[Editorial note – My PC is a little screwed up so I had a hard time putting up anything that wasn’t from my camera phone. Check back over the week for updates.]

In the mean time WORLD EXCLUSIVE Video from our friends at BrandNewEngine.com. I personally think this is some of the coolest race video I’ve ever seen.


Roll the Rock I (2008) from Craig Geiger on Vimeo.


SpecE30 Rockingham Lightning Race (Saturday) from Craig Geiger on Vimeo.

At least that is what my mom always said whenever she saw me doing something that had the potential for ending badly.

The adventure begins as Craig and I headed off early Friday morning to Rockingham, NC. I leave the house at around 9:30am, plenty of time to avoid traffic (so I think). I'm in traffic merging onto I75 when inexplicably everyone in front of me jams on their brakes. Not expecting this I jam mine on as well, and quickly realize the little lady in front of me driving a KIA is about to become the meat in a train wreck sandwich. Using my hard won racing skills I dive off in the shoulder and grass with the trailer fishtailing behind me. No harm no foul as I zip by the line of amazed and terrified traffic and merge neatly onto the highway.

I meet Craig en route and head onto NC. We had to briefly stop off in Kannapolis to drop off a part at shop doing some work for me. Towing to the track at the best of times is a bit of a pain. My truck is probably 20 feet long and my trailer is another 18 or so. Next time you pull into your local Quickie Mart imagine the logistics of getting something like that in and out. You have to choose your gas up locations wisely or you risk getting stuck, like I did coming home from Roebling a few months ago. To make this problem even worse - approximately 60% of the gas stations we saw at any given time were out of gas, or had lines that looked like something straight out of the 70's. One interesting bit of trivia that we discovered, many of the vending machines that you find in your finer truck stop bathrooms are made in Kannapolis, NC. We didn't see the factory on our tour through town, but we did meet a very optimistic rural gentleman with as many earrings as he had teeth, he had a Ford Ranger pickup truck and seemed convinced that we were 'drifters' and that if he put a V8 in his little pickup he could be a drifter too. He added that 'someone' had told him all he needed to do was make a drift truck and he'd be turning sponsors away. He did a burnout to display his skills as he left the gas station parking lot. The good news is some of the cheapest gas (when you can find it) is found along 85. We filled up one time for $3.69 vs. the $4.19 they want here in Atlanta. Our gas easter egg hunt continued through the weekend since finding premium (93 octane) in Rockingham, NC isn't as easy as you would think. Our cars will run just fine on 87, but even 1 HP that comes as cheap and easy as running higher octane gas is worth the effort (and that 1 HP is probably just the placebo effect).

Our trailer troubles didn't end with gas stations. The shop we were going to in Kannapolis had a small driveway that already had cars parked in the grass on either side making a narrow crappy driveway even more narrow. Parking on the street wasn't an option so I pulled forward into a grassy area to allow Craig to park in the more civilized driveway parking spot. The shop shares a building with Speedy's pool hall - home of (you guessed it) Speedy, I know this because it said so on the sign outside. All I saw was a small rug rat kid (Speedy?) running around with no shoes and some old woman that looked like she had become part tobacco leaf. She immediately started yelling at me for parking in the weeds next to the shop. I hadn't blocked anyone in so I wasn't exactly sure what she was hollering about. I yelled back that we were simply dropping something off and would be gone in a minute and walked off. We go to "Suite B" only to find that quitting time on Friday's in Kannapolis must be around 3pm. I make the executive decision to leave our package on the doorstep and keep moving on. The sweet old lady in the meantime is sitting in her car looking like she wants to back out but my truck and trailer 10 feet away are somehow keeping her from leaving. My options are backing my rig up with this old bitty watching with her reverse lights on like she is going to ram into me, or exploit the one great virtue of American made trucks - ruggedness. I take the truck and trailer through the weeds over a small ditch and onto the road. Craig follows on the road more traveled and we're on our way to the Rock.


Rockingham is a former NASCAR track that has fallen on hard times. It is roughly 1-2 hours outside Charlotte in the absolute middle of nowhere. Just some of the NC state highways we were on during our travels 52, 177, 220, 74, 1, 277, 485, 17, 29, 601. Not to mention the 85, 285, and 75 that I need just to get out of Georgia. As an indication of the track's prosperity they recently tore up half the grandstand area bleachers and sold them for scrap aluminum. I don't have my MBA, but I’m pretty sure it isn't a sign of growth if you're selling off parts of the buildings. However, once you get to the place it is actually pretty cool. The banking is between 22 and 25 degrees. Which is about average for NASCAR, tracks like Talladega and Bristol are banked in the 30's. 20 some degrees of banking may not sound like much but it is easily as steep as your household stairs if not more so. The track is also pretty abrasive and bumpy, which doesn't lend itself to being easy on tires or suspensions. The Rock mostly exists these days to run some small time NASCAR-esque races (ARCA) and for some teams to do testing on. NASCAR has stringent rules about testing on the actual tracks that they race at, so since the Rock approximates tracks with bumpy and abrasive surfaces like Darlington and Atlanta teams use it to figure out setup tricks. For us the banking means going flat out for about 3/4 of a mile. The banking is odd since it does compress you into the car quite a bit, it also makes vision tricky as you have to look out of the driver's side window in order to see what is going on ahead of you. We spent the rest of Friday walking around the actual track so that Craig could get his bearings and see where to turn left and right! Early on we had discussed camping at the track since the local hotels aren't much different and some actually worse. Being old and soft and lazy we opt to try the Holiday Inn Express in Rockingham. My travels to obscure countryside destinations have shown me that the Holiday Inn Express is the Ritz Carlton of small town America. Craig and I check in and head up to the room over the sounds of our witty conversation we hear what sounds like 'romance'. We listen a bit more carefully and our suspicions are confirmed. The decision to turn on the TV loudly is unanimous. We then speculate that we may be hearing the intimacies of one of our racing fraternity members who had left the track earlier with his new girlfriend. Luck is a fickle mistress since he would pay for his nightly good fortune by going home Saturday afternoon with what sounded like an engine about to explode. Thankfully it didn't last too long ;)

Saturday morning arrives and we begin with our early morning practice session. I go out and have an absolute blast jamming around the banking. I don't 'win' practice but set a few quick times that seem to bode well for later in the day. Despite every evidence to the contrary I still seem to have this part of my brain that thinks I know mechanically what is going on with this car. At Road Atlanta I had been locking up my brakes, having replaced (so I thought) every functioning part that made up the braking system before Rockingham and not locking up a wheel I naively think that the problem is solved. I put on a brand new fresh set of tires, since my other existing set had some residual flat spots from the RA race. Pro drivers don't need ABS, they'll maintain that you can stop a car more quickly without ABS. Which (for reasons I won't get too much into here) is true. With that said, it requires skill, a car more properly designed for not having ABS, and an infield track not polished shiny after years of neglect. When you lock up a tire you make a small 'flat spot' on it. At that point it ceases to be round, and every time you do it, makes it easier for you to do it again. If you do it bad enough it can destroy the tire. I go out for qualifying and immediately start locking up time after time. Not just the rears, but the fronts this time too. Which was nice for a change of pace. Regardless I come in feeling good about my time and am rewarded with 3rd place. In a shocking development Travis Wilson beats out THE Mike Skeen for pole. As the race starts the world quickly rights itself as Travis goes skidding off the track and Mike regains 1st place, leaving me in... 2nd! I manage to pull away from the pack but can't get my braking figured out and Mike puts a pretty big gap on me. Towards the end of the race I see Travis coming through the pack and soon he is right behind me. I spend the last 4 laps driving as quickly and as defensively as I can to keep him behind and it works. I'm rewarded with my highest finish ever, which felt pretty good. Vic Hall of team Salazzar (pronounced Salad Bar) Racing made the trip down from Washington D.C. just to join our hi-jinks. Knowing that 6th place is probably the best paying position of our race - with handcrafted trophy, t-shirt, and free brake pads pulled up right before the checkered and let some people by to claim the coveted award. So in other words he is a sandbagging cheater. He also claims to be nuclear inspector, just like Homer Simpson. Lets all hope that they find more oil soon.

Since Rockingham has a low turn out, we are rewarded with an extra afternoon race. I had taken the time between the first race and the second to completely dismantle my instrument cluster. Encouraged by several of my fellow racers we look for a mysterious ABS relay that might have gone bad. It also seems in an interesting piece of E30 trivia, that if the light bulb for the warning light goes bad on the instrument cluster the ABS system shuts down. Now I hold German engineers in pretty high regard, but I'm at a loss to describe how a pretty critical safety component can be disabled by a burnt out light bulb seemed like a good idea? We check the bulb and sure enough it is out. However fixing it doesn't seem to do anything, which means that more electrical stuff is broken that I don't know how to fix. All of this goofing around means that the race starts in 15 min. and my car looks like a radio shack that just exploded. JP Coates knowing my mechanical abilities tells me to get dressed while he zip ties and crams everything back into place. I take the grid with an ABS computer dangling by my feet, no working gauges (speedo, tach, etc), and the instrument cluster simply 'pushed' into position.
Surprisingly this works out okay, and in typical DTOM laziness I leave it that way for Sunday too.They start this race with the quicker guys in the back and we're lumped in with the high horsepower cars. Meaning 30-ish people on track. The flag drops and I think we were 4 and 5 wide on the banking going around. It is 3 or so laps of madness before everyone settles into their positions. I managed to finish 6th or 18th overall. But it doesn't really count for anything but fun. Which these crazy races always are. The Rock has a great viewing area so everyone gets quite a cool show since they can see pretty much all of the track at one time. That leads to the obligatory trophy presentation where Jim Pantas - Nasa-SE head honcho and amateur comedian MC describes me affectionately as Skeen's b!tch. We leave the celebration around 8pm with everyone several beers into the Sat. night celebration. Sunday morning comes along and everyone looks hung over and pretty girm. We quickly find out why. The "Spec E30" guys in a bit of sophomoric prankery (that pretty much has become our calling card) take Jim Pantas' "pink pantas" race car and park it on the start/finish line sometime during the night. The steering wheel had been removed so that no one could move it. The track management doesn't find this amusing, along with unsubstantiated talk about physical threats and vandalism leads the track to talk about shutting the entire event down immediately for breach of contract. Things have officially gone 'too far'. The entire Spec E30 group is called into a secret meeting room and given the high school 'we're very disappointed in you speech'. Everyone is appropriately shamefaced and apologetic for putting Pantas in a bad spot. He is a genuinely nice guy with a good sense of humor and no one would intentionally jam him up.

During one of the school sessions a car leaves the track and takes out a fence in such a strange location I'm still not sure how the guy managed to pull it off. The angry track people still looking for an excuse to kick us out, say this is a safety issue and want to shut us down again. Jim goes back in negotiation mode and agrees to put yellow flags at the corners effected. Unfortunately this means that 2 or the 4 or so corners on the track are pretty much off limits. We qualify right after this happens and no one had time to really explain how it was supposed to work to the race groups. I get behind Skeen for qualifying and we're cooking along when an RX7 rookie comes onto the track going very slowly. He gives us a point and thinking we're past the incident I pass he and Skeen to hopefully continue my lap. Well long story short almost all the top qualifiers get screwed up and disqualified for passing under yellow. Personally I think a little more slack should have been granted since a) the yellow was a joke anyway just to make the track people happy and b) no one really explained exactly what the yellow was for prior to qualifying. Regardless since I was the slowest of the 5 impacted I start DFL (Dead F-ing Last). I'm pretty angry at the time since I know it is going to be almost impossible to make big moves when the first turn off the start is off limits for passing and how close the competition is in general. I managed another outstanding sixth place finish but am frustrated since I would have liked to have raced with some of the other top guys instead of working up through traffic. Having had my fill of the Rock - hopefully forever since I doubt we'll be going back anytime soon - we set off for home.

VZ Navigator, which has supplanted my brain due to a complete and utter lack of directional ability when it comes to finding my way around, finally lets me down. For some reason it takes us roughly an hour or more out of our way and turns a miserable 5-6 hour drive into an even more miserable 7-8 hour drive. I'm coming around a corner almost home around 10:30pm at night and there is a car, dark parked in the middle of the road with some dude rummaging around the trunk. I'm side by side with another car and we both see him at the same time. The car gets on the brakes and has to skid off onto the shoulder to avoid hitting this guy. I lock mine up too not being able to tell exactly what lane the guy is in. The dude looks startled but doesn't seem to be especially concerned that he almost was crippled or killed. I gather the truck up and arrive safely at home after another exciting adventure in amateur grassroots racing.

Labels: Bad Attitude, Race Recap, Rockingham, Video