8 days in May

The 2009 One Lap of America was an epic ride, cumulating into printed media coverage in a magazine distributed around the world. I realize the world might not get the same epic experience after reading about the One Lap of America as I did making the journty. After experiencing the trip and then reading somebody else’s perspective on the same experience, helped to memorialize the effect of “yes, that did just happen”.

2009 was also the first year that Motor Trend provided coverage of the One Lap of America.  With Brock Yates being the editor for Car and Driver in the past, coverage remained exclusive up until 2009 when Motor Trend took over.

Last year the article about One Lap of America came out in August. After receiving my October 2010 edition of Motor Trend without any mention of the race, it appears that we will not have any published coverage of this event.

Motor Trend’s coverage for 2010 appears to be an exclusively online publishing focus.  While I understand this model more than anybody, marking the end of the print coverage is a substantial blow to the event coverage.

There was a time where the DSM shootout also consisted of a full scale autocross, to offset those who wanted to do more than go straight.  That event returned somewhat this year in the form of the Max Effort venue, a combination of drag race and the autocross. While a tamer more controlled version to what we did on One Lap of America, it sounded like the perfect setup for a prepped One Lap car.

It has been a few years since I myself have been to the DSM Shootout.  I almost went this year, but managed to talk myself out.  Luckily Chris Wirth went down to represent the One Lap team this year.  Not only did he go down, but he secured a First Place in the street tire class of the new Max Effort event.

Credit: Jarrod Barnett @ Buschur Racing

Chris is good at driving, and apparently tuning his car, but he falls short on the marketing side of things.  For some reason he neglected to take one picture of the car on this trip, so we are stuck playing a game of “Where’s Wirth?” on the internet, as we scour the forums in search of proof.   Here we can see him lurking through the parking lot, somehow still wearing some of the One Lap stickers on the car.  If anybody finds any more pictures let us know.

When I first got into cars it was always my goal to race on a real race track.  It took me until I hit my mid 30′s to accomplish that goal but the moment I drove onto the track I knew my next goal was to be an instructor.  That took a few more years but I reached that goal and have since moved my sights even higher with the One Lap of America race.

As my goals for racing grow with my experiences their still remains a big part of me that loves sharing my passion for racing and my knowledge of Watkins Glen.  There is something that comes over me when I get into a students car.  My voice gets loud and my tone gets stern…”brake..lift..gas..gas..gas!”  I love being the cheerleader in the car and nothing makes me happier then to help somebody do what they thought they could never do.  When given the oppertunity to take on the worst student in the bunch I jump at the chance.  I want the student who can’t drive a strait line.  I want the guy nobody can handle and I have a smile a mile wide when I help that student pass their first Porsche, and then their second…and third!

I have also had the pleasure to help some really good friends and family enjoy the thrill of the Glen.  They have all since moved on to solo driving and are making their way to being instructors themselves.  Its fun to hear their stories about epic battles and out braking the GT3′s into the corners.  I get a little teary eyed when they say “I could hear you yelling in my ear…wait..wait..wait..wait…NOW!..gas..gas..gas!” .  I can’t really put it into words but I guess I am a closet teacher because I never would have guessed in a million years that I would enjoy teaching people how to drive as much as I enjoy driving itself.

This past spring I had the pleasure of instructing Mark Holdren.  Mark is retired now but his claim to fame is that he was a VP of marketing at our local Genesse Brewing Company.  The Brewery has a rich history of supporting Motorsports and I have no doubt that Mark was at the heart of that.  Mark also has the pleasure of dating my Mother in Law so he is family to me.  Mark drives a neat Mini Cooper Clubman which is nothing more then a Frenchy powered go-cart.

Being Mark’s first time on a race track we started slow and worked through the basics.  ”Brake, lift, gas…move on to the next turn” .  Once we got the rhythm down we were able to pick up the pace.  This is were my voice gets louder and the fun begins.  We worked on driving the right line and not letting other peoples bad driving mess us up.  We worked on braking deeper and later then your brain thinks it supposed to.  Fighting that “pucker” effect until it was just a distant memory.  We worked on getting on the gas early to balance the chassis and making sure we had our foot to the floor before the apex of the turn.  In some cases we learned that the little Mini has more grip then we gave it credit for and in some cases more Hp too.

At the end of the two days Mark walked away knowing he had done “it”.  Not only did he get to drive around the famed Watkins Glen race track but he got to really drive the track.  He experienced what it is to push yourself and your machine to its limits.  He got to experience one of the greatest race tracks on the planet not from a chair in his living room but from behind the wheel.  The way Milliken and his Cornell buddies designed it.  A track that rewards patience and punishes the early entry.  A track that when driven right has a rhythm to it and rewards the driver who can maintain the most momentum.

Mark was over the house last weekend to help celebrate my wife’s Birthday.  He had just come back from watching some of the F1 qualifying and practice runs and he said it was a whole new experience for him after having driven the track.  His eye was sharper now and it was easy to spot the drivers who were attacking the Glen and the ones who were just trying to survive.  At one point he was able to see a driver heading into turn 1 with a little to much heat.  He said to himself “you’re not going to make it!” and sure enough they didn’t.  ”slow in fast out” still hold true even with the pro’s

When the gifts for my wife had run out a final gift was revealed.  Mark had commissioned a good friend and local artiest, Richard Burandt, to paint a picture of me at Watkins Glen.  It was Mark’s way of saying thank you for helping him reach one of his goals.  To say I was “floored” would be too mild.  I’ve had pictures taken of me and stories told but nothing matches the permanence of paint on canvas.   Nothing matches the time and effort it takes to sit down and paint a picture.  It makes me feel like I’ve made it.  I’ve gotten to a place where all the work and effort has been captured in a medium that is meant to last. Almost like I am part of history.  Maybe that’s a bit to corny but to anyone who’s spent a day in the hot sun challenging themselves to master the art of driving can tell you it can be a surreal, even romantic experience.   Movies, books, magazines, TV shows have all been dedicated to capturing this spirit.  It’s what makes racing addictive and its why I am hopelessly hooked.

“There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”

-Ernest Hemmingway

I want to thank Mark Holdren and Richard Burandt for their thoughtfulness and the wonderful painting.  I will cherish it.

-painting by Richard Burandt (http://richardburandt.com/)

I had the pleasure to recently attend an AMS organized event at the Autobahn Country Club that ran the South Course for a six 30 minute session day. I drove there friday night which took about 10 hours thanks to a fatal accident closing down the main entry from the east to the Chicago area. There were literally hundreds of cars and trucks sitting on the highway and nobody really knew how long it would be. So I moved a few construction barrels out of the way and did a U-turn hoping I could challenge my Garmin Navigator to find a way around the mess.

Turns out Central Ave was a pretty good shortcut to another on ramp except that it was closed for construction. This sent me north of the highway into a “financially challenged” area of the city where you actually would really need an SUV to navigate these rough roads… and a bulletproof vest probably wouldn’t be a bad idea either! Luckily I made it to my hotel in time to have 4 hrs of sleep before heading to the track in the morning.

After arriving at Autobahn I had enough time to unload the car and get the car teched. Already it was pushing 80* F and the sun was bearing down with no relief in sight. After the drivers meeting to make sure everyone was on the same page, they sent the Intermediate and Advanced group out for some parade laps to get a feel for the course. Then I decided to follow some of the lines that the more seasoned drivers  knew for this road course and ended up driving the car so hard that the brakes boiled about 20 minutes into the session. Luckily I was able to slow the car down with my feet out the door and bring the car into the pits for inspection. If it wasn’t for the fact that the Girodisc 2 piece rotors and Raybestos ST43 pads were so good at stopping It might have ended much more dangerously.

Luckily just a quick re-bleed of the Racing Blue brake fluid seemed to have brought them back to life and the second session was fine assuming I got some cooldown laps after doing 4-5 hot laps. Plans are to get another set of ducts to cool the rotors directly in addition to the ducts that cool the caliper area, swap to higher rated brake fluid, and swap in some titanium shims. By session 3 I started to feel more comfortable again but still decided to stick with learning the proper line and not really going for absolute best lap times. One thing that reared it’s ugly head again was the fuel sloshing around in the tank during longer G corners. The Evo X just does not like running below half tank or less on road courses and I was forced to let a race prepped BMW go by when it just wouldn’t hold the turns when powering out.

Session 4 was interesting in that I rounded the corner to the back straight and spotted a red waving flag. This can’t be good! I scanned the area and noticed a white Evo planted up on the tirewalls, apprently his brake line(s) ruptured at ~120 mph and he was unable to stop. It also turns out that 3 laps before I lost my oil cap after not screwing it down all the way and getting distracted by onlookers in the pits. Apparently Pep Boys sells an oil cap that has a threaded end but they had to look it up as a 2009 since the 2008 just failed to list it!

Hopefully I’ll have time to run another track day at Road America with AMS as I had a great time and got another track under my belt reasonably well. Basically this was “The 24 Hours of Autobahn” for me since I drove ~20 hours round trip, 1 hour extra to reach the open house at AMS. and spent about 3 hrs total out on the track. It turns out that 24 hours of driving in 3 days really takes it’s toll and felt worse than the One Lap trip since there was no co-driver to share the overload of driving!

Session 3 video (available in 720p):

I started to have fun with the car and avoided abusing the brakes too much knowing I had to drive home after this event!

Session 4 video (available in 720p):

This video has a few laps with a passenger along for the ride, then as we round the turn to the back straight I noticed a red flag waving and spotted a white Evo up on the tire wall.

What do you do to occupy your time in the painfully slow months following One Lap of America?  Teach teens how to drive of course.  This past weekend Sean and Stephen decided to offer some instruction seat time with the Street Survival program, put on through the Genesee Valley BMW Club.  We did have a Street Survival sticker on the One Lap cars this year, as it is a Tire Rack supported event, carried out nationwide.

If you are not familiar with this program, here is the premise.  You take teenage drivers, who are just getting, or about to get their license and teach them how to deal with emergency situations on the road.   While some of them have only just started driving, there is a high rate of accidents among teenage drivers, which this program focuses on reducing.  You do this by setting up a series of simulations using cones in a large parking lot, so the teens can learn how the car will react when they need it to.  By learning proper braking techniques and learning how to react when the car looses traction, they gain a huge advantage on the road, where you can’t really practice for such events.

Homework

The day before class, I took at look at the student instructor pairings and found out my student was driving a 2001 Subaru Forester.  It happens to be the same car that my neighbor has, so I asked to take it for a test drive to make sure I knew how the car would handle.  Besides determining that my neighbor needs new brakes on every corner of the car, it helped me to know what sort of expectations to see out of the car itself.   After stepping out of a 400+ horsepower One Lap car, it was pretty easy to handle because everything was in slow motion.   It also pivots real easy if you want it to, so I knew focusing on braking and turning at the same time would be a big advantage in this car.

Instructing

Volunteering for this event was an easy one, because it has to be the most fun and rewarding driving schools on the planet for an instructor. I was leery on what to expect in regards to results the first time out, but now I know why this program is such a success.  It grabs the drivers before they have been corrupted with years of bad habits, and they listen without the burden of all of those expectations.  Sean was already a veteran of instructing the program and still had a yellow shirt to prove it. I can say with confidence that I will use my yellow shirt again with pride.

Media Coverage

Despite an overcast and foggy day, there were a few news crews that came out to document the class. You can catch up on the articles and video clips through their websites.

http://rochesterhomepage.net/fulltext/?nxd_id=184805

http://rochester.ynn.com/content/all_news/rochester/507922/school-teaches-teens-street-survival-behind-the-wheel/

Instructing the instructors was none other than Stu Sacks, a veteran One Lapper who gave us our advice the first year we entered the event.

I didn’t grab as many action photos as I was hoping for, but when they opened the track up at the end of the day for a track walk, we took advantage of the time out there to get some pictures of the cars together on the track.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

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So what does one do before the 2011 One Lap of America?

Tune the nut behind the wheel and improve the car so that it’s ready for next years event!

I’ll share some experiences with how my Evo X faired at the May 24/25th HPDE event down at Watkins Glen earlier this week. I was coming down off a high placing well at the One Lap event and wanted to see what the car could do at my home track by pushing it a bit harder without breaking anything. Well at the end of my first video I found the one weakness the car might have and did a small off track detour but it wasn’t anything too major. Luckily they had just revamped Watkins Glen for safety and areas that were gravel traps were now paved over with improved safety walls set in place in case the paved run off areas weren’t enough to recover.

It seems that while the threshold braking is amazing with the Girodisc 2 piece front rotors and Rabyestos ST-43 pads, even the Yokohama AD08 have their limits for traction when on the binders hard. At Watkins Glen there seems to be numerous braking zones that are downhill, and once the ABS engages fully, it really doesn’t slow the car down nearly as well when compared to threshold braking where the ABS is just about to kick in. What caught me off guard at times was when I would get a late pass point bye in the black (advanced) run group, most of the cars weren’t lifting as we approached the turn so being stuck passing offline meant I had to extend my braking zone into the apex of the turn, make corrections at the apex based on how early I entered, and then power out with relative safety if I did it right.

When I really stomped on the brakes and got full ABS to kick in, the car became very greasy and didn’t want to rotate very well at all when at the limits. I had the ASC turned off one touch which meant at least the power was not being cut, but the ABS were supposed to still be there to assist in steering the car to where I had the wheel pointed which didn’t always seem to be the case. It seemed that if the system was overwhelmed it would just understeer and kick in antilocks so much that I likely had to let off the brakes, correct the angle, and then get on them again in order to make it work. I probably could have also gotten on the power and power drifted the car around the turns when overcooked but figured it should work with using braking control as well. I experimented with turning the ASC off for 5 second push so that the ABS assist for turning was off as well but never got into a situation where I could definitively say it made the difference.

Last year I vividly remembered that the Porsche GT3′s were about equal on the track for power, braking, and handling where as a certain black 2007 Z06 driven by a nice guy named David was tearing up the track when he had race rubber and most everyone else was on steet tires. Well this year with the Coilovers, stickier street tires, and possibly slightly better driving I noticed a change. While the power on the straights was still similar since I detuned the car to around 500 crank hp at 25 psi, I could outbrake those GT3′s and easily turn inside of them in the corners now. The Z06 that I attempted to pace last year which warped my brakes after 1 lap overdriving the car was now within sight for a couple laps, and by the last session of the 2nd day I was able to keep pace doing 2:15 laps and the car seemed to hold up fine without any worries. After talking it seems that when he gets a clean lap he can lap around 2:10 or slightly better so my next goal will be to tweak a few things to see if I can pull that pace off on a street tire setup through increased reliable power (~650 crank HP goal), wider street tires (295mm?), and possibly a few suspension changes.

Overall the BC Racing ER series coilovers performed quite well and I increased the stiffness of my shocks bound (compression) and rebound to a stiffer 20 (of 30) setting all around with a few tweaks after that. Overall the car had minimal tire rollover on those settings with the -2.5* front and -1.5* rear camber settings and the stiffer shock setup. Still you could really toss the car around and not have any worries that the car would suddely experience snap oversteer, and besides the ABS taking over control at times, the car turned in amazingly well for 20+ minutes of track time and allowed accurate vehicle placement without having to muscle the car. As I pushed the limits a bit more on the 2nd day, I started learning the technique to get more bite out of the tires where you release the wheel and turn in again. The only places the car felt a bit dangerous was up the esses so I was still letting off slightly and boosting 20 psi until the car felt more settled before powering up to the back straight where I was reaching 145-150mph before getting on the binders at the 400 ft mark leading into the bus stop.

The only major issue I had was fuel starvation, and with the new found handling and more aggressive cornering it turns out that a 2nd session is not possible without topping off the tank since the left hand exit from the off camber turn 9 caused fuel starvation I would rather not experience again. Luckily I brought my 5 gallon fuel tank and just refilled that when making my mid day refueling trip in town. Plans are to get a fuel surge tank setup in place along with a 400 LPH fuel pump matched to the Deatschwerks 1500cc injectors I have yet to install. Basically at 7 MPG I go through about 1 gallon of fuel every two laps at Watkins Glen long course (3.4 miles) and that means after 12 laps (~27 minutes) the car is approaching half a tank of fuel.

I’ve got about 50 minutes of in car video footage from the various sessions over the 2 day HPDE and tried to list a brief summary under each video. The first one has the most traffic where I must have passed over 20 cars during the entire session and the last video shows that Z06 on race rubber that I’m keeping pace with just barely. So go to full screen mode and turn up the sound because it’s “almost” as good as being there yourself.

You’ll have to double click the videos to enter youtube in order to see the full descriptions.

Day 1 – Session 3 (Heavy Traffic, passing 15 cars in this 10 min clip)

 Day 1 – Session 4 (Passing Steve’s near stock Evo X on back stretch, caught silver Z06)

Day 2 – Session 1 (Late Passing Exercise with Steve at start, later doing some 2:16 laps)

 Day 2 – Session 2 (4 wheel drifts down the chute and late passing practice)

Day 2 – Session 3 (Pacing Black Z06 through traffic with around 2:15 lap times)

Motor Trend posted up a video of the One Lap of America.

Returning to run the car on Watkins Glen for a track session, after spending a week on One Lap of America, is like celebrating Christmas after opening all of your Hanukkah gifts.

It also helps relieve the knee jerking pain that happens after One Lap is over and the entire world goes silent. For this year’s team it was a chance to get back on the track, have some fun, and relieve a little stress from the build up of One Lap. Tim, Chris and I booked the trip to the Glen with the PCA group long before One Lap. Sean was placed in a marital and financial holding pattern, which might get him back on track again in the fall if we are lucky.

I had the easiest amount of preparation time in the group, as it involved putting a set of seasoned brake pads on the relatively stock Evo X with only 10K miles on it. The only other things on the agenda was to get the Race-Keeper system setup in the car and attempt to tune out the smoke screen of fuel, indicating I was running a bit too rich.

Two weeks before we left, Chris left me with homework to do,

and I ended up data logging the car to work every day. The car went away last winter with a nasty case of running too rich, and I wanted to make sure to lean it out enough before this Watkins Glen trip, to prevent the black flag from coming out. A few emails with spreadsheets, followed by a few revisions to the current ECU tune, and Chris had the car running relatively smoke free, with an underlying clause that I need to get a wideband o2 sensor before he leans it out any more.

Having the car relatively stock and running laps with Chris was going to be painful. I love my car, but Chris has 150 HP on me, a suspension that was handed down by the gods of Darkside Engineering, brakes of biblical proportions thanks to Tuners Nation and Girodisc. I feel a little under-prepared all of a sudden. I was also a little light in the wallet, after the One Lap trip, so taking out a second mortgage to keep up with Chris’s modifications, wasn’t going to happen.

One of the upgrades from the dealer in the Mitsubishi Evo X, is an aluminum shift knob. It has always confused me as to why this is considered an upgrade, as the aluminum hasabout two days during the whole year where it doesn’t burn or freeze your hand when you grab it. So yes, my only upgrade on the car is a new short throw shifter along with a shift knob made of derlin to keep my hand from burning every time I go to grab the shifter. Completely lame, not a chance in hell it will make a difference against Chris, but it made me feel better.

The Death of the Race-Keeper

I finally had a car to really get to play with Race-Keeper and I managed to blow it.  Race-Keeper has this cool capacity to datalog information from your cars computer while you drive, so you can use this to overlay things right over your video.  We didn’t get to use this for the 1992 Galant VR4 on One Lap, since it uses OBDII, a standard in all vehicles after 1996.

I had run some updates on the Race-Keeper before One Lap, which somehow left me unable to record to the SD card.  Most of One Lap, I recorded using USB sticks, which you can just plug into the side of the device.  Now I needed that USB port to make the fancy logging portion work, so I attempted to get the Race-Keeper update pushed to the device again.  Of course I completely lobotomized the device, leaving it unable to produce even a blinking light for me.  I sadly gave it back to Wilson Performance before I even hit the road for Watkins Glen.  Perhaps we can try that one again in the fall.

So with last years brake pads, Chris’s old set of tires, a stock Evo X with a tuning update, and no real video system to play with, I was ready for Watkins Glen.

Now that One Lap is over and I am back to reality, its time to fix the VR-4 and get her ready for a couple of days at my home track, Watkins Glen.  If you’ve followed us along our journey you know the VR-4 had some issues.  We popped a head gasket right off the bat, tossed a rocker arm at Hallet, the radiator was oozing in a couple of spots, we had brake issues, front wheel bearing issues, broken wheel studs, and one really cool off road excursion.

The first thing I did when I got home is re-installed my Baer track brake kit.  That didn’t take much time and like an old friend, it was nice to have them back.  Then I got on the ball and started ordering parts.  Brakes, rotors, a new radiator, and material to build brake cooling ducts and a bigger radiator catch can were all desperately needed.  After putting it off as long as I could I finally dug into the head gasket.  The first thing I found was a 2″ split in the intercooler pipe coupler that connects to the throttle body.  The amazing thing is I think its been split since mid week during One Lap.  Another testament to ECMlink and its V3 speed density.  The car didn’t miss a beat even with the huge leak.

I knew the radiator had issues.  It may have been damaged due to the bad head gasket or it could have just failed because it couldn’t take the abuse.  Either way I have a new one ready to go and after a little welding it should slip right in.  Inspecting the old radiator I found at least three areas that were leaking where the core connects to the end tanks.

I could tell just by looking at the car that I “tweaked” the front end when I went off at Hallet.  The evidence was hard to miss as one of the front wheels has about a degree more camber then the other and that tire also shows some wear on the inside indicating a toe issue as well.  Something caught my eye while working on the head gasket…I think something moved on one of the RRE caster/camber plates

Once I got the head off the car and inspected things I was happy to find that the rocker which had fallen out actually stayed put.  There is a noticeable grove in the cam lobe which means it will have to be replaced but there isn’t enough time before the Glen so I am just going to leave it as is.

At first glance the head gasket surface between the head/block looked good but once I pealed the gasket from the head I found three areas where not only had the gasket leaked but big chunks of it were missing.  That’s some real gasket carnage!

A new head gasket is on and my fingers are crossed that it will hold.  This time I’ll keep the boost to 25psi or less and not attempt any more of those 33psi dyno runs.

Its also time to say good-bye to a good friend.  The Forced Performance FP3052 that Art Hoffman loaned us for the race is off the car and ready to be shipped back.  With all the problems we had this year that turbo was flawless.  It pulled like a freight train in every gear and with the tuning we did this year lag was not an issue.  A big thanks to Art Hoffman for lending his support again this year and for Forced Performance for making sure it gets back to Art in perfect shape.