Chumpcar 24 Hour Enduro – Pikes Peak Raceway June 11-12 2011

”I expected an epic adventure and a grueling race. What I experienced was much more than that.” – Charles.

We arrived at the track midday Friday, to make our final preparations. The green flag would drop at 11 AM Saturday morning, signaling the start of the race. It would be another 24 hours after that, before the checkered flag would be waved. The garage and paddock slowly began to fill, as the teams rolled in with their crapcan racecars in tow and proceeded to set up.

 Many of the teams had brought stacks of new tires. Required by the rules to run DOT street legal tires, with a minimum mileage rating of 200, that was exactly what they brought.

 We had 12 used tires, some of which were pretty old and tired. Four of our tires had a wear rating of 620. It’s hard to imagine what kind of rubber it takes to make a tire that hard, but recycled superballs are probably part of the recipe. None of our tires had any kind of a performance rating, unless “M+S” somehow means “Mighty Sticky”. We brought them because they were free, acquired after months of scrounging in friends’ garages.

 Our team: “Who’s on FirstRacing” built a car to compete in the crapcan racing series. In the Chumpcar series, “Theme” is optional, but all of the competitors dress out their cars a bit. Peer pressure, and perhaps a few bonus laps, set every team busy developing a theme. Ours was baseball. Our hood was a diamond, complete with bleachers. The bleachers and spectators in them were composed of words, and those words were many of Yogi Berra’s “Yogiisms”, such as: “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

 On the roof was a giant baseball, signed by the Yankee’s Hall of Fame catcher. Yogi’s autograph was just a clever forgery, albeit a pretty good one. And at the center, on the pitcher’s mound was a photo of Abbot and Costello. Overall, it looked pretty cool. We didn’t get any bonus laps, though. In fact, I never saw a single team get a bonus lap. The race results were determined straight from the lap timers.

 We had two crew members, who volunteered to help our support our effort. Greg brought an RV, to give us an air-conditioned place to decompress. Jeff brought clear thinking and a timer: we made him our pit boss. We immediately put them both to work, and they graciously helped us for the next two days. I almost said “tirelessly”, but by the end of the race, they were probably more tired and sleep deprived than  the six drivers amongst us.

 Spectators and competitors of auto racing often talk about the machines. We do so because the cars are what we can see, racing around at a blistering pace, while their drivers are hidden from view. Besides, cars are cool!

 You might’ve seen Disney’s “Cars”, or even the sequel. All of the characters are cars are full of spirit and alive. It’s a familiar story, and Lightning McQueen wears a great big smile on his face. McQueen’s the star, and has no need for a driver because he IS the driver.

 Our Mazda was also a happy little car. But not by the skillful use of animation to tell a good story. Our car came alive because we were inside driving it. McQueen was just fine on his own, but our car needed a little help. We had six drivers applying every bit of skill and courage they could deliver. All of which left us wondering: would that be enough?

Chumpcar 24 Hour Enduro – Pikes Peak Raceway June 11-12 2011

”OK, this will work. I can’t see, but then I realized, I don’t need to see to get around corners. It was like a Zen moment or something.” – Steven

Our sealed beam headlights were old, tired, yellow, and dim. They might have as well have been the original lamps, installed 23 years ago. Maybe they actually were! We had considered adding a couple of lights, but lighting is expensive, and our intention was to comply with the rules. Little did we know that million candlepower headlights were exempt from the price cap, since they were considered a safety item. The rules are not at all clear about this, and our interpretation of them turned out to be mistaken.

 Nearly all of the competitors had run in the series before, and a few had done so many times. There were only a handful of other Chumpcar virgins, like us. Our unfamiliarity with the series had led us to make some erroneous decisions, a few of which would make our race far more difficult than it might have otherwise been. Significantly, one of them was to rely on the original sealed beam headlamps.

 “The hands follow the eyes” is a basic tenet of road racing. You will soon be where you’re looking, so be sure to look for a happy place. Don’t look too long at that wall, or the car pirouetting into the dirt. Don’t just look over the hood: look up and out. Find your markers. Look for your line; your racing line, and you will follow it. Seeing is absolutely essential, and quickly interpreting visual clues leads to good situational awareness.

 With that awareness in mind, the hands and feet can smoothly apply whatever control inputs are needed to stay on course. Rapid and smooth inputs are continuously applied to change the racecar’s course and velocity. Brake and throttle are smoothly applied and released, and of course steering, which is the primary control input. When performed well, it’s very much like a dance. There is a rhythm to it all, and there’s a simple equation that sums it up: smooth=fast. Whether or not they know the latest steps, and they usually don’t, all racecar drivers are good dancers. Some of them are even musicians: all of them have rhythm.

 Children, especially young children, have a store of knowledge about things that are soon forgotten as they grow. We raise, feed, and comfort them. We protect them, and with gentle love, try to lift them out from the difficulty of being very young and small. We heal their wounds and soothe their fears. There is a particular fear that all children know: they know that the boogeyman awaits them in the dark.

 It was during my second driving stint that the sun set, and the lights came out. You could say that was when the lights went out. The track only had lighting available near the pit areas, and the rest of the track was soon plunged into darkness, or worse. All of our lights were working, but sadly, would not be giving a stellar performance tonight. Soon, the onrushing track ahead nearly vanished. It was then that the boogeyman came out to play.

 What seemed a very long time later, our pit held up our number 86, signaling one hour, and I came into the pits. Our race strategy was to try and extend each driving stint upwards from an hour, to 75 minutes. I had come in after just an hour, however. Exiting the car, I offered my explanation as calmly as I could manage, “I couldn’t see anything out there.”

 Dennis, our team captain climbed aboard next and quickly roared off of pit road. An hour later, we signaled to him, and he pitted without hesitation.Flipping up his visor, his first words were spoken with emotion and conviction, “It’s INSANE out there. I couldn’t see a thing! One hour stints!”

 We needed to improve our lighting. The lack of sufficient lighting was a mission critical problem, and we needed to resolve it. We had very few options available, and we used all three of them. We cleaned the headlights and windshield, and began to use the high beams exclusively. Ed was up next, then Charles, Steven, Brian, and then me again, as I was sixth in our rotation.

 Each of us in turn roared out into the black maw of the darkness. Each driver returned from their driving stint with some very colorful remarks about what they couldn’t see. Nearly all of us had to do it twice. The second stint was a bit easier perhaps, since by then we all knew how to survive the blackening conditions. None of us would in any way describe it as “easy”.

 Many of the other teams were having difficulties with the darkness as well, and the six turn infield course was pretty much a dust storm throughout the night, revealing many agricultural excursions. Considering that June 12^th is one of the shortest nights of the year, it sure lasted for an awfully long time. In defiance of the danger and the dark, we found ourselves laughing.

Chumpcar 24 Hour Enduro – Pikes Peak Raceway June 11-12 2011

A friend said, “Sixth place: that’s not too bad”, and I replied, “No, it’s not bad at all: it’s outstanding!”

 Our team, “Who’s on First? Racing”, was formed in December 2010, to compete in “The 24 hours of Lemons” and “Chumpcar” road racing series. Our goal was simple enough, and success easily defined: complete an endurance race, and cross the finish line.

 In our first race, we succeeded in doing that and by our reckoning, a wide margin. We raced in the 24 Hour Chumpcar enduro last Saturday at PPIR. After 24 hours of racing, we had covered 1,238 miles and 8,568 corners in 952 laps. That was good for a 6th place finish in a field of 30 cars, only 14 of which had survived to take the checkered flag.

 Lemons and Chumpcar are two different national racing series, both started in the past few years. They have very similar rules, and a racecar can be built to race in both series. The essence of the rules require a $500 “crap-can” racecar, built to compete in endurance road racing. All safety equipment is excluded from the price cap, and the personal safety gear for just a single driver exceeds that limit. Our team was composed of six drivers, and two crew. Most of us are Miata drivers, and all of us are “Chumps”.

 In December, our Team Captain purchased a 1988 RX-7 that had “some engine problems.” After troubleshooting, we soon discovered that the primary problem was that the engine had very low compression. If it had been any lower, it might have been better described as a vacuum. We decided to rebuild it, although none of us had any experience with a rotary. All of us were willing to learn, however.

 We completely disassembled the engine, putting all of the parts into clearly marked, and organized boxes and baggies. Once inside, it became obvious what the source of the problem was. The 13B rotary engine had been severely overheated, causing the rotor to gouge out the rear rotor housing. The housing now looked a bit like an oversized ruffles potato chip. It was quite dead, and far beyond resurrection.

 Required by the “crap-can” racing rules to remain within the $500 budget, we replaced the dead rotary with a 1600cc engine from a wrecked Miata, built in 1989. We picked the engine because it was available cheaply, and it allowed us to comply with the rules. It was a desperate move, but we figured that no penalty laps would be assessed for decreasing the car’s horsepower, especially by 25%.

 The project required transplanting a short round engine with a long skinny one. We succeeded, replacing the 146hp rotary with 110hp of fire-snorting ponies. To do so, we completely rewired the car, using the wiring harness, ECU, and even the steering column and instrument cluster from the wreck. Four months of weekends later, we had a working racecar and dubbed it  “The MX-7”. We had hoped to build a reliable, well handling, and reasonably fast racecar. While we were successful with the first two items, we failed with the third. The car isn’t fast at all: it’s overweight and underpowered. Only two of the 30 race entrants were slower, and one of those had a better power-weight ratio and all-wheel drive!

 Recognizing that our racecar was slow by any standard, our racing strategy was to have fast pit stops, drive well, stay out of trouble, and survive. We were determined to take the checkered flag in the morning.