced in turns (meaning it didn’t understeer as much) but they would push the gas pedal coming out of the turn and all they’d get was wheelspin…. I thought we must be getting better horsepower now and spinning the tires. We tried various things to reduce wheelspin including extra weight in the trunk. It helped a little, but they didn’t seem faster. I was still not driving so I was trying to figure this out from watching.

Finally one day between runs I jacked up the back of the car and removed the helper springs. I think I did it because of them had gotten out of position. So I could quickly remove them both in a couple of minutes. I did this and it seemed like another car. The massive wheelspin went away. But interestingly enough the 3 months of so of Mom and Dad trying to feather the gas to eliminate wheelspin had made them both much better drivers. They probably gained 2 seconds each in that one-day and all of a sudden they were right in the hunt. I think this day became the first that they beat Al Lowe. Unfortunately shortly thereafter Al bought another car (a Pinto MPG) and started racing in a different class. Stan and Barry were still out of reach, but now when they didn’t show up, Mom and Dad were now the ones for everyone else to beat.

After the helper spring ordeal I decided to start really understanding suspensions. Prior to that everyone always needed stiffer springs, stiffer shocks, bigger sway bars, etc. So stiffer must always be better. Well, I found out on that one day otherwise. Now it was up to me to figure out why.

Here is some news of some publications that may be of interest to our readers:

Octane Magazine

Octane is a local publication here in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia. Octane is the brainchild of Dan Hankin. The magazine features tech articles about racing preparation, muscle car restoration, local event reports, and much more. The best thing about Octane is that it is entirely advertiser supported. That means it is free…. Yes that is correct, free!!! You can drop by one of their many locations around the state of Virginia, or you can download a copy of the current issue via a PDF files. If you download you don’t get the pleasure of the wonderful slick hard copy edition. You can subscribe to magazine for about the cost of postage, and if you like what you see online, you can get all of the back copies. I highly recommend it.

Turn 1, The Marketplace for the World of Motorsports

The first publication of this was delivered to my house today. It has listings for hundreds of race cars for sale. It lists everything from vintage Open Wheel cars to available IRL and Nextel Cup cars. Need a good SCCA Club Race car, or want to vintage race a ‘74 March 741? This might be the place to look. There are old IMSA GTP cars, Want the Chevy Lumina that Terry Labonte drove the 1994 Michigan 500 win, or the 69 Gulf Racing Mirage CanAm car, they have the listing. There are also some really nice streetcars that can handle track duty with no problems. It is worth a look.

The work project that I thought was nearing its end, is going to take most of my time for a little while longer. Sorry, but here is an effort to catch up a little.

Radio Show Went Well
My appearance on the Octane Magazine radio show as part of Race Talk Live on the new local radio station 1490 AM “The Outlaw” which is putting a great deal of effort in local and national race promotion. Dan Hankin of Octane has promised that he will have show archives available online soon.

According to many people, Glenn Bunch and I did pretty good on the show. I know it seemed very short and both of us actually wanted to say more than we did, so at least there was no dead air.

Hamlin Wins First Pole
Denny Hamlin is sort of a local guy to me. He has raced at all of the local tracks in Virginia, and hails from nearby Chester, Virginia. He won one the Budwiser Shootout in his 6th start in a Nextel Cup Car. But he has finally won his first Busch Series pole for Saturday’s race at Texas, the O’reilly Auto Parts 300. Good luck in the race Denny.

My First HPDE Event Canceled
Well the event wasn’t canceled, but I could not go to the event, for the same reason I have not been posting as much as I wanted here. The Mazda Drivers Associates event at Virginia International Raceway event was held on March 25-26, while I worked the weekend at my “regular” job. More of you need to start reading my blogs and other web sites so I can do this instead for a living.

Well, I hope to catch back up with everyone very soon.