Jasmine in the Valley of the Red Mist "The check is in the mail". "I take that turn without lifting". "I'll just go to SCCA drivers school for cheap track time and coaching". It's amazing how even the person saying it will often believe it. I finally got Jasmine, my '69 MGBGT, running well enough to take to the track, and took her out to Thunderhill to teach at a couple of open track days the weekend of February 22 and 23. She ran perfectly, my driving didn't suck too badly and I had so much fun I decided to sign up for the SCCA drivers school at Thunderhill March 7-9. There is a bit of a gap between "ready for the track" and "ready for SCCA drivers school". If you have a free hour or two, ask me about the story of why my roll cage wasn't SCCA legal and how it caused the GCR to be changed. Among other things, I had to get about four inches of welding done to the tops of four roll cage tubes. Then I had to paint the roll cage, and while I was at it paint the exposed metal in the interior. I also had a list of things I knew that I needed to adjust or fix, and an even longer list of little things that I'd find out about while cleaning the car, or fixing other things. I'd like to thank my "adopted neice" Ruth, Edward and Kim, for their help in that hectic fortnight, getting the car ready. My friend Julia for giving me an SCCA physical on short notice. Ricky Freeman for adjusting his schedule so that I could get the cage welding done at a time that was a lot more convenient to me. Randy Shupes of Integrity Automotive in Scotts Valley for his flexibility and help when renting my time on his dyno for tuning up my car, and Jane and Tkat for being an unbelievably awesome pitcrew at the track. It's been said that "time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once". Obviously, whoever said that has never been trying to get ready for a race weekend. I had nearly enough time to get the car ready for the track before I left for work on Thursday morning. Tuesday afternoon, bugs were filed against my code. Since we were at the tail end of a QC cycle, they needed to be solved immediately. I was at work until nearly 10 on Tuesday night, got in early on Wednesday and worked until nearly 7, which put me on the freeway in time to catch some of the worst rush hour traffic I've seen in a while. I finally got the car pretty much ready to put on the trailer at about four on Thursday morning and started dealing with packing and logistics. At about six, I called it a night and hit the sack for a solid three hours of sleep. It wouldn't have been quite so bad except that I spent an hour looking for a tub of parts that I had forgotten that I had unpacked. I eventually found the various things I was looking for in pretty much the places I first looked for them, but didn't see them. There's a lesson there about working when you are exhuasted, but I've proven time and again that I'm too stupid to learn it. I didn't run into any major crisis, getting the car packed on Thursday, just a long list of things that took longer than they should. If I were going to the track more frequently, I'd have everything set up and ready to go. Just load the boxes of stuff for the track into the van and drive off. OK, the preceeding sentences should probably have been put right between "the check is in the mail" and "I take that turn without lifting". On the way, I stopped by Tkat's shop to pick up one of his Trailkats. I guess you could call them minibikes. They are basically what a minibike would be if they were designed for offroad use by someone with a much stronger sense of aesthetics than efficiency. Check them out at http://www.tkat.com I got to work by 8:30, made sure that no more bugs had been filed, and picked up the brake pads that I had had Porterfield ship to me at the office. The last time I had something shipped "next day air", I found out that it may not show up at my house until sometime after 5PM. This pleased me almost as much as when I had a next day air COD delivery and got home on a Friday night to a note that UPS does not take cash for COD. As I left the office, I realized that if I went up 80 rather than crossing the bay at 92, I could drop my last set of dyno results off at a friends house in Daly City for him to scan and OCR. I got to his place and realized that the printouts had been taken out of the van and were back at home. As it turns out, so was my paperwork with the schedule for the weekend. I stopped for a food and potty break in Vacaville. I was planning on grabbing a bite at the Burger King, but they had already closed by midnight. The good news is that I found a Nations Giant Hamburger in Vacaville. The bad news is that they are real slow and nowhere near as good as they used to be. I finally got to the track at about two to find that the gate was closed and locked. I moved a couple of large objects from the futon in the back of the van onto the trailer and was making the bed when Jon Becker, the chief instructor, showed up. Jon and I ended up chatting until 4am, at which point I crawled into the back of the van for a solid two hours of rest. In addition to dealing with the usual registration fun caused by my not actually signing up until several days after the deadline, nor having everything together until the day before, was my concern with making sure that the donuts arrived and made it to the workers. Any racer with a clue, realizes that they could not go racing without the volunteers behind the scenes. Since I like to pretend I have a clue, I wanted to do something nice for them. A bit if research showed that getting them a hot lunch on Saturday was beyond my budget, but donuts were doable. Leroy Lacy thought that this was a good idea, and we each chipped in $100 to buy donuts for everyone for all three days of the weekend. It worked out well enough that I'd like to suggest putting a donation jar at registration and the end of day social, and it wouldn't take many drivers chipping in $5-10 each race weekend to make this an ongoing thing. Unfortunately, neither Tkat, nor Jane were going to be able to get to the track until Friday night, and I still had work to do on the car to get it ready for tech. I also wanted to put in fresh brakes. While I was putting on my numbers, Mike Monegan showed up with the friend who had bought his Rx7, and they ended up paddocking behind me. I didn't quite get everything done before the groundschool started. Scott Rubin did the lecture, making jokes about British cars every few minutes. Mind you, Scott had decades of experience racing British Cars, and several of the instructors also race, or raced them, but I was the only student there in one. Or at least the only student in a British production car. Several of the formula cars were probably built in the UK. At the break, I asked Scott if I could skip the lecture and work on my car. As I've been playing this game for years, he let me go. Tech was remarkably painless. They found a hole in the sole of my drivers shoes, but my street shoes being leather without vent holes, were legal for the track. To save time, they just gave me a temporary logbook, because I don't plan on racing Jasmine, just using her as a track car for schools and the like. Should that go after "I don't lift" or "I'd always have everything ready to go"? After tech, Mike helped me swap my brake pads, and even finished up the job while I went back up to the lecture in time for instructor assignments. There were three groups in this school. Group 1 was for students in fendered cars that had no track experience. I was in Group 2 for students in fendered cars with track experience and Group 3 was for formula cars and sports racers (though sports racers could run with the production cars). My instructor was Tom Turner, who races a G-Prod Spitfire, very similar to the G-prod Spitfire that I briefly owned: http://www.red4est.com/lrc/racer_html/spit2a.jpg Now owned by my friend Marek. Since this was Tom's first time teaching, he was assigned to Mike Cummings (who races an H-prod spridget) as a student teacher. In one of those funny coincidences, the year that Tom went through drivers school (in Southern California), I was Mike's student teacher at the SFR drivers school. Tom has also codrove Marek's Spitfire in the Ilgen Enduro, which is the only SCCA race that I've driven it in, though that was a different year, of course. In my first session out on Friday, I followed Mikee for a couple of laps, then passed him so that the other students in our little group could follow directly behind him. I learned that he entered turn two lower than I had, as the very outside is slightly off camber. Mike also apexes turn two just briefly, while I have alwasys just hooked my inside tires on the edge of the pavement. Mike complained about my throwing rocks at him when he followed my through two. One of my purchases for the weekend was a camcorder to video my tracktime, and so that I could take notes while driving. I tried to be clever and took a small 12VDC to 110AC inverter to run the camcorder power adapter (to get 11VDC, somehow I think one or two diodes in series would have been more efficient). Unfortunately, with the vibration, the power from the inverter turned on and off, which turned the camera off before I even got out of pitlane. After that, I just ran the camcorder off batteries for the rest of the weekend. Tom spent the weekend watching from the tower near turns 8, 8A and 9/15. He commented that I seemed to have found a line (clip the first berm of 8, miss the second) that seemed to work for me and I was very consistent with it. He also commented that I may be pushing a bit hard. In the second session on Friday, I followed Mike for a while, then took off and hooked up with another instructor in a Volvo for a while. I noticed that he had a very unusual entrance into two. He'd turn down sooner and sharper than anyone I had ever seen before. I tried his line and it actually seemed to work fairly well. I also followed him on the inside line through turn three. The secret of the inside line through three is to put your inside wheels about a foot or two off the white line at the entrance. That makes it work a lot better, then entering all of the way to the right. Another thing that I realized from following Mike was that if I moved my line in 8 and 8A up a little bit and clipped both apexes, then my line through the turn was a bit shorter. I also learned that if you are on street tires and try to turn down the way a production car on slicks does, you won't make it to the apex. Following Mike, it was fun to watch how fast a Spridget on slicks can change direction, especially if it is going at what would be about a 7/10ths pace for an IT car on DOT tires. In the second session, I hooked up with a couple of students in Miatas who were driving them pretty hard. They couldn't get away from me, I couldn't pass them. They were, however, missing apexes by car widths, if not zip codes. I realized that if, even with the blower, I couldn't catch Miatas being driven that poorly, how silly it is to spend enough money to buy a used Miata on trying to make Jasmine go much faster. After the session, one of the students did compliment me on my driving. He said that he could tell that I was pushing the car way past what it was capable of. I was curious about his lines, so in the download session I asked who was driving the car. Scott told me and I said thanks. I was just going to ask him afterwards, but the room was totally silent as everyone wondered why I had asked, so I asked him about his line then. He explained that he learned the line from Dave Vodden and uses the sharp turndown to scrub off speed. I found out from Mike that when I was trying his line, one of the instructors noted that I had been turning down too early. Tom said that my lines looked pretty good, I was getting to the apexes and I was pretty consistent, but that I seemed to be driving a bit hard. He kept hinting that it would be good for me to take it easy and make the car last the weekend. I think I made him nervous. When I had students in "beginning" groups driving as hard as I did, I got nervous too. I have, on too many occasions, had students that were certain that they knew more about driving than I did. I tried my best to not be that smartass student. On the other hand it was very frustrating. There are definitely things that I can learn about driving and racing, but Tom kept teaching me stuff that I've known for 15 years. That evening, I wandered down to Mike's trailer to ask him about something and ended up watching incar videos from both his car and mine. I was reminded that if I go through 5 straight, I can wait until the bottom of the hill, when there is weight on the tires, to turn in for the sweeping right hander. It's frustrating, realizing how much I've forgoten. I also discovered that the way I had mounted my new video camera, while it showed a clear view of the guages with me out of the car, showed an even better view of the side of my helmet with me in the seat. The next day, I adjusted the camcorder with Jane sitting in the drivers seat with a helmet on. I still have some fine tuning to do, but the pictures were a lot better, and I can even read the hotlap timer on my dashboard. The JVC dv-70U takes great pictures. Very steady, and with the digital recording very clear. Unfortunately, it does not have a jack for external microphones, and that makes it useless for taking notes when out on track. It is impossible to understand what I'm saying when at speed, and even if I could be understood, shouting takes too much physical and mental effort. While I was watching Mike's and my videos from the day in his trailer, Tkat showed up in is RV. We got it parked in my paddock area and as Jane had not yet showed up, we called her on the cellphone. The three of us met for dinner at Granzella's in Williams, about 15 minutes south of Willows on I-5. For some reason, while there are large clear signs on northbound I-5, both Tkat and I missed any, if they exist, heading south. There were five track sessions on Saturday. I really, really appreciate my crew. We would go out on track, go to our meeting and finish the meeting just in time to put the car out on pregrid for the next session. I had not even turned on the hotlap on Friday, concentrating on other things than laptimes. The three laps that I had "clear track" for in my first session, I turned 1:34.54, 1:35.13 and 1:35:27. In the second session, they opened us up from passing on only the front straight to passing anyplace. In the second session, I really started to have fun. Naturally aspirated, Jasmine would put about 75 hp to the ground, which meant that I'd get blown away down the main straight by girlscouts riding their Schwins. With the blower, even not totally dialed in, I'm putting 100 hp to the ground. The Spec Miatas and Pro 7s can still walk away on the straight, but at least they don't run away. So, this was the first chance I had in a long time to go out in an open passing session, where my car was not totally outclassed by nearly every other car on the track. I was literally passing cars right and left. I also ended up carrying a lot more speed into 8, locked up the brakes and decided that a quick exploration of the access road was the better part of valor. Since I found myself with a lot more people to pass than I had ever enjoyed, and in a session where I could be a bit more aggressive than when I'm instructing at an open track, I also spent some time experimenting with places that I could attempt passes. Passing on the straights was not trivial, so I started trying to find out where I could pass in, or between turns. As soon as I saw that it wasn't going to work, I'd back off and note which passing opportunities really weren't. Between that, and the fact that the only way that I could get around most people turning slower laps was by late braking them into turns, my novice permit had the note that I "attempted unsafe passes in almost every session". There is a difference between attempting a pass and investigating a pass, but it's really hard to tell from outside the driver's helmet. The third session was more of the same. Incremental improvement on my line, annoyance at my inability to hold off my turndown for turn 6 and having fun being able to pass cars, if not at will, with a lot more ease than I have for a long time. Until, that is, she made a nasty sound in the exit of turn 5. Coming into 7, the speed of the wheels had become totally independent of the speed of the engine, so I coasted up to the e-crew and the towtrucks with a lap or two left on the session. I didn't know if I had busted a halfshaft (most likely) or what. When we were trying to see if the drive shaft was turning when the car was in gear, Tkat noticed that the hubnut on the left rear wheel was turning merrily away, while the tires was firmly static on the ground. It turned out that the splines on the hub, which connect it to the splines on the halfshaft, were completely stripped. Fortunately I had a whole spare rear end for my car. Unfortunately, it was 200 miles away at home. I was trying to track down spare parts that were closer when Leroy's brother Daniel saved the day. He told me to see Mike at Economy Foreign Car parts in Chico, who had a used MGB rear end that he could sell me when he got off work in an hour. Jane and I hopped in her Civic Wagon, drove to Chico (45 minutes away) and discovered a parts store that specializes in British cars. It was a veritable treasure trove of cool stuff, with both A and B series motors on display. I found some key blanks which had been on my shopping list for months, and various other cool things that I declined to spend money on. I decided that it was worth missing an hour of track time and spending $125 on a rear end like I had at home to find a treasure trove of spare parts for 35 year old sportscar less than an hour from the racetrack. While we were there, Mike showed us a picture of an MGB vintage racer that had been rolled up into a little ball at Thunderhill. I looked at the level of damage, the grass wedged between the rim and the tire and guessed that it had happened at Turn 1. When I talked to Daniel later, he mentioned the car and how it had gotten totalled at turn 1. Maybe I could star in a TV show called RCI, "Race Crash Investigators" where the protaganist looks at abstract sculpture that had once been racecars and tries to guess where and how the car crashed. After we got back, it only took about 5 or 10 minutes to put Jasmine back together with the new hub. I had bought the whole rear end as I didn't know how badly things were munged up, or the condition of the bearings in the "new" rear end, and only needed one hub off of it. Even so, finding the parts store, open on Saturdays, was worth the money. On Sunday, we had two thirty minute practice sessions, a six lap race and a twelve lap race. It was in the second practice session that I made my nearly unforgivable mistake of the weekend. I was in the middle of a pack of cars, with lots of passing going on. I came through turns two, three and with cars ahead, behind and to the side of me. I was trying to get around traffic, not hit other cars, and not get hit by other cars. Coming into 5, I checked the flag station, saw the double yellow flag signifying a pace car and backed off. The problem was that the yellow flags didn't look like they had just gone out. When I came in, I found out that I had actually missed several yellow flags and had passed under the yellow. In fifteen years, the only other time I had ever passed under a yellow, I had thought that I had finished the pass before the flag, the flaggers didn't. I was stunned that I could have missed not, one but several yellow flags. I think I know what happened. Looking at the flag stations becomes a habit. It's not even done consciously. For most of the past seven years, I've been driving Thunderhill in "open track" sessions, where not all of the flag stations are manned. The rule is "no passing until the next flag station", not "no passing until after the situation". There were several flag stations that I had gotten out of the habit of checking, especially when I was in "the red mist". There were about a dozen cars that got called into impound for a "talking to". I suspect that I got blamed for a pass that I didn't make, but that is immaterial. I heard that I was going to be gridded on the pole for the races, but as punishment got gridded at the back in front of a few high horsepower cars. On the upside, that gave me more opportunities to practice working my way through traffic. The two races were a lot of fun, but fairly uneventful. There were a few passes that I probably could have made, but which weren't worth risking during a drivers school. Especially on drivers not used to racing in traffic. I had more fun last weekend than I have had in a very long time. Racing is as much more fun than driving in an open track session as an open track is than driving on the street. Racing when you are not 30% or more down on power versus almost everyone else on the track is even more fun. I've realized that rather than spending thousands of dollars making the art project that I call Jasmine incrementally faster, I really need to just put together a Spec Miata, and just drive Jasmine on the street and at open track days. They are a lot faster, and a lot cheaper and easier to repair if, or rather when, anything goes wrong. On the other hand, it was a lot of fun to have a car that all weekend long people would come up to me to tell me how cool it was. One student, who drove a Formula Vee, even told me that I had the coolest car there last weekend. I'd like to get spend an evening in the near future reviewing my in-car videos from the weekend and make notes about my line, what my line should be and the lines various instructors took. If you're interested, let me know. If you have a good TV and can host, also let me know. Also let me know what days work well for you.