The Racing Geek

Its been almost a month and I’ve finally sat down to write a recap of Lemons SF 2008. We entered our trusty #56 Formula BMW E30 with the only changes being the addition of an LSD ($65 from the Pick-n-Pull) and putting in some stiffer springs ($200). We also put in a new (junkyard new that is) left rear hub ($150) to replace the one that led to our crashing out at Thunderhill. All in all we put in 2-3 days of work and we had the car back up and running for well under the $500 limit.

We originally planned to have a Max Mosely mannequin bent over the trunk (pants down of course) but we ran out of time and as you can see the car looked pretty much exactly the way it did at the end of Thunderhill (apart from the aforementioned left rear hub).

Since there was no practice day this time we all just showed up on Saturday and got ready to race. Rob took the first stint and was making excellent progress through the field. It was about an hour into the race when we looked at the scoreboard and realised just how excellent the progress was - WE WERE IN THE LEAD!!!

Photo by jyri1

We were trading back and forth for the lead with car #65 (a green MR2) with our buddies at Team Red Bear just half a lap behind us. Coincidentally all three teams were pitted next to each other making it the fastest section of the pits. The original plan was for each driver to drive stints of 2-2.5 hours so we we immediately knew that something was wrong when Rob pulled into the pits at about the 1.45 mark. It turns out that the heat from the exhaust had literally melted the engine mount which is never a good thing. Luckily we had a spare and we were able to replace it and send Jyri out for the second stint.

At this point we had fallen out of the top ten but we were only about 20 laps down on #64 who was leading. Jyri kept up a steady pace and about 1.30 hours into his stint we had made up a few of the spots when tragedy struck Lemons and driver Court Summerfield died on track. The rest of the days racing was immediately cancelled and we wet to the hotel wondering about the future of Lemons. After battling with it overnight and talking to Courts family, Jay decided to continue on with the race in Court’ memory. The Lemons organizers have organized a memorial fund in Court’ name and I encourage readers to donate what they can. The next morning the organizers made this statement:

A California Highway Patrol investigation was undertaken at the track. The CHP informed us that there was no mechanical failure or unsafe track conditions and that no other cars were involved. The CHP also informed us that, based on physical evidence and witness statements, it appears that the driver was not conscious prior to impact.

The race was now down to 6.5 hours and we had 3 driver who hadn’t turned the wheel yet. Gabe got to take the start and despite a couple of scary moments kept up decent pace. About 2 hours into his stint he came into the pits for the scheduled driver change when we noticed a crack in the oil pan. At some point the oil pan had struck something on the track and developed a crack that was furiously leaking oil. This was heroic fix time and like last time Rob came up with another winner. He used a dril to drill a small hole in the center of the crack and then used a screw to attach a Gatorade bottle tap filled with red silicone. Amazingly enough this bottletop fix not only lasted over 4 hours at race speed but also took a couple of heavy wall impacts without coming loose.

At this point we were some 60 laps down and had fallen all the way to 37th place. It was time to get back on track and put in steady laps. While that sounded great in theory it was further complicated by our shifter mounts breaking. This meant that the entire drive train would move under braking and resulted in our car popping out of second gear under anything resembling heavy braking. Since there was no time to fix that we just had to drive around the problem and drove the entire lap in 3rd instead. This meant that we were very slow coming out of corners but once we got into the working range of the engine we would take off. This must have confused a lot of our competitors who would come alongside by the midway through the banked turns only to be left behind when the car hit its stride It also made the car much more of a momentum car - I found that I could take the esses quite a bit faster than the other cars out there but would usually have to brake to avoid hitting the car in front only for the other car to out accelerate me coming out of the turn.

Guy and I put in some steady laps and which pulled us back into the top 25 before handing off to Rob for the final stint. He putting in some excellent times when someone put him into the wall just 2 laps from the end.

Photo by Murilee Martin

In the end the car went through a lot and kept on running. We finally ended up 20 and some 50 odd laps behind the winner. The 2 laps we lost in the end were crucial since we were just 2 laps behind Red Bear who finished 18th. All in all it was a fun event though the tragedy did bring home the dangers of racing. Formula BMW will definitely be back for Thunderhill.

A few people have asked me what it was like to drive Thunderhill at night and I figured the best way to explain would be to show you what its like. This is a quick lap with no traffic from the 24 Hours of Lemons race in December. Its pretty hard to see the course so I have labeled the corners to give you a better idea of the course.

Driving in the dark from rnair on Vimeo.

As you can see, the visibility is not the greatest which makes driving quite an interesting experience. While the lights do give you some idea of where the apex is, the real problem is in finding your track out point. Turns 1, 2 and 4 were especially difficult since the optimum racing line has a very wide track out point where you run over the outside kerbing on the exit. This is all well and good in the sunshine since you know exactly where you are going and you know that its safe. In the dark however, you simply cannot see the track out point when you turn in and you basically have to hope that the exit is clean and that no one has dumped mud or oil on the kerb. The other problem is that its really quite hard to see the track surface and/or its boundaries, especially when people drag mud onto the track. In many cases, the white line marking the track is completely obscured and you just have to guess at what your turn-in point is and hope that you wont put a wheel off on the inside. Some of this might be improved by using better lights: we used the stock E30 headlights and tried spreading the beam sideways to try and light up the apex but since it is a road car the amount of adjustment allowed was just too limited. The next time we will use more powerful, fully adjustable dune buggy lights instead. My solution to the visibility issues was to take it slow and always leave myself a margin for error, it may not have resulted in ultimate lap times but it meant that I always had enough “in hand” to be able to adapt to the any unexpected changes in the racing surface. Our goal was to just stay out of trouble and rack up the laps at a steady pace - since we were in 6th place after 10 hours I guess it did work :).

The next video is an example of what happens in low visibility, the cars are just entering turn two after someone had an agricultural moment and dragged a massive amount of mud right onto the racing line. None of us can see the mud on the line and come into the corner at race speed only to lose all grip mid corner. One car spins out completely while dPunks and I have some interesting sideways moments. While I got through it ok, it did give me quite a scare and I ended up taking turn 2 quite slow for the next 3-4 laps. Endurance racers who race at 10/10ths all night must be either incredibly brave or incredibly dumb

Muddy moment from rnair on Vimeo.

The next video is of a couple of laps in traffic. As you can see it is actually easiers to drive in traffic since there are a lot more headlights lighting up the track :-). Also the headlights make it impossible for someone to sneak up on you which means that you always have a good idea of the cars around you and what they are going to do. This leads to much better manners on the track and less problems off the track. Compared to the October race at Altamont the traffic here was incredibly well behaved and there was hardly any contact.

Driving in the dark (in traffic) from rnair on Vimeo.

This final video is a highlights package attempting to show some of the interesting from my 4 hour stint in the dark, I apologize for the crappy editing. All the video in this post was recorded using the PDR100 Racer kit from our sponsors at ChaseCam - I highly recommend it for your own racing/track video.

Thunderhill Lemons highlights 2007 from rnair on Vimeo.

We just finished the first days racing and we are currently in 6th place just 13 laps behind the leader. Wish us luck for tomorrow.

The cumulative result of all the contact in the Lemons race in Altamont was that the front end of our car was in pretty bad shape. As you can see from the above picture, the left front corner is a couple of inches too high as well as an inch or two inboard of its regular position. Now a real race team would either replace the frame or send the car to a bodyshop for some frame repair. Unfortunately both those options would have put us well past the $500 limit for the race. This is where Robs forklift comes into the picture

We started out by cutting the metal bar that served as our impromptu bumper after the hearse took out our original bumper during the race.

Step 2 was to lower the left edge of the frame. For this we wedged the left frame mounting point of the bumper under a truck and then used the forklift to raise the rest of the car. It took a couple of attempts, and some interesting moments with the forklift on two wheels, but we eventually got the front end into a level position.

Frame Repair, Lemons style from rnair on Vimeo.

Step 3 was to attach chains each of the bumper mount points and use the forklift to widen the front end.

Body repair 2 from rnair on Vimeo.

As you can see we ended up moving the right edge over a bit so the final step was to push the right edge back in.

Body repair 3 from rnair on Vimeo.

In the end we were able to fix our front end for $0 and keep with in both the rules and the spirit of the 24 Hours of Lemons

Craig from Group of Fools (Car #9) contacted me a few days ago saying that he had some on-track video from his car that included our car and asked me if I’d like a copy. After being deafened by my “Hell YES!!” he mailed me a DVD with a 10 minute video clip of their car following us around the track.

The following video merges 3 video streams for your viewing pleasure. The top and bottom camera views are from our car (#56 White BMW with a wing)). The camera in the center is from Group of Foolz (#9 Maroon BMW with a baby seat on the top). The video starts with me coming out of the pits to start my Saturday stint and by the 40 second mark you can see the #9 car right on my rear bumper. They then follow us around the track as we both go through slower traffic until they finally pit after about 10 minutes.

Major thanks to both #9 Group of Foolz for sending me the video and ChaseCam for giving us the video setup we used in our car.

3 camera action from the 24 Hours of Lemons from rnair on Vimeo.

#56 SFF1 (us)

#9 Group of Foolz (with baby seat :-))

We got to the track at 7 am on Sunday so that we could prep the car for the 9 am start. The car was in reasonable shape and the main thing we wanted to was to replace the transmission mounts and the driveshaft with parts we had managed to scrounge up from various disreputable sources :). However just as we were about to jack up the car we realised that we had left them at home . Seeing that we had no way of further patching up drivetrain, we got to work fixing the front end bodywork which had taken a few hits on Saturday and was dangerously close to the radiator. Rob hooked a chain from the car to the trailer hitch and stood on it force the bodywork back into shape.

Guy once again started the day and gave a good account of himself. Midway through his stint there was some contact which ripped our front bumper out of the car and left the radiator unprotected. Though Guy was still continuing, we knew that it would be too risky to run for to long without a bumper. At this point we went around the pits to see if we could scrounge up any spare parts. In a typical display of Lemons (and racing) spirit one team gave us about 5 feet of hollow iron bar while another team lent us the use of their welder. Unfortunately I don’t remember the team names but major thanks to them for helping us out. We lost about 45 minutes as Rob welded the bar in as a replacement bumper and then Gabe went out for his first stint.

Unfortunately just a few minutes into his stint we has a run-in with some very heavy Detroit iron that felt that smaller cars should magically disappear from its path. Since we haven’t yet mastered the fine art of teleportation, there was some fairly hard contact which ended with the other car getting a flat tire and our car slicing its lower radiator hose. We pulled the radiator and got to work fixing the powersteering bracket which was bent out of shape. After another round of begging in the pits I got a spare hose from the Edge Motorworks team while Team Blue Goose donated a hose clamp. In all we lost about 20-30 minutes during the fix.

At this point we had lost some 3.5 hours due to repairs and we were way behind on laps. Gabe, Rob and Jyri did some great stints but we knew that our only chance of making up ground was to do long stints and pass people while they pitted. I got into the car with a full tank of fuel and went out to do a hour stint. The lack of a real front bumper meant that I to be extra cautious about traffic and sometimes had to step HARD on the brakes to avoid any front end contact (even got rear ended a few times as a result :(). After a few warmup laps I really got into the groove and was pulling of some pretty fun passes through the traffic. My laptimes were good enough that the team asked me to stay out there as long as possible. About 90 minutes into the stint, driver fatigue started becoming an issue. Interestingly the effect first started during the yellow flag laps - I started feeling a bit hot and uncomfortable. However the second the flag dropped adrenaline would start flowing and the fatigue would disappear and I would get back to race pace. After going through another 2-3 yellow flags I decided that enough was enough and ended up pitting after an hour and 45 minutes on track.

Jyri took on the next stint and was doing quite well until he was punted off the track. As you can see in the video, he recovers well from the first hit in the esses but a few seconds later he gets hit again while going through the right handed sweeper and goes into the tirewall. This ends up bending out left control arm and completely messes up our toe settings. Rob once again came to the rescue and eyeballed a toe adjustment to get us back on track. Gabe then took over for the final stint of the race and despite a couple of ‘moments’ he brought the car safely to the end.

Ouch from rnair on Vimeo.

We finished 44th out of 85 cars which is a pretty good for a group of Lemons newbies who were lying in 62nd on Saturday night. A big thanks to our sponsors - Dietsch Werks, Griffin Motorwerke, ChaseCam, Livermore Performance and Autopower - for helping us prep the car. All of us had a great time and we are already planning what we need to improve in time for the December race at Thunderhill

Our tactics for the race were to run 45 minute stints at a healthy pace and to avoid any unnecessary contact. Guy was our first driver and got to experience the Lemons start procedure. All the teams are asked to lineup in the pits and are slowly let out onto the track for yellow flag laps. Once the whole grid is on the track, race control randomly picks a team and throws the green flag the next time that team crosses the start/finish. At this point the race is on and its every man for himself. This is a short video of the start of the race - Guy enters the frame from the left at the 40 second mark.

Race start from rnair on Vimeo.

We were keeping up an excellent pace and were among the faster cars out there. Our pitstops, while not spectacular, were decent enough and saw Rob and Jyri taking stints 2 and 3 respectively. About 2 hours into the race, Jyri pitted and I got into the car for stint #4.

I started out pretty tentatively, this was after all my very first race in a real car. On lap 2 I started to feel really brave and tried to pass a couple of cars around the outside of the banking. While I did end up going around the cars, I was unsighted going into the esses and found that someone had dragged quite bit of gravel right at my braking/turn-in point. This being Lemons there was no debris flag and I basically had two choices: a) squeeze the car on my left and attempt to avoid the gravel with the possibility of getting broadsided if it doesn’t work out and b) hit the freestanding tire barrier and hope for the best. Having seen other cars hit similar barriers without too much drama, I decided on option b and hit the brakes which locked the second I hit the gravel.

Debris flag anyone? from rnair on Vimeo.

As you can see I hit the barrier with a glancing blow and knocked them over. You probably also saw that there was a third option available - turn right, avoid the barrier and skip the esses. Unfortunately I didn’t think of it at the time so that route really didn’t come into play. After the it the car seemed to be working fine and after slowing for a few corners I continued on my merry way. The following clip should give you a good idea of the action we encountered on track. Watch the grey Subaru wagon (Team Scooby) as it tries to pass me, it was one of the fastest cars on the track but I kept getting him stuck behind slower cars until he finally passes me two laps later

On track action from rnair on Vimeo.

About 30 minutes into the session I came around the banking and was about to pass another car when the back end of the car suddenly let go and spun me around. Luckily the car missed the tire barriers and ended up facing the wrong way on the inside of the first S. I tried putting it in neutral to start the engine but the gearshift had sunk about 6 inches lowers and I could not change gears. I tried starting it with the clutch in but only got an loud banging noise from the transmission with no forward movement. I then sat around waiting for the tow truck and watched cars coming head-on towards me at race speed - I even had one guy blow the turn and drive across the front of my car. After a few minutes the race was yellow flagged and the tow truck pushed me into the pits with the transmission making loud banging noises all the way.

Spin out from rnair on Vimeo.

When I came into the pits, we got down to diagnosing what was wrong with the car - the transmission was obviously busted but we didn’t know how or why. When we opened the hood we saw a most interesting sight, the radiator was bent outwards rather than inwards. It appeared that when our car had any forward contact (such as the tire barrier I hit), the engine was actually flexing the engine mounts and moving far enough forward in the engine bay for the distributor to hit the back of the radiator. This motion kept pulling the transmission forward until the transmission mounts finally snapped. At this point the transmission stressed the driveshaft enough that the two piece driveshaft just separated at the joint. /the driveshaft snapping was most likely the cause of the spin - it was equivalent to lifting mid corner which produced lift-off oversteer with no drive to allow recovery. Our car was now officially dead and we did not have any spare parts to fix it.

Enter our in-team mechanic: Rob Dietsch of Dietsch Werks. Now Rob usually spends his days doing high quality repair work on his customers cars, this obviously was NOT the time for quality work so he settled for quick and dirty fixes (emphasis on quick :-)). He started out by removing the two pieces of the driveshaft and used a hacksaw to clean out the joint between the two pieces before mating them together once again. We did not have any spare transmission mounts so he fixed the transmission in place using straps and bolts passing through holes drilled in the car floor. The final piece was to anchor the engine in place using chains so that it would no longer move forward if there was any impact.

The repairs took about 2.5 hours and dropped us to 62 place in the standings. Rob took the car out first to see how it would hold up. He put in some good times before handing it over to Jyri for the final stint. By the end of the day the car had suffered only minor body damage and was still putting in some excellent times. We were just glad to be running at the end of the day despite having such potentially race ending damage to our drivetrain.

P.S.: If you have nothing better to do and want to kill a full 30 minutes you should watch this video of my entire stint.

Saturday stint from rnair on Vimeo.

I am finally getting down to writing my review of our Lemons experience - this first post will be about Saturday setup while following posts will be about things like on-track action, mechanical breakdowns, jury rigged repairs and other bits of lemons fun.

As I had mentioned before, we had some tire wear issues on during our Friday test session. The banked turns were enough lateral load (sustained 1.3 G) on the car that we were blistering the outer edge of our right front tire. While raising the tire pressures did help, there was no way that our tires would last an entire race with such uneven wear. The first thing we did was call pretty much every the tire shop in the Bay Area to find one that stocked Falken Azenis and was open early on Saturday. Eventually we found a place in Milpitas that opened at 8am and Gabe did an emergency tire run to pick up four tires.

The new tires would however only be a bandaid to the tire wear issues - we really needed a way add negative camber at the front in order to get even tire wear. In keeping with the Lemons philosophy of cheap and easy fixes, Rob brought out his trusty strut bender. The strut bender is a hydraulic tool that is bolted to the wheel hub and uses a combination of a positioning chain and a hydraulic ram to bend the strut and thereby adjust the camber on the wheel. Its quite an interesting device to look at and as you can see below, Rob had a large crowd of interested onlookers asking him what he was doing.

Once we had sorted out our suspension, we went to the tech inspection area. The inspection had two parts - first they inspected at the car and the drivers equipment to ensure that we passed the minimum safety requirements. Once that was done we went over to the judge to get our car costs accessed. The “Judge” (who wears judicial robes and a wig) inspects the car to see if it is worth $500 or less. Cars that are judged to be too expensive are accessed a BSF which calculated as follows:

To prevent cheating, all cars will be inspected by a panel appointed by the organizers. At that time, all teams will be given an opportunity to describe the car’s purchase and prep. If the panel believes the $500 limit has been exceeded, it will assign a Bullshit Factor (BSF) equal to one BSF per ten dollars above the limit. The entry will be docked one lap for each BSF assigned. (Ten dollars = one BSF = one lap.) Entrants are encouraged to bring all supporting evidence and make up plausible-sounding stories in advance. Appeal of BSF Panel Decisions: Get real. There’s no appealing this decision. You’re boned.

We did get a couple of questions regarding the cost of the car, especially since we had a new radiator and muffler (the lack of receipts and a bill of sale didn’t help either), but in the end they had to accept that an E30 BMW isn’t worth more than $500 no matter how many new parts you throw on it.

Once we were through tech we went through our final prep and double checked things like the lap transponder, fuel, chasecam setup, DL1, etc… At about 2pm, Jay Lamm (the organizer) called everyone over to the budget truck that served as his office and conducted a drivers meeting over a megaphone. After telling us several times to not to hit each other, he turned it over to the track marshal to explain the flagging situation. Unlike SCCA racing which have some 10 different kinds of flags, Lemons has just 3 flags:

Green: Race is on
Yellow: Full course yellow - slow down, no passing allowed.
Black: You’ve been a bad boy - come into the pits and roll the wheel of misfortune.

There are no debris flags or stationary yellows to warn of obstructions - racers will have figure out the best way around anything on the track. Additionally cars stalled on track will not be towed immediately, instead the marshals will wait until there is a car in an unsafe position on track before throwing a yellow flag and towing out a bunch of cars at the same time.

Once all the drivers meeting was done all the teams were sent back to the pits and told to line up to enter the track - the 24 Hours of Lemons “ARSE-FREEZE-APALOOZA” was about to begin.

Question: Which Lemons team was using the same technology as Formula 1 teams?
Answer: Team SFF1 was using the same ChaseCam setup used by Formula 1 teams like Renault and Red Bull.

As I’ve said before, the ChaseCam PDR100 Racer Kit is my dream in-car video setup - a solid state video recorder with a lightweight, shockproof, weatherproof camera. When we decided to run the 24 Hours of Lemons I approached ChaseCam to see if they might be interested in lending us a video setup to record the race. I am glad to report that they were very interested in the race and sent us a two full recording setups (PDR 100, bulletcam and camera mount) so that we’d be able to record both forward and backward views.

We mounted the cameras to the rollcage and velcroed the PDR units to the area where the back seats used to be. To avoid having to change batteries every stint, we directly hard wired the units to a 12V line from the dashboard. Once the cameras were aimed all we had to do was pop in a couple of 8GB video cards and we were ready to go. We are still sifting through the recorded video but here is a quick teaser from our rear facing camera. Jyri was driving the car when he gets hit while going through the esses. He recovers well from the hit but a few seconds later he gets hit again while going through the right handed sweeper and goes into the tirewall. Incidentally the blue CRX that passes us in the beginning of the video is Team Blue Goose, a team of EliseTalkers from Texas who finished 8th.

Ouch from rnair on Vimeo.

At its highest quality setting, the PDR100 records MPEG-2 at the rate of 4GB an hour. This meant that at every pitstop we had to switch CF cards and download the card data onto a laptop. The only issue we ran into was that the maximum file size on the PDR is 4GB (irrespective of card size) which means that in high quality mode you can only record 1 hour of video. If you are going to be recording video of greater length I suggest you reduce the quality to “normal”. Now if you’ll excuse me I have some 50 GB of super high quality video to sift through.

P.S.: I am in the process of writing up our entry for the December race so it will probably be a week or so before I recap the race and post the video online.

Update from Randy Chase: “The largest single file size is 4gigs but it can record continuously using consecutive 4gig files. For example, a 16gig card will record 4 hours of the highest quality video, but in 4 files. A 32gig card will record 8 hours. The gap between files is less than 1/2 second.” The PDR100 is now officially perfect.

We finished 44th out of 85 cars (full results). Our pace was really good but we lost a lot of time (3+ hours) due to some mechanical issues. I’ll be writing up more detail of how the race went and our band-aid mechanical fixes over the next few days. In the meantime here is some video of the race start.

Race start from rnair on Vimeo.