You happen to live under a rock I’ll continue the tradition of posting stuff that everyone else has already put up. Mainly as a service to my non-facebook using audience (aka Brendan). Here is the full version of the commerical from BMW.
Not sure if anyone else noticed they spend a lot of time talking to Turner but when they need a podium shot its BW and Seth…. Anyway lots of friends in this so pretty cool. En’joy’.
As usual I’m probably the 50th person to post this up, but just in case you’re using DTOMracing as your sole source of racing news… Here is the latest in a viral series of videos being produced by BMW and this one features a lot of the Grand Am teams including Seth and Bill on the podium. Pretty cool! Clay finally got around to giving us a shout out in his blog as well. We managed to hit over 100 fans on our facebook page which means I’m obligated to tell the unfortunate tale of Jim’s Mystery Ball Rash. Despite its name it is family friendly and I hope mildly amusing. Stay tuned.
Birthday Present from the BW guys, our long lost chassis fresh from the media blaster!
You probably can’t learn to run a race team in four days, but we don’t know how to build a race car either so let’s not get caught up in the details. Using our Ready, Fire, Aim approach to this pro racing thing – since we had purchased and stripped a car, I figured it might be a good idea to actually see how a Grand-Am event runs. I had been to this same race last year when the BimmerWorld crew were doing their due diligence on the series (before they made a decision, announcement, and bought / stripped a donor) as a spectator but that doesn’t always give you the subtle details working behind the scenes allows.
I made my gracious offer to Clay, that in return for credentials, food, and lodging I’d serve as his apprentice team owner. For my mental model I used a combination of Roger Penske and James when he fell off the team transporter, basically a guy looking grumpy wearing some type of hat, sunglasses, and radio earphones. We started negotiating on specific duties based on my diverse skill set – eventually settling on Car Helper / Tool Fetcher as my official title, which I modified to “Chief” Car Helper / Tool Fetcher due to the fact that I was the only one with that job description. I still maintain I could have served as Dave White’s security detail, but will reluctantly acknowledge that he wasn’t swarmed by female groupies like Patrick Dempsey and his four police officers so in hindsight probably not the best use of my time, that is the call an experienced team owner makes. He also made me promise to bring Craig.
DTOM Security Detail
When we got there we were asked to reprise our roles from the famous car stripping video i.e. Craig Geiger as President of the Film Club, and Jim Robinson caterer. Then at the end of each day James or Jason Marks would ask “Did you learn anything today?” I certainly did! I know where all the fast food spots in Leeds, AL are. Now how that connects exactly to managing a professional racing team I’m still a little foggy on, but I’m sure it will come into focus down the road. Thankfully we also were able to sneak in Ted, Jason, and Brendan and they got a chance to look over the cars, ask intelligent questions, and receive intelligent answers from Marks, Ryan Kuhn, Dave Simpkins, et al.
Craig’s handy work.
In addition to getting lunch I also tried to generally stay out of the way, the BW crew does an amazing amount of work getting the cars prepped and ready, setup changes, not to mention some of the obiligatory work required like packing & unpacking the rig, Grand-Am inspections, etc. This just reinforced my opinion that driving the car is somewhat the easy part in all of this, having the right support people are crucial to success. Wayne Yawn the team’s engineer also dazzled us with his 911 engine trivia and successfully answered Craig’s one tough question – “Why are manhole covers round?”. His friend Amy showed some awesome jump rope skills too, the most attention I think the team got all weekend was when she was jumping rope – see a small taste here.
Since we’re talking about Barber it wouldn’t be right if I didn’t complain about the track a bit. First of all it is a coin toss between which is more miserable; standing outside in the paddock when it is 100+ degrees, or standing in the paddock with huge clouds of pollen floating around. By the end of four days I was ready to pluck my eyes out of my head. Unfortunately every time I had a run in with the legendary paddock police of Barber, Clay was sitting right alongside tsk tsk-ing me into not running over cones or people, and not destroying property. I took some satisfaction in seeing the huge grassy fields that they use for parking absolutely destroyed by the heavy rain that came through on Thursday. It was a total mess.
“Ha Ha” – Nelson from the Simpsons
Superstar racer Randy Pobst was making his own parking space all weekend to keep his baller ride clean, I had to one up him.
Another thing I ‘learned’ while standing on the pit lane was more about the Indy Racing League than Grand-Am. There is always a higher level. Grand-Am has some nice stuff, there are pro teams that have huge semi’s, big dollar stuff. IRL takes that and turns it to 11. There wasn’t a guy on pit lane that looked like he’d ever changed his own oil. They looked more like engineers and computer geeks. They had massive ‘war wagon’s’ with seats and awnings, and carbon fiber bits. They had huge antennas for telemetry and weather gizmos. In short probably about as close to Formula One cr@p that you’ll ever see in Alabama. Also all the drivers are like Shetland people. Danica Patrick is a tiny tiny grumpy girl, Helio Castoroneesess (The dancing with the star tax cheat guy), Tony Kannan? All borderline midgets.
How much does the umbrella holder guy make a year?
So after 3 days of car helping and fetching lunch, Clay introduced me to my race time duty – “Deadman”. The picture will help explain; basically the GA fuel rig has a valve that someone has to hold open while the car pits and fuels. I’d like to think they call it the “Deadman” because it so easy a dead man could do it, but in fact its called that because when it blows up and the dude holding the valve open falls to the ground as a pile of ash the fuel shuts off and saves everyone else that isn’t standing next to a firework. I didn’t give this a second thought, and with Clay’s encouragement of “Don’t screw this up” I figured no problem.
Pull the yellow handle and don’t blow up – Mini in background pre-blaze.
Since it was very easy I didn’t screw it up, I only mention this because it has forced a review of my well documented safety first policy. Here I am in jeans and a golf shirt surrounded by dudes in nomex fire gear next to 60+ gallons of fuel when towards the end of the race a Mini goes up in flames. Not – ohh a leaf got caught on the exhaust and started smoking, a “WHOOSH” and oh sh!t they’re pulling that dude out of the car on fire, type fire. No one was hurt, and we had earlier noticed that one of the Mini’s were leaking fuel into a puddle but assumed it had dried up. Well whatever problem it had didn’t fix itself, unless you count burning to a crisp a ‘fix’. The pit crews put the fire out three times, before the big fire truck dudes rolled up and foamed it down. Unfortunately we’re not building a Mini otherwise I would have seen if the wheels were for sale since that is about all that wasn’t a melting pile of cr@p afterwards.
Mini – post blaze.
In summary what did my apprenticeship teach me? Well that if you need a guy to feed between 10 and 16 people with fast food, I may be your man. Craig is really good at sticking a bunch of cameras on a car and pressing a button. You wear fire proof snowsuits for a reason. Grand-Am looks like a lot of work. The End.
Congrats to Dave White for sitting on the Pole! Pictured here in his second big time interview – remember hands down.
Here Dave celebrates sitting on the Pole, who says racers aren’t athletes.
Well as promised here are few additional things that just didn’t ‘fit’ into the overall O’fest writeup but were still amusing enough as stand alones but first a message from our sponsor. Not really but I am going to grouse on the govt. for a bit. I can hear the collective groan of the audience. I feel like the teacher that promised movie day and gave a quiz instead.
Speaking of teachers, here is evidence that the govt. shouldn’t run anything. I mean that literally, short of the military and maybe the police, I honestly think anything else would be better off in private hands. Eliminate all but the very minimum amount of taxes and let us pay ala carte. I’ll call out the non-funny stuff with tags so you can skip ahead if you’d like.
[not very funny]
Why do I say this? We take our dogs on a nightly walk / park trip and my wife announced she was tired of being a teacher yesterday and wanted to look for a new job. I can’t emphasize how shocking this was. My wife was named teacher of the year at her highschool for 2008. Now I don’t particularly like her job, but I will be the first to admit that I think she does it very, even exceptionally well. She is one of those lucky people that has known since they were a kid what they wanted to do and has always enjoyed her work and looked forward to it. As a further testament to her teaching skill she managed to teach me enough calculus that I got a C in my one last gasp at math in college.
So why the change of heart? Well here in GA since the schools do so well, they figured kids weren’t learning math due to the curriculum and really the ‘order’ of how concepts were presented. So they completely changed everything mixing alegbra and geometry together (among other things), they’ve also added extra fun stuff on teachers like reading/writing in math class. Makes perfect sense to me. Now the math that you learn in highschool hasn’t changed in literally hundreds of years, most of these concepts are old timey Greek civilization things. In my business mind to be efficient and good you assign one teacher a ‘type’ of math let them learn it up and down and that is what they teach, maybe 4-5 classes of it in a day. Pretty much learning by assembly line. What does the school system do? They give their teachers a bunch of different classes so they can’t get in any type of routine and are teaching something new each period. This just creates confusion, busy work, added overhead in terms of preparation and grading, and you have some teachers that are more qualified than others in terms of the high level math classes so this ‘equal distribution’ means some students don’t get the right people instructing them. So this is what has brought on her career crisis, right now she comes home from work around 4-5pm and spends an additional 3 or so hours grading papers and planning. All for the amazing salary that you could make managing a gas station, and minus the college and advanced degrees. Way to go govt.! Also all kids must now take college prep. math regardless if they want to, if there parents want them to, if they’re not going to college they’ll just sit there and fail it which will certainly help bring those test scores up! As with most govt. programs I’m sure this was based on good intentions, and like most of them no one will pay attention to the actual results.
[/end not very funny stuff]
Okay on with the show.
Clay takes great pleasure in his jokes and for O’fest he had planned two that he (and I’ll admit to an extent – I) both thought would be pretty hysterical. The first was a rigged raffle where Dave White would win a prize. I coordinated with Chuck and Patty to have this raffle done during the final awards ceremony where they’re giving out trophies, prizes, etc. So there are roughly 50 or so people standing around. Dave’s racing number is called to win a “Special prize from BimmerWorld” and he immediately knows something is up. Chuck hands him a plain brown box which he unwraps and quickly sees his ‘gift’. No one else can see what it is and Dave isn’t too pleased with our humor. So he walks off and no one in the crowd gets the joke. Clay has to awkwardly take the microphone and explain the punchline to an uncomfortable smattering of laughter and tense silence. Joke Fail 1.
The 2nd involves the crew and a horrible experience they had with an E30 3 series, very similar to mine. For a long time I had tried to get Clay to do some work on my car and he was very reluctant. It all stemmed from an E30 that had come to the shop with some ‘electrical’ issues. The geniuses that built the car had spray painted the interior white, but had neglected to cover up any of the wiring bundles. When trying to trace problems with wires, it helps to be able to tell them apart – which is difficult if they’re all white. To further exacerbate the problem, they had removed all the car’s fuses and simply jumped them together. Apparently Marks and the guys spent weeks trying to fix this thing. So what does James do when he sees this beauty for sale? He buys it and secretly arranges to have it delivered during the BW BBQ so that Marks can be horrified as he sees this nightmare coming back into his life. Unfortunately for Clay his clever plan fell apart when Marks informed him the trailer this car was to ride back to Virginia in had left about 4 hours eariler… Joke Fail 2.
On a more positive note, Steve Bassen who wrecked his car in the Friday race won the “Spirit of Club Racing” award. This is a very cool thing that the BMW Club Race guys do for each event. Every racer signs a flag and it is presented to the guy that has the best attitude and most closely embodies the ‘spirit’ of Club Racing, meaning he spent the most money on his car — NO — meaning an all around good guy, that is helpful and generally liked and respected by all. Anyone that knows Steve knows that description fits him to a T.
Next up at DTOM – our 3rd annual IFU race at CMP along with the enduro. Should have that out early to mid November. Some pics to entertain in the meantime -
Steve with his well deserved award.
My car parked ‘uncomfortably’ close to Dave White’s fancy ride. Note Joke Fail 2 / finding nemo car in the background…
The amazing Mark’s family grill. Smoker, gas grill, and 2 mini-keg fridge capacity. John in the blue shirt is ironically a vegetarian.
My awesome plan of taking down BW property values with the car on jackstands. I at least made sure the amateur body work wasn’t facing the ‘street’.