The last truly local race of my season and, with air temperatures well into the 90s and the largest grid of the season so far, it was going to be a scorcher any way you look at it.
Friday
My plan was to head to the track after 6 pm, when the Friday afternoon traffic clears up to the point it’s a one-hour drive, but I’d forgotten that “dry weather” on a Friday means Friday Night Drags at Pacific Raceways. There are three lanes on the track access road (two in, one out), but there are typically so many drag racers that they fill both inbound lanes and still back up all the way to the freeway, so getting in was going to be a real challenge. Even then, I was concerned that they’d fill up the empty spots of the paddock to the point where I wouldn’t have a place to set up. All things considered, I decided to just “do an Eric” and drive down first thing in the morning.
Saturday
I woke up and got moving early enough that I’d arrive with plenty of time to get things ready, but remembered a while later that you can’t start race engines before 9 am: I wouldn’t be able to start the car to unload it if I got there at 8:15. With no reason to rush, I took time to putter around the house, water the new grass seed I’d planted, etc, and still ended up pulling into the track at 8:30. By the time I’d registered, set up the canopy and gotten the other paddock things ready, it was 9 am and I could unload the car. With about 30 minutes to go before qualifying, I realized I was already so hot (without having really done anything effortful yet) that I was sweating through my shirt. It’s gonna be a hot one…
Qualifying
Getting geared up in my fire-resistant underwear and race suit wasn’t so bad considering the temperature, nor was sitting in a toasty car on pregrid with the additions of my helmet and gloves, so that was reasonably positive. On the other hand, once the session started I was having all kinds of engine stumbles in every gear for the first 3-4 laps, right around 4000-4500 RPM, and the “95% throttle” trick I figured out in Portland wasn’t working. I started to think that was going to be my day when it cleared up, although the “usual” stumble would occasionally crop up in 5th gear on the front straight.
For whatever reason I didn’t feel comfortable with the car and couldn’t seem to get below the 1’36” range, not helped by strange mistakes like early turn-ins for both Turn 3B (second hairpin and slowest corner on track) and 5B (the second of a three-turn sequence that in my opinion is the scariest part of Pacific Raceways), but I eventually managed 1’35.773″. My feeling from that lap was enough to restore faith in the idea that I thought I could improve, but I started running into traffic and was only able to get a similar time on the last lap (slower by 0.001 seconds). I was definitely aware of the heat by the time the session was done, but it’s going to be another 10-12 degrees hotter for the race, so… yeah.
Race
And OMG was I ever right about how hot pregrid was going to be! (Thoughts of the Chillout cooling system sitting at home in my shop…) I’d only been on pregrid for 5 minutes or so and I could literally feel the sweat running off my forearms and pooling in the elbows of my suit. That kind of sensitivity to the conditions was never going to work for a 25-minute race, so I worked myself into a little bit of Zen and was reasonably successful at ignoring the heat.
Pete Bristow (who, to be fair, used to race PRO3 and has lots of experience with split starts) was just crawling around for the out lap and making me (and possibly the guys behind me) nervous that we weren’t going to catch the pack until after they’d taken the green, but we caught them up in Turn 8 with plenty of time before the start. It looked like we were doing a good job getting setup for the start but I think the left column reacted a little slowly to the green because I (in the right column) got in front of Pete and was right on the tail of cars a few rows in front. This “faster on the right” persisted all the way down to the second hairpin at 3B when Ron (who’d just been passed by Mike) tried to regain his position and misjudged the braking to the point he nerfed Mike in the driver-side door. While they were tussling things out I, still on the right side, managed to sneak around them and pull a huge gap on them and the four cars already behind me. Of course, the check-up that I’d made in the interest of not being part of whatever was happening also meant that I was gapped by the cars in front about as far as I’d gapped the guys behind, but that was going to happen sooner or later anyway, so all I needed to do now was put my head down and get in some good lap times.
I was actually making some good progress in regaining the lost ground to the tail of the frontrunners but then started making some silly errors and, about three laps later, Pete was looming large in my mirrors. Three laps after that, he got to the inside of me in Turn 8 when I got balked by a battle between Igor in the Viper and Chuck in the 911 GT3 Cup (they’d finish 0.161″ apart, so it must’ve been exciting!) and then passed me going into Turn 9 when I bailed and gave him the corner. He immediately gapped me a little but not as much as I would’ve expected, and two laps later I was back on his rear bumper.
Three or four laps later, however, I got the Big Red Dash of Doom when my oil temperature alarm went off: somehow, the oil was up to 270°F when I’d previously only ever seen 252° once (it’s typically 230-ish). I would obviously keep an eye on it, but I decided I wasn’t giving up the battle and the engine would just have to cope.
I was making up a lot of ground in the sequence of 5A-5B-6-7, but Turn 8 isn’t the braking zone it was before the repave the track did a few years back and so he was able to pretty comfortably stay in front leading to the front straight. Eventually, I was able to consistently stay close enough through Turn 8 to get the benefits of the draft on the following straight and “show my nose” to the inside of Turn 2 a couple times, just to put a little pressure on him.
As we started the last lap I got my best run yet down the front straight and drafted up alongside him as we went through Turn 1 to the brake zone for Turn 2. I stayed driver’s left to attempt an outbraking maneuver on corner entry, but Pete took his normal racing line and cut left across my nose to pinch me against the edge of the track. It would’ve been one thing if he was trying to force me to stay tight to the apex, which would’ve given him the advantage through the remainder of the corner, but he moved left as if I wasn’t even there and took away my lane. Hard racing is fine by me, but my objection here is that, even if it’s your normal line to cut tight to the apex that early in a corner, you have to throw that out the window once there’s a car on the inside, in a brake zone, and therefore committed to a course of action. The inside car might want to avoid what’s now an unexpected move on your part, but physics is in charge at this point and you haven’t left the driver any options.
Luckily for the both of us, I did actually have a little bit of braking pressure left that I could apply, although it also “pinned the nose” and caused the back end to come around slightly. This was probably ultimately a good thing, as between that and his (finally?) jinking a little to the right to leave me a lane, the eventual (and inevitable) contact was both light enough and “square” enough (directly side-to-side) that neither of the flag stations that could’ve seen it reported it, and the only evidence I saw on my car were some tire rub marks on my wheels, so I guess that’s that. Regardless, I will definitely make an effort to remember this the next time I go wheel-to-wheel with someone who owns an auto repair shop… 😉
Sunday
Arrived a little after 8:30 (why is it already so hot?!) to set things up for the day and found… no big puddle of oil under the car, so that’s good. I added about a quart (!) of oil and ran the engine for a bit. All the pulleys and belts seemed fine and the oil temp didn’t rise at a different rate than I would expect and so, after much consideration, I decided that I’m doing qualifying and making a call afterward. It’ll cost me the day’s fee if I withdraw after doing a session, but finishing a race that’s mostly over is one thing; I don’t even want to start the race if I know the engine still has that kind of problem.
Qualifying
I found myself lining up on pregrid behind Chris Johnson, which I was happy about because I thought he’d make a good rabbit to chase. For whatever reason, I wasn’t really getting the times I thought I’d see from trailing a faster driver, so I decided I’d see how the current lap finished and then back off. Apparently, he’d had enough of me dogging his heels and pointed me by as we went to Turn 2. 😀 I figured, what the hell, and took off for more hot laps, but I immediately boofed the line through the corner and concluded that was probably not going to be The Lap (I was actually closer to improving my time than I expected). The next lap I really overcommitted to Turn 5B and ran wide, so that lap was shot and it was about this time that Chris wisely decided he’d had enough and passed me back.
I followed him around for what turned out to be his fastest lap and then took off on what I decided was going to be my last attempt. While it was my best, it was still oddly slow compared to what I’ve done before, so …? Regardless, my times weren’t helped by the return of “the usual” engine stumble on the last few laps. I also switched dash pages a few times during the session to check the oil temp and wasn’t thrilled to see 260°F.
Back in the paddock, I found I’d pushed oil out the front of the head again (not a lot, but the oil was getting thin enough) and added another half-quart. I was now in the position I didn’t want of making that decision: I can probably get most of the way through the race without the oil temp getting too high and then run the rest of the race for whatever points I can scrounge, or I can just call it a day after what’s already been a problematic session that’s still 10 degrees or so cooler than it’s going to be later and only 20 minutes long instead of 30.
Before I committed to anything, I decided to go talk to the head wrench monkey at Racer on Rails (if you saw their logo, you’d understand) and, although all their cars have oil coolers and mine doesn’t, they use the same Red Line oil as me and change it after every race. According to him, the lubrication properties will still be fine at the temperatures I’ve been seeing and for the duration we were talking about, but its ability to manage the heat is gone. I don’t know how grounded in science this might be, but it does match up with what I’ve seen with the car (i.e., the high-ish temperature I saw on my shakedown day, where I was using the oil the car came with, compared with the temperatures I’ve seen once I’d essentially mostly changed out the oil by constantly adding fresh oil due to the leak) and so I’m much more comfortable about running the race and how to fix the issue once I’m home.
I’m still too slow, though…
Race
I got a good jump at the start and made up two spots by Turn 1. I took a rock to the window coming out Turn 2, probably kicked up by whoever ran slightly wide on the exit, but I didn’t notice it at the time. I made up two more positions as we went through Turn 3A and almost made it past Pete by the second hairpin at 3B, which is when I noticed the rock chip as it turned into a 6″ crack. Mike was right on my tail as I was Pete’s down the back straight, when the crack grew to well over a foot long. Between this and the one from Portland, I guess I’ll be buying some new front glass. 🙄
It’s not really obvious from the video (you can see me make a fairly casual countersteer), but the back end of the car made an unexpected lateral movement as I crested the hill in Turn 7, something I don’t think I’ve ever experienced there unless it was raining. More dramatically, and historically an action that has caused more than a few BMW 3-Series cars to crash nose-first into the wall driver’s right, the back end rather suddenly decided to try to overtake the front end going through Turn 9. Knowing how hot it was and hopefully being a little predictive about how that was going to affect the tires, I’d set pressures lower than usual, so my assumption was that this was the cause, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As closely-matched as these (or any) spec cars are, I know I can keep Mike behind me for a lot of laps and the next lap confirms that: he makes a number of runs at me, but he’s not going to get by without either an insane lunge for an apex or a mistake by me. That said, he is faster than me over a lap and I’m basically denying him a chance to run a more “representative” race, so I point him by going into Turn 2 on the next lap, although I do worry that I’ve let the gap up to Pete grow too much before doing so. (Spoiler: it wasn’t 😀 )
Just two laps later and the oil alarm goes off again because of excessive temperature. Already?! Yes, already. Ugh.
It was shortly after this that the lack of rear grip I experienced at the start, the reasons for which I thought I understood, came back with a vengeance. (Speaking with Mike and others after the race, we concluded it was down to just ridiculous track temps overheating tires, even those like mine set especially low.) Worse, I was getting oversteer moments in corners where you really don’t want the car getting loose, places where I’ve seen cars go into the woods (before the recently-installed guardrails), cars on their roofs, and even cars that spun and went UP the hillside next to the track. Not fun for my blood pressure and even worse for decent lap times.
Of course, enough less-than-stellar laps by me also means that Chris is steadily closing the gap and he eventually catches me a little before halfway. I wait until he’s pretty close to me before I conclude that, you know what? I don’t really care about holding him off at this point, so I give him a point-by. Well, I try to let him by exiting 3B but he doesn’t figure it out until we’re about halfway down the back straight. 🙂
Although I’m apparently having skill issues and it didn’t take him all that long to catch me up, he’s not pulling away from me like I thought he would and it’s not long before I start thinking that I might just go ahead and give him a race. In fact, it’s only a couple laps later, as we’re both getting lapped by Stefan in his (my term) “M325” (E46 M3 drivetrain, E46 325 body), that I’m right on Chris’ back bumper. Just for fun, I turn in to Turn 3B early so that I can go side-by-side with him down the back straight, but I also know it’s going to compromise my corner exit and he easily pulls away from me.
Another couple of laps with the top third or so of the field lapping us and the gap has grown to a couple seconds. It’s at this point that I conclude the car is ready for the day to be done as my low fuel alarm comes on, followed a couple corners later by some dramatic oversteer moments putting power down coming out of Turn 3A, and then it’s just a lonely, hot race for the next several laps until I decide that, like the car, I’m ready for this race to be over. I’m considering that we must at least be close to the end when Chuck in his Porsche laps me one more time at the start of the front straight and, a couple seconds later, the double checkered flags are waved for the finish. Not my best race, but I make up three spots in class and five overall, so certainly not bad.