The Open Track Challenge: 2002
The Open Track Challenge
is
a 7 day endurance time-trial, spanning 1500 road miles and 7 well known
race
tracks in
Friday, May 10th
We’re just finishing packing and getting ready to head out to Pahrump. 520 miles according to Mapquest, and I gotta do it all sans-AC. Ug… At least the cars are running strong and spirits are high. The only real last thing I need to shake down is the front rotors, after a failure at Laguna Seca I haven’t had a chance to “test” out the new set, but we should have some nice clear freeway to play with… Also just days ago installed a set of custom 37" full-length NA headers crafted by Michael Smith of MWS.
For those that are curious, I’m starting this event with just over 140K miles on the OD, Glenn has about 101K. Crazy…
---
We finally got on the
road at
The rest of the trip was
uneventful,
except for bumping into a SoCal SE-R Club guy in
After checking in here at the Pahrump Nugget we did a parking lot walk. My big competition in T3, the very trick Audi S4 was here. He’s clearly got a lowered suspension, real CF hood, roll bar, no back seat…hmmm…he could be trouble.
One of Lee & Glenn’s competitors, Mike Headland is also here, in fact parked right below the hotel room window as I type this (damn! Forgot to pack water balloons… J). His car is also looking pretty trick, Willwood brakes, not much interior, huge ass tires.
Lots of other stuff is around already too. Enough C5 Vettes to have a Tupperware Party (a joke on plastic body panels for those who don’t know), a new 911TT with roof rack and race tires up on top, a big at least two car sized enclosed trailer bright red with a huge Porsche logo on it, and a cherry looking Civic with quite functional looking splitter & rear wing.
I’m sure more stuff will
show
up tomorrow, registration starts at
To Do Tomorrow: Find the local car wash, check out what octane “Supreme” is in Nevada, find the track, bed in some Hawk Blue brake pads and scrub in some tires, test brakes, and we’ll be ready to rock.
Saturday, May
11th
We stumbled out way out of bed and down for breakfast at the reasonable
hour
of about 9AM. Our last bit of sleeping in
before
all hell breaks loose and we wake up at
We spent most of the morning preparing the cars. Swapped race tires and pads onto both cars (Yokohama A032Rs and Hawk Blues & Porterfield R4S pads) and took them out to bed in the pads and scrub the tires. Lee reports that Glenn’s new huge HKS 2530 ball bearing turbos & Auqamist system are totally kicking ass, delivering power to loose traction at 60MPH in 3rd gear on pump gas. My NA seems to be doing great, the new genuine Mitsubishi front rotors are holding up fine even with some serious panic stops and general abuse, so hopefully we don’t experience the same excitement as at Laguna a couple weeks ago.
We briefly hit the track to check out the facility, which is just about 5 miles down Hwy 160 from the Pahrump Nugget where we are staying. It’s a very odd track, basically no elevation changes at all (even less than Buttonwillow), but good length, and with a driveway that CROSSES THE FRONT STRAIGHT! Yikes! During run groups they lock the gate and you simply can’t get to the paddock until the session is over. All the structures are temporary tent’ish buildings, making it look like the whole place could be packed up and moved out in a moment’s notice.
In the afternoon people
started
to seriously start to show up in the Hotel parking lot. Piles of Z06s, a couple Vipers, a bunch of Porsches, etc… Of special note for me are the Audi S4 and
Honda S2000. The former went out for a
test drive around
Lee & Glenn’s competition looks pretty fierce. The RX-7 of Lou Young has a tire trailer with four 275/40-17 A032Rs on it, that’s a BIG tire for such a light and boost happy car. Also Navid arrived in his insanely fast 2001 M3, with those 285 tires on 10 inch rims all around. For both cars I fear the best we can hope for is that they break before we do.
Another nifty car to note is a brand new Mini-S. Blue with white top, when it pulled up everybody walked over and started checking it out. The car is of course bone stock, but it does have a set of nice rims and the new P-Zero Competition tires on it (60 treadwear, legal for Touring class).
We just finished getting all our stickers on and both cars are looking very trick with big ClubZ banners on the tip of the hood. While doing all this there must have been at least 10 people that have come up and asked if there was a race going on, and we fed them all sorts of info and web page URLs and stuff…kinda fun playing celebrity in a little town like Pahrump for a day.
Glenn just went to get some 100 octane gas and found the brake peddle is mushy from Lee’s test drives earlier today. This is not good if we are boiling Motul 600 on just some test drives…they are down in the parking lot now flushing the whole brake system again (we have like 20 bottles of brake fluid with us ;-), so hopefully that clears the problem up.
Tomorrow morning we are
due
at the track at
Sunday, May 12th
Video of Pahrump/Bragg-Smith [8.34MB]
867 miles on the OD, it’s fairly late Sunday night now so I’ll need to make this update short. Lee and I may have delivered quite an ass kicking, 2nd place for each of us in our respective classes, but we’re not quite sure as the official results aren’t posted yet.
The day started perfect, clear skies and only the slightest breath of wind, just enough to keep the sun from feeling hot but not nearly the 50MPH+ blustering we experienced on Saturday.
In T3 the big news was
the Audi
S4, who ran mid-high
In T2 Lee, the RX-7,
Navid’s
M3, and an M Coupe started the day in the
More than anything, what Lee, Glenn, Joe and I did today, was do FAR better than anyone expected. Finally, for the first time since the old IMSA GTS days, we’re earning the respect the 300ZX deserves. Lots of people were coming over and checking out our cars, people asking how much HP we have, how much weight, what times we’re running, etc…
One of the big talkers, an old Z owner Mike Headland had his opportunity to show his stuff today and back up his smack talking on the OTC and CC.COM message boards. Turns out his BPU Supra with huge steam roller tires only was good enough for the low 2 minutes, we didn’t see anything listed (again, unofficial times here) for him under the 2 minute mark. So not only is Lee crushing him by almost 10 seconds in Glenn’s tricked out 500HP TT, I’m also beating the pants off him with half that HP. Sorry Mike, that’s the way it goes when you run with the big dogs…
The 276 mile trip from
Pahrump
through the desert to I-15 was truly awesome, the air was crystal clear
and
the craggy desert mountains showed off every minute detail all the way
around
the horizon. Truly incredible scenery, if
you
haven’t been to
Tomorrow is the big track
at
Willow Springs, and the day after The Streets of Willows. I hope to gain some ground on the 911, who should be just 5
points
ahead of me, as they haven’t been on these tracks before. The S4 may not return, we can certainly keep our fingers
crossed, and
Lee is hoping their HP advantage over Navid’s M3 will make the
difference
on the very very fast and HP friendly track tomorrow.
Monday, May 13th
Video of
992.6 miles on the OD now, and we just finished up what is probably another successful day, but first let me make some corrections to the last update: Rule #1, never count your lap times until they are hatched… Bill Arnold and Tamara (Tammy) Hull in their black ’88 M3 turned a couple smoking lap times in yesterday’s session #3 (for which we didn’t see any times until this morning), fast enough when combined with their 3rdfastest time to beat the combination of my 3 fastest times by just .6 seconds. That’s somewhere on the order of a win by just .0016%, knocking me back to 3rd and the broken S4 to 4th. But, the times are gone and the points are on the board now, so we need to move on to today’s battle on Willow Springs.
The day started nice
& cool,
59 degrees by the on-board computer on my ZX as we cruised into Willow
Springs
at roughly
First session out went
quite
well, it was my first time at this track but it’s a very easy one to
learn,
just 9 turns and it’s shape is basically just a big oval with a pair of
bunny
ears at one end. By the end of the session
I was
running 1:44s, with one very nice near spin in turn 5, and
Lee
was running somewhere in the high 1:30s. The
competition
was generally in line with our expectations, Navid in the mid
Second session out the
weather
was starting to warm up a bit, but I was able to shave several seconds
off
my times to get down to the 1:41s, and lee worked his way down to a
high 1:36. On this session Bill &
Tammy cranked out a blistering
3rd session
things
were definitely getting hot, air temp into the 90s, and my car, my
tires,
and my brain started to fade bad. I turned
my
Tokico shocks up from 4 to 5, since the pavement is generally so
smooth, but
ended up almost loosing it while doing 120MPH through turn 8. VERY
EXCITING. I did that on my very first
hot lap, so I spent the
rest of the session building my confidence back up (loosing it in turn
8
can easily mean death for the car and possibly driver. There’s several hundred feet of run off room, but that
disappears
quick at 120 and you better pray you aren’t spinning in the process or
a
spectacular roll over is easily possible) and actually ended up slowing
down
by .5 seconds. Lee also had the same
experience
with his times getting lower in the 3rdsession, so we called
it
a day and started to prepare the cars for tomorrow (which is on the
smaller
“Streets” track also here at Willow Springs). Lee’s
cross mounting his tires as his shoulders are almost gone already…we
NEED
more negative camber people! All the camber
kits
out there are to REDUCE negative camber, and it’s not helping us at all! Lee is running -2.5 degrees up front and it’s
still
not enough by a degree, probably roughly the same for me. Check out these pictures and see for your self (click the pics
for
SuperSize):
The rest of the car’s subsystems are working fine, with maybe just a little overheating to keep track of. The brakes are working flawlessly, a massive improvement in stopping power and reliability over the stock systems. Lee & Glenn are running the 6-pot AP calipers up front with Coleman rotors and Hawk Blue race pads and stock hardware with Hawk Blues in the rear. I’m running the 12.375” 3000GT VR-4 rotor mod up front with genuine Mitsu rotors (don’t skimp on rotors! Get the real OEM stuff or you may end up very unhappy) and Hawk Blues, and Porterfield R4S pads in the rear on some dimpled and slotted Brembo rotors. The Hawk Blue pads are simply incredible, I am absolutely amazed, there is visibly NO PAD WEAR at all after two days at the track! And these things stop like there is no tomorrow and have been COMPLETELY fade free. WOW!!!
When the 4th session results were posted up on the board our bet proved to be correct, everybody ran slower times by a margin, and it looks like I’ve locked up 3rd place again and Lee is behind Navid’s M3 with a 50/50 shot at 2nd against the RX-7; we don’t know for sure as it’s simply too close to call until the official results come out (which the OTC people promise WILL be posted some time tonight).
In other news, the other T3 compedtiors are getting pretty bent about a 2500lb 1973 Porsche 911 with a late model normally aspirated 3.6L motor crushing the rest of T3 by 5 seconds. If he was in T2, he would be 5th, better than mid-pack. They are thinking about filing an official protest, but I’m not sure they’ll get very far. Sure, it’s more than the 2.7L cut off, but it was specifically downclassed (just like my NA ZX) by the organizer of the event in writing, so they’ll have to eat a big crow to go back now.
Tomorrow we’re heading
back
to Willow Springs to drive on the “Streets” track for our 3rdevent,
a small and short technical track which should give me a big lift but
will
unfortunately be a big downer for Lee & Glenn’s laggy boost monster. After that it’s a quick couple hundred miles
to Buttonwillow
for the 4th of 7 events. After
that
things start getting crazy, as we have 300+ mile commutes to do from
Buttonwillow
to Thunderhill to Buttonwillow to
Tuesday, May
14th
“We laughed, we cried, and our skin is really fried…”
Video of Streets of Willows [7.77MB]
1176 miles on the OD, by my guesstimates we’re about 1/3rd of the way home.
The Streets of Willows is
a
very tight and technical course, and while it is more suited to smaller
more
nimble cars, it can also pays big dividends to good lines and
foreknowledge
of the track’s layout. The track is short
and
narrow compared to the big tracks like Willow Springs and Thunderhill,
so
traffic was bound to be more of an issue than before. Lee got to the track at
First session I went out and turned some respectable 1:36 lap times, beating both the evil 911 and Tammy & Bill’s E30 M3 handily, and after pitting jumped out of the car with my camcorder and ran the footage past Lee while he waited in pre-grid for his run group. He then went out and turned some 1:34s on his first session, just a second or two off Navid’s 2001 M3, and easily trouncing Lou’s RX-7 and Mike H.’s Supra.
Second session out I cut
another
good second off my times, turning a couple mid
Also during the second
session,
the 911 turned some excellent mid-low
The flip side to this is that the owner of the 911 specifically asked one of the organizers of the event if this car config would be legal, and was told YES, in writing (or email at least). So what to do? The following is mostly rumor based, so take them with a grain of salt: The organizers talked to the 911 guys, wanting to move them to T2. The 911 guys said fuck off, you said we could run this config, we spent huge $$$ building the car, we aren’t budging. The organizers came back with okay, we’ll refund your entry fee and you can go home if that’s what you want to do. The 911 guys returned with not a chance, we’re in this thing for the duration or we’ll sue. The OTC organizers back then back down, but the T3 competitors start dropping hints about wanting to do some sabotage, which the organizers imply will turn a blind eye to as they’re pissed off at the 911 guys now as well. Yikes, this is a vacation people, I though I left petty politics back at work…
So anyway, I decide I
gotta
run, just to try and get one or two more low
So we sit and strategize
for
a bit, and come up with a plan. We grid
way back,
everybody else goes on. At the very back
of the
pack is the Mini-S, who is very quick but going very slow on his first
lap
and is lagging behind the rest of the pack. We
let the pack go by (hopefully now all doing a “hot lap” pace), let the
cooper
go by (who’s only a second or two slower around SOW than me), and wait
for
the front of the main pack to be juuuuust at the beginning of the front
straight. Glenn drops the hood, Lee yells
“go!” from the pit
wall. I hammer it hard out of the pits to
stay
out in front and not get a passing flag thrown at me. My very hot warm up lap goes fine, and on the final corner
before the
front straight I swing way way way wide on the extra pavement and take
a
near drag race start down the front stretch and fly around the course. I come back across the start finish line,
temps looking
good, Mini-S still way out in front of me with lots of room, cars
behind me
long since dusted, and my hot-lap timer flashes a
They are getting very good at posting times quickly on the timing shack (not so good on the web, sorry! They’ve got some “overall” stuff up now, but no details), so it wasn’t long before Tammy walks over and informs me that tire wear be damned Bill is going to go out for one last session to try and beat me. Ha! With a smirk I gladly acknowledge her challenge, knowing with confidence that I can’t turn any better times today, and there isn’t a snow balls chance in hell he can not just beat me, but beat me soundly with 3 solid laps.
Doh.
He went out and turned two 1:34.5s, and nipped me out of first place by just the narrowest of margins. #*&$@(#*$ Since they finished 2nd the last two days to my thirds, they are now 15 points ahead of me, while the 911 is now I think tied with them as the Porsche couldn’t muster any better than 3rd. The one good thing though is Nissan reliability, as the 911 on the last session broke a sway bar mount and the M3 blew it’s power steering pump. I expect the 911 to be back tomorrow at Buttonwillow, but the M3 may not be completely fixed until they detour on the way to Thunderhill tomorrow afternoon.
To finish off Lee’s story, Navid got all the way down to a 1:31, with Lee close behind with several mid 1:32s, the RX-7 in high 1:32s and the Supra way back somewhere in the pack (I think I may have beat him today actually. NA Z vs. BPU Supra, wohoo! J). Yesterday both cars beat Lee at Willow Springs (both those driver’s home track), so Lee only pulled 4th, but two 2nds and one 4th add up to still 2nd place overall in T2.
Updates for the next few
days
running towards the finish are going to be sparse I’m afraid to say. We have like 6 hour drives from Buttonwillow
to Thunderhill,
back to buttonwillow, and then to
Wednesday,
May 15th
“I’ve seen better days…”
Video of Buttonwillow #1 CW [16.9MB]
Really quick, as it’s 11
and
we just got into Willows: The OD reads
almost
1600 now, so we’re roughly half done with the road miles (700 to get
back
to
The day started well for me, I was posting times to humble all of T3 handily. Lee had his car dialed for Streets of Willows which turned out to be WAY too much oversteer for a big race track. The consequence was 3 off course excursions, one slightly bent rim, one busted wheel stud, and to add insult to injury as we jacked the car up the little 2x4x4 wood block we use when lifting from the middle under the front cross member broke and the jack pounded into the PS line bracket and bent the hell out of it. Luckily all the above were handled just fine before the next session (we have extra studs & nuts (no jokes please), the PS lines are fine, and the wheel is good enough).
On my second session I
turned
a fairly good 2:14.595, just a few thousandths faster than my M3
competition,
but several seconds ahead of the 911. In
the
3rdsession I went out and my tires overheated and I slowed
down
by a full second so I wasn’t able to back up that 2:14 with any more
laps
in the 14s. The M3 went out and turned
several
2:14.5s, *#(@*$&$(#@*, but at least the 911 was still way back. Then on the 4thsession, which I
skipped
to go get my tires remounted and balanced (I flipped them so I would
have
a fresh shoulder for Thunderhill. I tell
you,
we NEED MORE NEGATIVE CAMBER!!! We’re
going to
take this one up ASAP on the ClubZ
Tech
email list, because there is nothing out there that I know of to get
3.5
to 4 degrees of negative camber on the market at all.) the E30 M3 pulls
two
Speaking of failures, what is it with BMW M3s and their power steering systems? All three M3s in the event, Bill & Tammy’s E30 M3, Lewis’s turbo E36, and Navid’s E46 all have had their PS system fail. Bill, Tammy & Navid are heading back to the bay area tonight to get parts to fix their cars, and I’m not sure what Lewis is planning to do. Crazy…well, if we can’t beat them outright, hopefully we can keep the pressure on hard until Nissan reliability overtakes that flaky German engineering.
One cool thing though, on
the
way up to Thunderhill at roughly the mid point when we were just
getting ready
to pull off for dinner & fuel, we caught up to Lewis and his
co-driver
and we hooked up with Talk About radios and pulled off on the Patterson
Exit
off I5 for gas and Wendy’s. Not only was
it great
to take a break and shoot the shit with Lewis (who is BTW also a Z
owner,
among other interesting cars in his stable), the Patterson Exit is Hwy
130,
the road from
That’s all for now, been driving all day, must sleep…tomorrow we’re on our home track and hopefully we’ll be able to bust out a can of whoop-ass.
Thursday, May
16th
(actually, I’m writing
this
at
Video of ThunderHill [10.2MB]
Really short, as I have
little
time left to get some shut-eye, it’s been a long long long day. We’re at 2016 miles on the OD now, roughly 2/3
done. Two more tracks and a drive to
Lee & Glenn fubared and toasted two cylinders on the TT, they are out.
Here’s Glenn’s description of what happened:
“Well everyone, it
was
fun and exciting while it
lasted. Lee and I had a brain fade today and killed
the car before
getting
to Thunderhill today. No
excuses, we just
blew
it.
The car was
performing
great and Lee was driving great
and had we not
messed
the car up, I believe we would
have taken either
2nd
or 3rd in our class. But those
predications are
all
hearsay from me, because what
matters is what
takes
place on the track.
I will write a
much
more detailed account of things
later, but I am
beat
now and have to get some sleep so
I will keep this
one
short until the more detailed
write-ups.
So how did we
kill the
car? Our track setup up was 17
PSI, with 18.5
deg BTDC,
100 octane and Aquamist
starting at 7 PSI. The car ran strong and cool in the
low 200's and
with EGT's
in the 800 deg C range. The
3.5 deg of
advanced
timing helped the low end response
and brought down
the
EGT's by 80 deg C. We were very
happy and did a
lap
at the very long and fast Willows
Springs at 19 PSI
with
only slightly higher coolant
temps, but the
day was
also getting hotter. Between
tracks, I just
turned
off the boost controller for
about 10 PSI max
and
never pushed the car at all.
Well, this is
where
we blew it. On the 6 mile road
between the hotel
and
T-hill, we were setting the high
boost setting on
our
boost controller to 18 PSI and
boosting to 18
PSI for
verification. Well forgetting
that we didn't
have
race gas, we saw a big cloud of
smoke behind us. We didn't hear anything. We
got to
the track and saw
oil
in the engine compartment coming
out of the
dipstick. Thinking we may have just
overfilled the
oil,
we cleaned it up and went out on
the track for a
warm-up
lap. Unfortunately, the car
was smoking
badly, so
we brought it into the pits
where Joe R.,
pulled
the plugs and checked
compression. We lost the compression in cylinders 2
and 6. It looks like the rings went. The car was well enough to drive
home
without
problem.”
I ran the 3 latter sessions today at Thunderhill on Glenn’s light weight CCW rims and relatively new A032R rubber (this combination is 15lbs lighter PER CORNER than my Fitipaldi rims) and turned some blistering times to get 2nd for the day behind the M3 and in front of the 911. The M3 still has a toasted steering pump, and the 911 went spinning off turn 1 backwards in session #3 and the front window popped out and shattered on the track. I passed them during the commute south back to Buttonwillow, looked like the window was still gone, so I have no idea what their plans are.
When taking off the CCW wheels, one of my lugs up front striped it’s splines, and another on the other side has some slightly damaged threads. Weird…as we saw some similar issues on Glenn’s car back at Buttonwillow on Tuesday. With the help of some cool guys at the local Shell station in Willows I was able to get that lug and nut out so I could swap back to my street tires for the 300+ mile commute south, and Joe is taking gear back to the bay area for Lee & Glenn and will be rejoining me at Buttonwillow tomorrow afternoon with a new stud.
Tomorrow morning I plan to mount up the CCW rims again and at least try to pull a few laps to get on the board (assuming of course they don’t spring an unannounced tech inspection on me, that would be uncool). I’m currently 30 points behind the leader and 20 points behind the 911 with just two races left, so my game plan is to just stay in the running and be ready if one of them break and miss a day’s points. Otherwise the 4th place guy is way back, so I could almost miss a day without worring about him catching me and taking away my 3rd place trophy.
Oh, and to make things even better, it took 45 minutes to check in because they are understaffed here at the BW Motel 6, the AC is broken for the whole building, the modem will only connect at 14.4Kbps, and the rooms were still under my old co-driver’s name in spite of confirming the reservation in person two days ago. Sigh…
Tomorrow is another day, hopefully it’ll be a wee bit better…
Friday, May 17th
After all that happened
on Thursday,
from blown motors to stripped wheel studs to a 5 hour drive and a motel
room
with no AC, Friday morning came way too early even at the ‘late’ hour
of
7AM. I actually made it to Buttonwillow
Raceway
at
At this point I was running on just 4 wheel studs on the front left corner, so my game plan was to make like I was going to go out and race, I.E. fully prepare the car and get ready to go, but wait until the rest of the pack was going on course and slip into the end of the line and roll through the hot pits so my wheels wouldn’t stop rotating and nobody could see I was missing something. Once on track, I would take it easy under breaking and right hand turns and just get 3 full laps in so I had officially attended the track and then kick back and wait for Joe to show up.
I turned 4 complete laps to be sure, all in the 2:20s, a good 15 seconds off the day’s fastest pace in Touring 3, and then pulled off and prep’ed the car for the new wheel stud (I.E. jacked up the corner, pulled the wheel, caliper and rotor). Once I had that done I let various people who were asking what was up what was up, and I got several suggestions on where to try and dig up a new stud, but to no avail. So I kicked back in the shade inside Louis’s trailer and BS’ed with Louis, his brother/co-driver, Bill, Tammy, Navid, and several other of the BMW team I know well from races past and present.
Lunch time comes around
and
I get a call from Glenn that Joe has left his house in SJ and is on his
way
down, so I guess he’ll be coming into town around
While all this is going on, the 911 shows up again with a new windshield and turns some good 2:02 laps, while Bill & Tammy are having egregious power steering system problems and can turn only a 2:04 at best. However, this shouldn’t be a problem as Bill & Tammy are a good 15 points ahead of the 911 since I knocked it down to 3rd place at Thunderhill, so even if the 911 takes first place both today and tomorrow they will still only gain 10 points. Me, I’m a good 15 points behind the 911, so again, no real hope in catching them, and I’m *65* points ahead of a 3 way tie for 4th, so I could almost skip the last two events and still finish 3rd.
I started out with a 2:08, then a 2:09, then a couple more 2:08s, then a 2:09 as I slip on the last turn and put two wheels into the dirt (the last turn is the ONLY turn on the course where if you spin to the inside you will Crit’ into the K-Wall, so needless to say I feathered the throttle (not lift, just feather), straightened the wheel and gently guided her back on track), and lastly a high 2:07, almost definitely enough to take 3rd. Yes!!! And this on only my second session ever on this track configuration (#14CCW for those that are curious).
We decided then to leave Glenn’s CCW rims on my car (why risk buggering up another lug trying to get them off hot (we’re talking VERY hot, too hot to touch)), there was lots of tread left, more than enough to drive on to Las Vegas and then race on Saturday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway (the “infield” course, not the oval). So we quickly packed up, much easier this time than previously with so much less stuff to deal with, and we were off to Vegas.
We arrived at the
Saturday, May
18th
Video of
2537 miles on the OD, and an another great yet hot day on the track, this time at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in 100+ degree heat.
The track is short, tight, technical, and table top flat, situated in the infield of the LVMS NASCAR/CART oval. We were hoping to get the American Le Mans Series course, which uses a combination of the infield and a section of the oval, but no joy, the Petty NASCAR Experience program had the oval.
We hit the track around
Second session out Joe
quickly
picked up the pace to near race speed and turned several low
After the second session we found out that while the M3 was well ahead of the 911, a couple of the 4th place people, a 944 and the S4, were also close on the 911’s heels. If I could win today, and fit TWO competitors between the 911 and I (I.E. the M3 plus another car), then I might take 2nd place in our class. Oh….way too tempting a possibility, so Joe willingly hopped back out of the car and I went out for my 3rd session. Off the bat I turned a 58:4, followed by a 58:6, and then my hot-lap timer went dead as I turned another 4-5 solid laps probably in the 58 second range. Finally I catch up to traffic and look down and find my temp gauge up at 7/8ths, yikes! Same bloody problem as at the Streets of Willows, the course simply wasn’t fast enough to keep the car cool. I slowed down for two solid laps and got it down to maybe 3/4ths on the gauge (which isn’t even remotely linear if you didn’t know, so who knows what exact coolant temp I was at), and then pulled off and pitted ASAP and killed the car.
As I walked over to the timing board I heard the big news, at the end of the run group before my 3rd which the 911 and M3 run in, the 911 blew through the checkered flag (I.E. ignored it and failed to pit), and then blew through the red flag they threw at him trying to get him off course. He was kicked out of the 4th session, and his transponder battery happened to be dead so he lost all his 3rd session lap times as well. YEAH BABY!!!
As I write this I’m still not entirely sure what the real results are, as the timing sheets we see posted after every run group only show the 2 best laps, while your time for the day’s competition is actually your best 3 laps. I may have beat Bill & Tammy in the M3, I did beat the 911, and somebody else MAY (fingers crossed here) have also beat the 911. Really too close to call, and we packed up before the 4thsessions and headed back to the hotel to clean up before the awards ceremony. In a few hours I’ll know for sure, but one thing we do know, we went the distance and kicked some ass in The Open Track Challenge.
Sunday, May 19th
No real update for today. I just got home, both Joe, I and the car made it back in one piece, with 2986 miles on the OD. OMFG am I tired, that 9 hour drive from Vegas to San Jose, which included 100 degree heat (you are all remembering I don’t have AC right?) and rain (no windshield wipers either, thank god for Rain-X), sucked big time. Next year I’ll leave the car with Z Club people in Vegas and fly back home and then go back out and get it a few weeks later I think.
I finished 3rd place in Touring 3, the 911 second, and Bill and Tammy in their M3 took first. In that final event at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Bill got me by just .5 seconds for 3 combined lap times, so that’s less than .2 seconds per lap, and the Audi S4 beat me by literally just a few hundredths of a second, and I beat the 911 by several seconds. Yes, that means the S4 *did* beat the 911, but no, I wasn’t really quite close enough on points to overtake the 911 even if I came in first at LVMS and had Bill & the S4 in-between me and the 911. In the overall standings I came in around 30thout of 62 cars I think, real final results should be on the OTC web site soon, but they have been saying that for days so who knows….
Brain hurts, must sleep…videos will be up tomorrow.
Monday, May 20th
Well, they STILL haven’t posted official scores yet, so I can’t do any preaching about who I beat and who beat me. However, I can give you all what you have been patiently waiting for, videos!
Pahrump/Bragg-Smith [8.34MB]
Near Spin on turn 5 at Willow Springs[1.88MB]
Near Spin on turn 8 at Willow Springs[2.28MB]
Streets of Willows [7.77MB]
Buttonwillow #1 CW [16.9MB]
ThunderHill [10.2MB]
Buttonwillow #14 CCW (sorry, no footage for this track)
Joe spinning at LVMS [1.74MB]
Joe and I getting our trophy for 3rdplace in Touring 3 [1.85MB]
Be sure to check out this month’s issue of Sport Z Magazine, in there you will find a big article detailing all the stuff Glenn and I did to prepare our cars for The Open Track Challenge, including Dyno charts and all sorts of great stuff. In the next issue of SportZ, you’ll find a more concise and far more grammatically correct accounting of the OTC event, who’s butts we kicked, who kicked ours, and what lessons we learned while on the road.
-Carl
