Idiots in Cars
At 2:40 in the morning, the alarm chirps and it’s time to wake up every cognitive resource I can muster. On most days this wouldn’t be a problem. I would have retired early enough the previous evening to have gotten a full night’s sleep. This wasn’t the case today as there were scheduling circumstances that kept me awake until 11 p.m. To make matters worse, I realized as soon as I laid down that the constant noise was going to do its best to prevent any real sleep.
Now that I’m becoming more aware of what awaited me at 2:30 in the morning, I’m contemplating my sanity. After getting dressed and heading to the trailer I discovered that my Nomex underwear and driver’s suit had yet to dry from the soaking sweat they had endured just five hours earlier. Since the temperature had dipped into the high 70s, this meant they would be both wet and cold. Perfect!
Not the best way to start a double stint at 3:30 a.m. but I also knew it would be quickly forgotten once I left pit lane. 3:30 a.m. would mark eighteen and a half hours of doing constant battle in a 24-hour race at Virginia International Raceway. We had started in fourth and between pit strategy and drivers we have moved both up and down the standings. When leaving pit lane in an endurance race it is common to have the exiting driver give you an update over the radio. As pit-lane seemed to go on forever, I was brought up to speed on the condition of the car, which was great, our current position, which was back in fourth in class, and which competitors were struggling. My job was simple, I needed to use the consistent car that was under us to put us closer to the front of our class. After about an hour we had moved up to second in class and 15th overall. At an hour and 25 minutes, my spidey senses went ballistic as I tried to slow the car down on the back straight and nothing happened. About 20 feet into the slide the tires woke up and started howling. Fortunately, the car slowed down enough to make the left-hander at the end of the straight before it had the opportunity to visit the tire wall.
The driver behind me (Tim) later thanked me for waking him up as he knew he would be next. He was able to get slowed down before getting to the oil spill I had been the first to find. Before I got down through the roller coaster and onto the front straight the flagtronics system on the dash went full course yellow. This was an incredibly fortunate thing to happen to our competition as the pace car was dispatched after 3 laps of yellow running. The cars we had worked so hard to gain on were now moved up to the back of the pack. Sometimes these situations help and sometimes they work against you. This one would work against us.
As I write this, my best guess is that I’ve only had 2 hours of sleep in the last 39 hours. It’s not the longest I’ve gone without sleep, but the last time was almost 30 years ago. I really want to get everything down while it is still (somewhat) fresh in my mind.
Going to the way back when, I can hear Dr. Freese in my mind saying, hey, you have a Porsche, why don’t you come out to one of our High-Performance Drivers Education events? Well sir, what is that and what do you do? A few months later I found myself at Putnam Park running around in circles and trying to figure out how I could possibly do this every day of my life! I became aware of the saying that has been credited to several people, including Paul Newman that “Racing is life, everything else is just waiting”. Even now my incredibly wonderful wife knows that most time off is spent at a racetrack somewhere. I have found that most pro drivers have either started in karting or some type of HPDE program. I did a quick count of our 60 instructors last fall and found that some 25 percent of them either had raced or are currently racing. Please do not believe that I’m saying that they’re better than the other 75% of our instructors. Quite the opposite is true, we have many instructors who know the track and can run it with their eyes closed. They can take a complicated concept and break it down so even drivers like me can understand it.
I wish I had started at a much younger age. If that was the case the idea of climbing in a car at Le Mans at 2 in the morning may not have been so unrealistic. Now over the age of (this is so hard to admit) 60 means that any idea of competing at Circuit de la Sarthe is nothing but a fantasy that exists in my mind when no one is paying attention. However, the growth of amateur endurance series gives opportunities to those who will never get the opportunity to experience that level of competition.
30 hours ago, when the race started we realized that none of the drivers on the team had ever raced at night and the car had never turned a single wheel in the race. It had 2 years of development and testing to get the kinks out, but it had never raced. The odds were stacked against us, but every team member and driver was committed to making it to the very end. We had no idea we would finish so well in a field of 70 cars. My first stint would be racing from dusk into the dark and then bringing the car into the garage for a mid-race service to be able to run to the flag. That stint was exciting as with about 45 minutes left, I caught up with a Boxster and a 944 turbo. We were peeling off almost identical laps and each attempt to make a pass was thwarted by either of the two drivers. Each of us wanted to be in front.
Miraculously the mid-race service included a brake change that took only 10 minutes, and we were back on track. This would be the only extended stop except for fuel, driver changes, and tires. As you can imagine there were many challenges driving at night. All your markers for braking and turn-in were now enveloped in darkness. Your apexes were rarely in the headlights until you were right on top of them and as every driver that has made it into an intermediate HPDE run group knows, never follow the car in front of you. We had to come up with alternate markers and once those were nailed down, we were able to share them with each other. In one such case for turn 3 you would simply drive right at the light outside the snack shop (about 100 yards from the track), brake when you identified the curbing, and turn left to nail the next apex. All this is going on while filling someone else’s mirrors with your headlights or someone else filling yours.
I would absolutely do it again but while waiting for another opportunity I’ll be joining you in October on the 4th through the 6th for some time at our Autumn Thunder weekend. If for some reason you have never tried an Ohio Valley Region HPDE, then it is time to get out and try it at least once. You never know how far you can go until you give it a try.
Just shy of 6 in the morning, I climbed out of the car and Tim, the driver in the next pit stall, came over to spend a few minutes going over our stints and the greasy track that caught me out. Tim is the quintessential New Yorker and doesn’t waste any time getting to the point. He looks me square in the eyes and says, “You know that we are really just idiots in cars”. Once I stopped laughing, I heartily agreed. What person in their right mind would think it was a great idea to head out on track at speed, in the dark, with only a couple hours of sleep, and then do it all over again just a few hours later?
Do I think that any of you want to compete on some level? I think that you might. I also believe that most of you think that it is out of reach. This is the entire reason that high-performance driving events were developed. It gives you a safe environment to stretch your legs and go as far and as fast as you’re comfortable without putting yourself or your equipment in danger. An exhaustive amount of time is spent developing and adjusting our program to keep every driver as safe as possible. If you haven’t registered for Autumn Thunder October 4-6, please do that today. When you arrive, please find me and introduce yourself. Once you’ve registered, you’re part of the family and we love when our family grows. Until October, always keep those eyes up!
