Don't Tread On Me Racing

Rookie Sensation Dave White Wows Daytona with Debut

2010-01-28T19:16:00.002-05:00

Qualifying an outstanding 3rd place Dave White attributed most of his success to DTOMRacing.

"Jim taught me most everything I know. I say James so that I don't hurt Clay's feelings since he just assumes I'm talking about him. The time I spent driving with Jim in the NASA endurance series really prepared me to take the next step in pro racing. There are so many things that NASA-SE has in common with GRAND-AM, like they both use the same flags. It was a real shock that we didn't have to discuss those and the rules for an hour in the driver's meeting, that was one thing I missed. I look forward to the race tomorrow and will look to keep it clean and try not to barf in my helmet."

Follow the real story at www.bimmerworldracing.com .....

Garage Sale

2010-01-28T13:26:00.003-05:00

When you have a 20+ year old car you accumulate spare parts at a junk yard-like rate.

Since I have limited room for inventory some things MUST GO!

Click here for Crazy Jim's Midnight Madness sale. Prices do not include shipping.

Email at j h rob in son a@t bells outh dot. net

eliminate the blanks, etc.

INVENTORY LIST

Pictures

2010-01-24T08:29:00.003-05:00

Hopefully these are worth a thousand words so I can cheap out on another DTOM post. I can say with confidence that things will be getting interesting soon I promise. In house news the brick portion of the garage was almost completed on Friday, so hopefully we can get that wrapped up before we go into month 4.

Brendan made an ill advised Ebay purchase of an S54, for you non-BMW types that is the motor that powers the 2001-2006(?) M3. The most powerful production inline six I think BMW made, 333hp at the wheels in the car. He also got a xmas present from his buddy Bobby Thrash at the Strictly German junk yard of a 70's ish 3.0. The goal will be to make a historic looking car that has modern underpinnings. Step one is probably going to be putting it in the E12 5-series. That work will start after the Feb. club race. Its a shame that BMW has ruined swaps like these with all their electronic gizmos, running this engine without a super computer attached is almost impossible. In typical BMW fashion the "M" stands for "money".

Since we're still in the off season here are some cool pics from the 9hr enduro to keep you company. Enjoy! The real deal pics can always be seen here.

Happy Holidays?

2010-01-11T18:24:00.005-05:00

Wow, I'm embarrassed its been too long. Unfortunately? Nothing tragic / amusing has really taken place so since I'm not original enough to come up with my own material I'm somewhat dependent on fate for the assist. Some of it has been sheer old fashioned laziness though.

I'll give everyone something to chuckle about. As usual I gain weight towards the end of the year, so to counteract I'm trying this P90X. I'm on week two. The strength stuff isn't too difficult for me, but the Yoga, and Plyometrics work outs are horrifying. I was laughing during the Yoga thing at how uncoordinated I am. It must have looked like a monkey f-cking a football. Anyway I doubt I'll be on any magazine covers anytime soon regardless but it keeps me from looking too much like Orson Welles (the bad years).

The garage that was damaged pre-Halloween is 'almost' finished. I'll post some pictures. My goal was to redo this in such a way that I could install a lift to ease working on the car. Most people can't do this simply because having 12 ft+ ceilings in a garage is pretty uncommon. Ironically I have the height, I'm not sure I have the width. I'm waiting for everything to be 100% done so I can tape of the dimensions and triple check things since it is a chunk of change, but also a somewhat major alteration to the garage once added.

In racing news I went with Brendan on what was probably the sled's final race at Roebling. This is usually one of my favorite events of the year since I love the track, it is pretty low key but fun BMW Club Race, and the chance to drive his car is always a good time for me. We showed up late Friday and got one dry practice session in before it decided to rain and rain. It was cold too, so that didn't make it anymore appealing. Brendan's car isn't exactly well set up for the rain. To start it has no windshield wiper, none. Second, it has a plastic windshield and Third it has no defrost. We balanced those problems by pinning our hope on some awesome Hoosier rain tires.

It turns out that if you let your HoHo rain tires sit for 5 years they lose some of their effectiveness. Who knew. We MacGyver'd up a defroster using a Wal-Mart AC/DC converter for camping, some ratchet straps, and a mini-hair dryer. It kind of worked. Anyway it was a good time, we didn't wreck, and mostly just sat around in Rick Maxson's totterhome trying to stay dry. Clay found an all you can eat Mexican buffet that was probably the highlight of the trip. Anyway the sled will be an organ donor for his next project, potentially an S54 3.0 CSL coupe. Should be awesome, but I'll miss the ole' girl she was ugly but certainly surprised some people every once in awhile.

Still trying to figure out what my next race will be, potentially a club race in Feb. at Road Atlanta, need to do some work on the car though and haven't been very motivated. Almost certain I suffer from Seasonal Disorder to some degree, I hate the winter and dark. Daylight savings sucks.

My buddy Dave White has decided he's learned all he can from me on our BimmerWorld JV AllStar's enduro team and decided to go big time. They made their announcement late last week and were down in Daytona testing in the old Koni / new Contintental Tire Series. This is pretty awesome since this series has some of the biggest fields in racing and the cars are all very competitive. I think the BimmerWorld guys will do pretty well. Anyway Seth has a blog where he is talking a bit about things check it out - here

DTOM wins NASA 9hr Santa's Toy Run in E2, 3rd overall.

2009-12-16T21:22:00.002-05:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE –

DTOMRacing scores class win at NASA 9 hour enduro to clinch SouthEast E2 Championship fuel cell credited with victory.
Atlanta, GA
12/16/09

With pro drivers James Clay and Seth Thomas joining the BW JV All-Stars team of talented amateur Dave White and journeyman Jim Robinson, the #36 car took home a 1st place finish in the most competitive enduro class (E2) and enabled the JV All-Stars to lock up the season championship. Despite the quick pace of the DTOMRacing #36 car it was the team’s ability to fill up the tank that team owner Jim Robinson attributed the victory to. “Sure we’ve been fast and consistent but what has really won races for us this year has been how quickly we can fill up the tank. Fuel Safe has made the difference in every race even those where we set fastest lap, or ran a car without the fuel cell.”

When asked exactly what a fuel cell is, and how it could win the race especially in a car that isn’t equipped with one Robinson noted, “That is a testament to the quality product Fuel Safe makes, when we had motor problems earlier in the year and had to run Craig Geegar’s car the mere presence of the fuel cell made his POS car perform that much better. Did I mention that Fuel Safe makes the best fuel cells, they don’t explode or nothin’. When that miata hit me from behind in August my first thought was, here we go I should be engulfed in a ball of flame any second, but sure enough those darn Frenchies know their business when it comes to cowardly stuff like safety. It didn’t even burn a little bit, let alone explode.”

James Clay and Seth Thomas returned to the team to lead it to victory despite not eating a hot breakfast for the second consecutive year. James Clay said, “Listen we all know how important breakfast is, the govt. put something out saying you have to eat it I think. Apparently our ‘team owner’ didn’t get the memo since all he provided was a selection of gummi candies and peanut butter crackers. I’m pretty sure Swedish Fish aren’t the official breakfast of Sweden no matter what Jim thinks.”

For Seth Thomas missing breakfast was just as disappointing. “I had to start the car on an empty stomach. Let me tell you I almost missed the green flag because I couldn’t hear the radio over my stomach rumbling! That has to be a first. Usually for our early World Challenge races James has a personal chef that makes omelet’s to order. I should have known after last year that this was more of a bush league setup.”

To Dave White, however, the shoddy team management came as no surprise. “When I signed up with Jim earlier in the year I figured I could help him learn from his mistakes. All my suggestions fell on deaf ears. I’d say how about an Air Conditioned driver’s lounge, or a team masseuse, and he’d just mumble something about brake pads, or that the car wouldn’t run. After about three races I started to find ‘schedule conflicts’ so that I wouldn’t have to show up.”

Despite the comments from his team Robinson seemed upbeat about the season. “For me it is about giving back, and although we completely ignored the charity component of the race, I do try to give back to the racer community. This year we asked Steve DeVinney to run a race with us at CMP, and by with us we meant alone by himself. But just even being that close to a successful racing operation like DTOM was enough to bring joy into an otherwise dark and shallow convertible-filled existence.” Jim also said, “Come to think of it that was really just a transparent ploy to get more season points, I guess Steve felt good about his third place finish though so that is important (to him).”

When asked to summarize his team’s performance this year Jim observed, “Winning a season championship is mostly about showing up first, and second having enough cheater gimmicks like the fuel cell up your sleeve, the third most important thing is having awesome quasi-support from sponsors like BimmerWorld and a crack mechanic like Brendan Digel BUT right after all that is the driving. I’m hopeful we’ll be able to come up with something next year to repeat these awesome results. My wife asked what I got for winning the 9 hour and coming in 3rd overall. When I showed her the small plastic trophy, she said, “Is that it? No money or anything?” I told her about all the kids we could have helped if we hadn’t been so lazy, so that gives us something to shoot for next year, and maybe just maybe a hot breakfast….”

Stay tuned to DTOMRacing.com for up to the month coverage on the team’s plans for 2010.

Special Delivery

2009-10-28T19:02:00.005-04:00

[Ed. notes] - answering a few questions, etc. on yesterday's entry.

First up a special DTOM congrats to Ted McMahan on getting a job. Poor Ted was a victim of the recession when the place he used to work at got raided (and shut down) by the Feds - mortgage stuff not car stuff. Yikes! You can find Ted at Hi-Tech Auto Repair here in the ATL. Ted is a good guy and great mechanic. Ted is a big fan of the blog so shout out!

This week will probably be a little lame in terms of narrative, this is meant more to shock and awe in terms of crazy sh!t that happens around me, then to be a laugh riot. If anything I sugar coated the animosity in the neighborhood over the great wall. It was a total pain in my a$$ and included about 20 pages of handwritten notes of conversations, printed emails, and certified letters. Some good questions that have been raised by the peanut gallery:
a) why didn't you move instead? Well hindsight is 20/20, at the time the location of our house was pretty close to ideal in terms of commute, I would have had to spend quite a bit more to get closer and really if anything we would have wanted to move farther out which would have meant a significant drive for me. Also we were a bit polly anna-ish in terms of "this will be easy" famous last words, you'd think I would know better - well I sure do now!
b) how recent was this? 2004, and I still bear the scars.
c) is "Tommy" that guy's real name? I don't know, I've considered calling Homeland Security to find out. I doubt it, just like IndyJim is my Nome De Plume. I call him a$$hole most of the time.
d) which is more aggravating the wall episode or Barber Motorsports Park. No contest the wall. This was pretty serious since we were talking about thousands of dollars and these tools acted like I wanted to plant a tree. Numnuts even suggested we build a '3' sided fence so that it wouldn't be close to his house, now what the f is the point of a 3 sided fence? Total morons, seriously.

If that curbing wasn't there, this would be a different story, probably involving a medical helicopter...

Now for today's show. This will also be more of a 'look what happened' episode. Christine was off on summer break and actually in the house when this happened. I get a call at work in the afternoon from her. She said, "You're not going to believe this the UPS driver is stuck in our driveway." I said, "What exactly does that mean?"

Turns out this dude was delivering a package that he claimed was heavy. I forget exactly what it was, but Christine picked it up and carried it inside so if your definition is less than 20 lbs, I guess that is accurate. Well Mario Andretti was lazy, it was late in the day and he figured he'd drive it up our hill instead of walking (turns out this is a UPS no-no for good reason). He gets up to the top and that is where his brain shut down. Instead of slowly backing down using his mirrors, or even leaning out and looking behind him, he tries a 3 point turn. Well the 3 point turn can be done, but probably not in a UPS truck. Or at least not with this guy driving.

UPS trucks are rear wheel drive and his was unloaded, so he had no weight over the rear wheels, the engine and all the weight were on the front wheels, when he tried to back up on the incline the rear wheels would just spin. I explained this once I got home several times but he seemed to think he could fix it by putting a board under the rear wheels and other acts of genius. Thankfully once he shot the board out he saw that wasn't going to work, thankfully it didn't go through my truck window or anyone's chest. About 30 min. after I get home and ask him what his plan is, his wife and father-in-law show up. They try again putting like a rubber mat under the tires. At this point I'm done giving advice because no one is listening and its clear we don't have the varsity team on the field.

Two more UPS drivers eventually show up, and each one comes to the "Yep, you're F-d" conclusion and leave. Finally the General Manager of the UPS branch drives out and is standing there scratching his head. He at least had the sense to call a big a$$ semi tow truck. I can't explain how awkward this all was. His wife is henpecking this poor dude, the old man keeps trying to find stuff to wedge under the wheels, the driver is sweating because he thinks I'm p!ssed (which I was but also somewhat amused) and he is going to get fired, then all these other clowns keep showing up shaking their heads, also it has become a neighborhood attraction and people are walking down the street to see if this thing will pitch over our front wall. Good times.

So we've been standing around now for a few hours and the tow truck finally shows up. This guy isn't at the top of his class either, but I pull him aside and show him how the rear end isn't getting grip which he at least understands. He has a tow cable but isn't sure where to put it. Together we determine that if he wraps around the front axle and drags the truck forward it should pivot enough to face down the hill. Or tip over.

Thankfully it pivots and the UPS guy drives away. Of course even after contacting them I get no $$ for the 4 hours they used my driveway as a loading ramp, the burnout marks from this dude practicing his tire warm ups that took like 3 months of rain to wash away, exceeding the driveways weight limit by several tons causing cracks, or the bush he ran into and knocked out of the ground. I guess all's well that ends well.

OH SH!T

That is about a 15ft drop head first.

Tow truck to the rescue.

The Great Wall of Jim

2009-10-27T18:30:00.002-04:00

Or as it was sometimes known overseas "Robinson's Folly". Seriously this experience alone convinced me to never, ever get involved in any type of home improvement or construction project. I could write five days worth of rants just on this little gem. In fact if you ever want to get me wound up simply mention this - mission accomplished. I'll hit the highlights and then link to the 'visual essay' that is 7mb and will probably crush the limited DTOM servers - we'll see.

So after having the dogs and our house for awhile we were never happy with the layout of the yard. We're on a pretty steep hill, with another steep hill behind us so we constantly had drainage problems, there was no landscaping to speak of so it looked like crap basically. After living with this for awhile we decided that we wanted a) a bigger and level yard and b) the ability to put up a fence. Both of these would ideally help with the drainage that was washing out our yard every hard rain, and give more room for the dogs to use as a toilet.

Roughly at this same time there was a landscaper in our neighborhood that had just completed a fairly large and complicated waterfall / pond deal for some people down the road. We went and looked at it, and spoke to them about some options. Now my thinking was - building something with huge rocks, plants, and water moving around is a lot more complicated than a wall. Boy, what did I know. So we priced out the options, for a timber wall - cheap but ugly and didn't last, a paver type retaining wall 'system' - moderately expensive, durable, but still not that attractive, and finally settled on a poured wall with a brick face - expensive, durable, and attractive. The idea was this wall would blend in nicely to the wall that exists in front of our house.

After securing funding and establishing a rough 1 month plan from start to finish we broke ground. The first hurdle we faced was a large chunk of 'granite?' that prevented the wall from going exactly where we wanted. It also broke a few pieces of machinery and we spent probably 2 weeks chipping away at this thing. Finally the landscaper started talking about dynamite. I said we'd done well enough. Visions of every window in the neighborhood being blown out and me picking up the tab helped make up my mind. During this period of time we discovered our landscaper was pretty much the same as every one of these guys I've ever dealt with. The 1 month estimate was correct "IF" that was the only job he was doing and if he really paid attention to it.

The second hurdle was the wall itself. Given the placement now of the rock instead of doing 2 small-ish walls we decided we'd do one big one instead. This meant getting an engineer to draw the wall, and securing the permits and approvals from the city. This wasn't too much trouble, but did add time to the process. Oh and the way engineers draw walls is no joke. This thing would survive a direct hit with a bomb. I would later find out just how much extra $$ this would add to the project, there was as much concrete and rebar in the footings as in the wall itself.

So, we had our drawings, the basic excavation was done, and it was time to build out the footers. This was our third and biggest hurdle. Before we got started I had a survey done and also sent out our plans for approval to our neighborhood aesthetic committee. As the workers were building our footers, our next door neighbor came out and told them to stop or he was calling the police as they were digging on his yard? I come home from work and see that they're well within our property line. Being the good neighbor I attempt to explain where the property lines are and what that means to our 'foreign' neighbor who explains to me that he was an engineer in Egypt? Well the curriculum they're following must not be the same one the dudes that built the pyramids followed since this guy doesn't understand property rights, footers, or even how a poured concrete wall worked. He kept thinking it was going to fall over onto his house, but I think he was just playing the 'foreign' card because he wasn't hearing what he wanted.

We agreed to disagree and I gave him a period of time to get his own survey done since he didn't believe mine. In the meantime I also called another company just to double check the first places work. They came out and confirmed what we already knew. In the meantime "Tommy" wouldn't move on his. Then in some classic neighborhood politics their friend who happened to be the association president called and said we had to stop since he hadn't given approval. I informed him of what we sent out and who we had talked to, and sent him the copy of the approval email from the committee (that had the right to review per the bylaws). He basically said that didn't matter he was the president. At this point I finally lost my temper and told this dude to "F_CK OFF since I wasn't planting a GD bush we had already spent thousands of dollars." I also told him (knowing what a cheap a$$ neighborhood I live in) that I was getting a lawyer and if he wanted to go around with his hat out to all our neighbors to get one to fight me just for one guy after the other 3 houses saw what we were doing and liked it - he could be my guest. Roughly 3 days after that conversation we got a letter in the mail announcing his resignation. One of my proudest moments.

I come out of my pocket again to have a lawyer drive over review everything, talk to me, and then render an opinion. He tells me (again) what I already know, not only am I well within my rights I can actually tell Tommy to remove the poured concrete wall that is attached to his house off my property. We craft a letter to that effect and tell Tommy we're moving on. To this day I can't even look at that toad without getting angry, he still doesn't get it.

From this point it went pretty smoothly but all of this had consumed considerable budget so we went from 1st class to economy pretty quickly. Since several mistakes with the landscaper had eaten additional funds he couldn't afford to correct so he was working for free more or less and I was paying subs directly and effectively managing the whole process at the end. We finished on December 7th at 6pm I remember because Christine had a school Christmas party at our house and I was laying sod with mi amigos right up until the bell.

So if you want to see the "Great Wall of Jim" click the link and download a few months of my life and many of my dollars. We started in July and finished (fence and all) officially in Jan.

Tomorrow "Special Delivery"...

This week on DTOM - House of Horrors!

2009-10-26T19:25:00.003-04:00

Some of you may have seen on Facebook the images of our garage. Our maids / housekeepers whatever the PC term is, somehow crashed their car into it on Friday.

So you've heard about all the trials and tribulations with the dogs, and race cars, but what about our house?

This week we'll relive some of the highlights of our house of horrors. Starting tomorrow with "The Great Wall of Jim", followed by "Special Delivery", hopefully concluded with "Working Title - You Can't Make This Sh!t Up"

Stay tuned!!

Deleted Scenes

2009-10-14T19:27:00.003-04:00

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'.

Grand? Finale! Part 3 - The Club Race

2009-10-09T06:00:00.000-04:00

You can use a rock as a hammer, but that doesn’t mean it is always a good idea or that is what it is designed to do. That sums up the 5 series. It tries really hard to be a race car, and Brendan has done his best to make it act like one, but its almost 30 years old. They had a number of entries since this was a big event and so they split the race groups into slow and fast. Because the sled is technically a ‘modified’ car, it was put in the fast group. Brendan invested in some racing slicks to hopefully help the old girl stay on pace with the rest of the crazy cars in that group. To help non-BMW CR guys understand - the fast group probably has several cars that cost over $100k. They circle the track in 1min 29 secs for just over 2 miles. The sled is more like a 1:38.

The sled takes the green. Which of these cars is not like the others...

He went out for practice as I warned him to be careful and take it easy. Racing slicks are tricky and if you’re not careful heating them up you can spin out and wreck on the out lap, like Craig did with his 911 (although that was more a case of street tires and poor driving so really not a good analogy I guess). He went around a few times as we watched from pit lane, and everything looked good. Then as I saw him coming down turn 12 something looked odd. That wasn’t a drift it was a slide. I said “oh sh!t, oh sh!t, oh sh!t” with increasing urgency as the proximity between the sled and the wall got smaller. In one of the luckiest things I’ve seen Brendan remains one of the few people to lose it in that turn and not have the car hit the wall.

The next practice session and Brendan comes in after a few laps with smoke and water pouring out of the car. The little off road adventure had loosened some things up and one of the belts had flipped and cut a hose. Ted quickly fixed that and Brendan took the car back out for qualifying. He came back again after a few laps. Apparently that belt had stretched and wouldn't stay in place. I ran off to AutoZone to get a replacement so that he could make the race. With the new belt installed and everything (we thought) checked out, the fast group takes the grid.

I was still concerned about the tires, neither Brendan nor I are ‘slicks’ guys. I race on glorified street tires, I was worried enough to bring a set of RA-1’s to fall back on if the fancy tires proved to be too much. The green flag dropped and we watched the fast guys go. Two or Three laps go by and Brendan’s car is missing, I get that sick to my stomach feeling. The Black Flag comes out ordering all cars into the pits. This turns into a huge mess, as the flaggers messed up, and no one in the race or on pit road can make heads or tails of what is going on. Still no Brendan, but Steve Bassen, who is friend of ours and hand’s down the best Body Shop guy maybe in the world, is missing too. I’m getting sicker to my stomach thinking please God don’t let Brendan and Steve take each other out. One of the guys with a radio finds out that Steve has crashed his car and that is the reason for the black flag. No word on Digel.

Ted’s cell phone rings. Its Brendan calling from a corner worker’s phone. He doesn’t have a radio in the car so he borrowed a phone to call us and say the driveshaft broke and he is behind the wall. This seemed pretty absurd at the time, Ted almost didn't take the call! The race ends with more flagging drama, and the 112 comes in on the hook. The driveshaft (which spins at roughly the same speed as the engine) had broke free and knocked around in the transmission tunnel with such force to bust through the sheet metal around the pedals. Brendan is okay and lucky he didn’t take a knock on the leg, but the sled is done. Maybe permanently.

Now this is on Friday, and there are races on Saturday and Sunday, with no car - sitting at a race track loses its excitement almost immediately. My car is still holding a parking space hostage under the tent, so we devise a plan to put everything back together (hopefully working) and I’ll drive that for Sat. and Sun. With lots of help from Marks, Ryan, John, and Ted we get the wheelspeed sensor fixed and the dash put back together. I’m also missing the ‘required’ stickers so we track down a set of those from the super cool Mike Hinkley and then put them on like the dude that Clay got to wrap his car. Chuck Taylor and the other O'fest folks bend over backwards to switch around the paperwork needed to change cars.

More stickers, hastily applied, will make the car look less like sh!t, right?

There are some issues classifying my car – it is at separate points in time K prepared, Spec E36, and finally Spec E30 (but too late), long story short I qualify first in class ( about 18th or something on grid) and end up winning the enduro race for my class. This isn’t recognized at the time due to the above Timing and Scoring error, but whatever, little known fact - I get paid the same for first as I do for last. I take solace in that Clay jumps in to “co-drive” the last 6 or 7 laps of the “enduro”, and my fast lap is about 1.5 seconds better than his.

Proof is in the pudding - fancy Stack data!

[Ryan Kuhn who is Seth's car chief was nice enough to help out during the race. My radios were acting up, so the mic in my helmet was on the entire time. Ryan did an awesome impression of what it sounded like - vroommmmmm, upshift, vrooommm, blip, downshift, rumble rumble (curbing), vrooooommm..... listening to that for an hour, except for the occasional road rage profanity.]

This is probably the reason Dave and I are winning the NASA-SE enduro series. I explain “addition by subtraction” to James over the sweet sweet free BimmerWorld BBQ. Mark’s brother is some type of semi-professional barbeque guy. They literally towed his super grill down from Virginia and he stayed up all night Friday into Sat. cooking. Shockingly I think there was enough food for everyone. The super grill has a huge smoker / wood fired deal, a regular gas grill, and two keg fridges all on a trailer. It is a pretty impressive piece of engineering, and of course I don’t have a picture of it.

Sunday rolls around and I’m about as tired of being at the track as you are of reading this. (If you made it this far.) My truck has decided to start making a noise that sounds like a cat caught in the axles mixed with metal on metal. I show up late to the track, go and qualify and get hung up in traffic so I don’t get a clean lap which makes me mad. The car isn’t handling the way it should but I don’t have anything to fix it since I never planned on racing the car this weekend anyway. All of a sudden a nap, and not getting stranded at 6pm on 85 / 285 / or 75 with a broke truck towing a race car and trailer seems more important than racing. If this sounds soft, it probably is. But Club Racing for me is more about hanging out with friends / driving different cars, than the racing. The stuff we do with NASA is much more competitive and exciting since there are 20 or so cars all the same vs. different prep levels of BMWs coming and going. My mission accomplished I drive slowly home with the radio off trying to listen for the truck to break something while also trying ‘not’ to fall asleep at the wheel.

Side Notes -
Truck turned out to have 2 of the 3 U joints rusting together. The grease was gone and during the flood driving through huge puddles meant water had gotten in them and started rusting things up.

Congrats to Dave White on probably locking up like his 10th BMW National Championship. People like to think its just Dave's car that is fast, but he had some serious competition this weekend including Clay racing another guys car and proved he could handle the pressure.

Stay tuned later this week I’ll post up the deleted scenes: of the practical joke on Dave White that went horribly wrong, comments on Clay’s running, how I got screamed at by a safety official, and Clay’s practical joke on Mark’s that also went sideways.

Part 2 - Enough with the BW love letters what about DTOM?

2009-10-07T18:34:00.005-04:00

These are the types of cars you see at O'fest. Rare and very rare. Photo credits Gary Donaldson.

This has been a busy two weeks. I was up and back at Road Atlanta a lot for Petite Le Mans, I was juggling that with basement flood cleanup and also trying to get the car somewhat ready for the BMWCCA Oktoberfest. "O’fest" as it is typically called, is the biggest BMW Car Club event of the year. It travels nationally and each year they hold it in a different location, BMW fanatics from all over the country drive to take part in the festivities. This year it was at Road Atlanta. I contemplated getting a hotel room, but ended up going cheap and figured I’d just drive back and forth (70 miles each way about 1hr to 1 1/2 w/ traffic). I was planning to be up there from Wed. to Sunday, upon reflection the $50 hotel room would have been the smarter call. My itinerary was to instruct Wed and Thur. then co-drive the #112 Brendan Digel 5-series in the weekend Club Races.

I constantly amaze myself with how unhandy I am. I was struggling for time due to the flood, but I still needed to do routine maintenance to the race car since I planned on taking it out for a few sessions while I instructed. This meant basic fluid changes and putting on new brake pads. Stuff I’ve done 1000 times. As usual I put the car up on the four jacks stands. It immediately occurs to me that I forgot to loosen the front lug nuts - I do this EVERY TIME. Stupid things like this are equal parts my incompetence and the lack of practical working features in my garage. I have no room for an air compressor and the impact gun that would drill those lug nuts off with no problem. I do have a cordless dewalt but it is getting tired from years of use and won’t rip them off since it is 14.4v which is marginal. So I was faced with taking the car off jack stands, or rigging up some retard garage method of locking the front wheels while I break the nuts loose.

I started all this stuff at 6pm I was finished by 9. Went to start the car and put it on the trailer. Battery is dead. Wait is this a DTOM repeat, no I’m really that stupid. Of course the jumper cables are in the truck down the hill, my wife’s car isn’t in position to easily jump anyway and I’m covered in transmission fluid. My hail mary attempt is the sh!tty Sears jumper box that has LITERALLY never worked to start a car. Ever the optimist I try it anyway, and whatever higher power that delights in torturing me must have ran for coffee since it fired right up (little embellishment, more like it coughed and wheezed to life).

The devious master plan that I had was to drop my car off by the BimmerWorld circus tent and hold a coveted awning parking space hostage while I pestered Marks and the guys to help fix my fancy Stack dash / data system. They installed this back in the spring, however in the process of hooking it up we also removed the engine. This is like installing a super cool home theater system minus the TV and Speakers. So they did the best they could, but since the car didn’t run some of the details of setup couldn’t get ironed out. Jason did his best to help me troubleshoot and get things up and working over the phone and email, but the Wheel Speed sensor that is critical to all the data functions resisted my ham fisted attempts to get working. With the car parking under the big top, and Marks saying, “He’d look at it”. My plan was working to perfection.

Strategically positioned to capture an awning parking spot..

Ofest is a little goofy in how the Driver’s Education event is setup. Instead of having a 2 day weekend track event, they actually had 5 – 1 day schools. During the 2 days I had 3 students. It is always a bit interesting to me to instruct. You’re meeting these people for the first time, they don’t know you from Adam, and they can have just about any car under the sun and just about any degree of track experience. I got to ride along in a 335 automatic. Not the ideal track car, but pretty fast, the guy was an eager student and it was his absolute first time on track. I think we had fun although were a bit limited in what we could do given the car and one day.

On the second day I had two students, they only gave us 15 min. rest in between so the BW guys were amused as every session the PA system announced “Jim Robinson your student is waiting on the grid.” Followed by me running in a helmet and dropping stuff along the way. The novice student had a 2007 M5. A very very fast car, but again not the ideal track toy, it got up to 140 mph faster than anything I've been in, thankfully we stopped there. I don’t think I clicked with him, I’m not anywhere near the teacher my wife is, but I think that personality and how you explain things make a big difference. I’m perceptive enough to know that I wasn’t getting through but whatever angle I tried didn’t seem to deliver the “Aha” moment I got with the other two guys. He seemed content to rely on the numerous electronic nannies the car has, and would do one corner great and then blow the other one.

My advanced student was a different story. He had a pretty well track prepped E36 car and had done a lot of sessions at Road Atlanta. We went out and his driving was pretty solid with good lines, but he was slow. When we came in I gave him a choice. I’d sign him off and he could go have fun, or I’d go out with him again and help him pick up the pace. He seemed leery but agreed. We went out for the next session with me screaming “GAS, GAS, GAS” in his ear and making him take scary turn 12 flat out. He listened exactly and we probably dropped 3-4 seconds in just that session. It was pretty cool to have us both grinning like idiots and clapping. Truthfully I’d been going slow in the other cars so long I needed a little excitement to stay awake. I was pretty proud of him and gave him the rest of the day off to practice the few tricks he had learned. Turned out he was an ER doctor from Athens, originally from Indiana, etc. Only in America can I teach a doctor anything. Both he and Tom (my Wed. student) came out Sat. to watch the race and stopped by which was pretty nice of them.

I asked him what he thought of health reform. He agreed something needed to be done, but felt that tort reform and the end of (update poor proofreading on my part) defensive medicine would make the biggest cost impacts in his world.

Tomorrow the grand finale!! What will happen to our intrepid hero(es) in the Club Race? Find out in the blandly titled Part 3 - "The Club Race"

Today - a very special 3 part episode of DTOM

2009-10-07T17:39:00.004-04:00

Sorry this is a little late I’ve been ‘swamped’ (flood joke, cymbal crash). I had a lady flip me off in traffic today. This happens about once a week. Somehow she took exception with the fact that since she was blocking the left hand turn lane, paying no attention since it was ‘make up’ time, and had about 3 feet to pull forward I took the liberty of driving my truck about 2 feet onto the median and simply going around her.

No point to that story just felt like sharing. I’m going to separate today’s DTOM entry into little vignettes in hopes of making this less than the normal rambling mess. 3 parts to this little entry covering about 2 weeks. This will cover the Petit LeMans WC race up to the BMWCCA Oktoberfest Road Atlanta fun. I actually had several people "recognize" me not as Jim Robinson, but as the dude who writes DTOM. Surreal and a new low for internet celebrity.

I asked Clay if he saved money by putting this vinyl wrap on himself. It wasn't appreciated.

Part I – BimmerWorld World Challenge Race
The BimmerWorld guys were up at Road Atlanta for the Petit Le Mans support race. I rolled up on Thursday to see qualifying. The chronology on this is a bit blurry since it happened awhile ago so I’ll just hit the highlights. I got there early and invited myself to the WC driver’s meeting. I was curious as to the difference between a ‘pro’ drivers meeting and the bush league versions I try to skip out on. I’ll point out the key differences.
Amateur / Pro:
Standing in the open or under a tent / Sitting in comfy chairs with AC
“Officials” that are like repressed stand up comedians / Ditto - except with real microphone
“Mandatory” / Attendance sign-up sheet
15 min. / 1 hour
90% of the meeting spent reviewing flags / 20% of meeting spent reviewing flags
No Boris Said / Boris Said
No opening prayer / opening prayer

[Randy Pobst was there too, he is a vegan? I think. Drinking what appeared to be a seaweed milkshake out of a quicktrip cup. It looked disgusting.]

That’s about it. I make the flag joke since inevitably in every meeting I’ve ever been in some yahoo has to ask about flags. If you have a race license and you’re not sure about flags someone didn’t do their job. In the WC’s defense the flag scenario had to do with pitting during severe rain and tire changes, etc. vs. our normal “What does the yellow mean again?” type question.

Clay managed to put his car on pole with a great lap. But due to some goofy marketing ploy the World Challenge guys do a coin toss in order to introduce some ‘drama’. The guy in pole position flips a coin and calls it. If he is right, the qualifying order stands, if he is wrong it is inverted from 1st to 5th place. The BW gang was in 1st, 3rd, and 5th. Before the toss I was liberal with my opinions on this hokey ploy. I honestly think that whoever came up with this wasn’t a racer. It is so hard to achieve something like that in a competitive field, which despite issues with World Challenge, the one thing you can say is almost all of those guys can drive, to then take it away on a coin toss is complete BS. Leave aside the competitive angle; there are also business implications as well. Clay had a huge sponsor of his in town, and had a special design on the car for them. The coin toss meant that he effectively went from almost certainly finishing on the podium to now being lucky to stay in the top 5. In terms of impressing sponsors and getting TV time this has pretty large ramifications. Jokingly I told Clay that if the WC guys wanted drama if he lost the toss he should proclaim this is “B_ll Sh!t” and punch the announcer dude. He toned it down and said he’d go after Nick (who was in 5th place and would benefit by moving up to 1st). Unfortunately? he didn’t share this with Nick. So when the toss went bad, he ran to tackle / grab / choke Nick who didn’t really know what the h3ll was going on. Pretty funny.

Clay shows off his cat like agility attacking Nick.

Ironically the coin toss turned out to be a blessing in disguise for the race. Nick started in P1, his first time ever, with Seth and Clay right behind them. The race itself was awesome, and the guys finished all on the podium and took every award they handed out (fast lap, hard charger, etc). Its cliché to say what a big team effort this is but I’m not sure how much people realize it, deep down everyone assumes the driver is the big hero. I can tell you having spent a fair amount of time with these guys that the crew plays a huge part and deserves an equal share in the success. Being the driver is easy, you get the fun / excitement of the race, you get the attention of people coming up and telling you how awesome you are. The crew guy gets to torque the diff bolts again, he gets to pack up the floor mats, and put away the awning. Playing both parts at DTOM of crew / driver I can’t emphasize enough how much having guys that want and can do those sh!tty things helps. The BW crew guys are all very cool and funny, and some of the hardest working dudes I’m around. For me it was cool to see the big payoff and hopefully they know what an important role they play in it. It was also very cool to see Nick do well. He had a rough time last year and is a talented guy, so it was good to see him up front and performing at a high level. He also has the coolest custom helmet ever, I'm working on a pic.

You're a big winner. I'm gonna ask you a simple question and I want you to listen to me: who's the big winner here tonight at the casino? Huh? Mikey, that's who. Mikey's the big winner. Mikey wins.

Stay Tuned tomorrow Part II - Enough of the BimmerWorld love letters what about DTOM?

So then Noah says to the bartender....

2009-09-21T19:07:00.003-04:00

Or - When it rains it pours part deux...

I try to be clever with this titles, but I can only do so much.

At around 1pm today I got a call from our dog walker lady telling me the basement was flooded and our backyard looked like a swimming pool. The dogs live in the basement during the day so having standing water down there didn't do much for their good mood.

I raced home as quick as I could, and thanked God that I was smart enough to buy a big truck. At one point I think I felt the front wheels floating, but I kept my foot in it and made it through standing water that was probably at least 2 feet if not higher.

Our foundation walls are like 10 ft or so? but in one place they drop down to like 7, the water had gotten so high in the back yard it had started to come over the top of the foundation wall and into the basement. Here are some photos about 3 hours after the heaviest rains. Part of the problem is we're literally on day 12 of solid heavy day and night rain.

This is a neighborhood lake across the street when I got home water was completely over the banks. Last time it did this was after a hurricane (the one before Katrina?)

Not sure what happened here, but this car was tore up.

This is down the road from us, if anyone wants a flood title T-bird let me know, I'll put an offer in for you.

The world needs ditch diggers too. The good news is with this economy I haven't lost my touch. This is my half a$$ attempt to channel water into my hillbilly french drain. I got to dig this in a downpour which was nice.

What's Happening

2009-09-18T20:00:00.003-04:00

Whatever happened to that dude Rerun from that show? I think he became a minister and might have died. I'm tempted to google to find out, but my version of the truth is usually more entertaining than real life.

Anyway just a quick update on DTOM. Car is beat out and ready for bondo and paint. There is a slight (very slight) chance I'll do the work myself. If that happens I'll document the process, which will include me probably lighting myself on fire somehow, since if I do it, I'm going to use real deal auto paint not Krylon.

Craig had a baby - well not Craig but his wife as usual she did all the work (but I think she is used to that by now). Thankfully for them the little girl looked nothing like Craig. Since I'm thoughtful I took the liberty of signing Craig up for more information about the Routan (VW minivan) and offered up his 911 as trade bait. The salespeople have already contacted him a few times. High comedy.

Next week (9/24 & 25th) I'll be at Road Atlanta watching Clay and the BimmerWorld crew hopefully win a World Challenge race. After that 9/30 and 10/1 I'll be instructing at the BMW Oktoberfest DE at Road Atlanta, then racing in the club race with Brendan in the fire breathing 5 series. Oktoberfest is a big deal in the BMW Car Club world since it rotates to different locations annually. Supposed to be pretty cool with lots of neat BMW rides. If anyone makes it up Wed. or Thur. let me know I'll bring an extra helmet and we'll get you a ride.

I'm sure all of this will make for exciting DTOM reading in the coming weeks. Until then enjoy a few pics as entertainment.

That'll buff right out. Notice the miracle silver door find!

White bumper, but see if you can find the rest of the damage.

Congrats to Steve D. for winning (not the special Olympics) but 3rd place in the SE30 National Champion race out in Utah. If I told you the two men in this picture raced Spec Miatas would that shock anyone?

Long time DTOM fans will remember the HeartBreaker Democross project. Since it is getting around that time of year, Al was nice enough to send us an update on the car's status (below).

Oh, how the mighty have fallen....

The Final Countdown

2009-08-31T18:36:00.008-04:00

&amp;lt;a href="http://www.7is7.com/otto/countdown.html?year=2009&amp;amp;amp;month=9&amp;amp;amp;date=4&amp;amp;amp;hrs=0&amp;amp;amp;ts=24&amp;amp;amp;min=0&amp;amp;amp;sec=0&amp;amp;amp;tz=local&amp;amp;amp;lang=en&amp;amp;amp;show=dhms&amp;amp;amp;mode=t&amp;amp;amp;cdir=down&amp;amp;amp;bgcolor=%23CCFFFF&amp;amp;amp;fgcolor=%23000000&amp;amp;amp;title=Craig%27s%20Racing%20Career%20Ends"&amp;gt;Craig's Racing Career Ends&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;

There is a really cool Java'script' countdown timer that isn't working as part of this post, so you'll just have to imagine it in your head.

Edit - okay that wouldn't work so this one is ghetto but does work. You get what you pay for. and wow that is super ghetto!

Anyway the punchline of this joke is there are roughly 4 days left in Craig's racing career. After that he becomes a full time manny / daddy and like our old racing buddy TJ who has fallen off the face of the earth. But ironically just bought a set of tires from Craig, why? Who knows since by the time he is racing again we'll be using solar powered hovercraft and he only has one set of wheels for his car (that doesn't start anyway).

Craig 'hard' at work.

Craig isn't the only one that is going to have some life changes to deal with.

Dogs take two

2009-08-18T20:00:00.003-04:00

First off thanks for the birthday wishes. The blog is gaining momentum, I attribute some of this to the linking from Facebook, since Twitter appears to be a bust. Some people have been curious, little old DTOMracing.com gets between 300-500 visits a month. I think this firmly cements DTOM as the market leader in the amateur racing and dog blog niche.

Some news from the vet today on the big dog's leg. He has small amounts of enterococcus bacteria, still waiting to see about the fungus. The amounts were so low it took extra time to culture them. So not sure that is the problem or what is going on. I love sponsoring my own private canine health research. Obama should give me a grant or something. So far my favorite antibiotic is Baytril, Indy's on that until the vet(s) can figure out something.

The blog has gotten rave reviews on the few dog postings, so here is a visual essay of sorts on the 12 good pictures I've probably taken ever.

BTW - I crudely sized these using HTML since the blogger photo tool hasn't been working for me lately. The good versions can be found here.

Enjoy.

Obi sees the light, we're putting the band back together.

What is this white crap and why is it soo cold up here?

He's not heavy mister, he's my pillow.

You say its your birthday....

Letting sleeping dogs lie.

Can you believe that big beast used to be this tiny little dog.

The big guy, when he had his allergies and we didn't know what to feed him. Down to 50lbs!!! My first $$$ vet bill...

Obi as a puppy sitting by the AC vent.

People tell you this is a good way to train dogs to go out. It is also SUPER annoying!

Indy at his favorite place doing his favorite thing. Floaty fetch!

6 months make quite a difference in a dog's size!

Indy hamming it up for the camera.

Hellooo - is this thing on? check check?

2009-08-12T18:19:00.006-04:00

I said "DTOMRacing is on Twitter". I actually got up to 5 followers before 4 of them figured out I wasn't what or who they thought I was.

Oh well. I still have my number 1 follower James Clay. Good Luck at Road America and Happy Birthday to the man that managed to drink an entire gallon of milk and keep it down.

The world said it couldn't be done!

The look of a champion - at milk drinking and not throwing up.

Ryan Kuhn... not so lucky!

Here is the 2nd place finisher. Jean shorts?
Photo credits Wayne Yawn.

At least go 'look' at the twitter page, I think it is pretty cool. www.twitter.com/dtomracing

When it rains it pours...

2009-08-09T20:00:00.003-04:00

[I really really tried to keep this one short, since general feedback from the peanut gallery = ‘brevity is the sole of wit’. I guess I need an editor since I failed miserably again. Look at it this way – DTOMRacing gives you a lot of words for your entertainment dollar].

Shark week footage in progress. Dog update – Indy went in for surgery on Monday to fix his ear and get another biopsy on his leg. We are waiting for test results they take 10-14 days. He is wearing his mummy headdress while his ear heals nicely, but he is angry since it is very un-cool.

I didn’t want to race at Road Atlanta on Friday. I didn’t have the time to go over the car the way I like (read “need to” - I don’t really like it), and didn’t have the money to pay someone to do it for me. We went out for team trivia on Wed. to celebrate my wife’s few remaining days of summer vacation. That meant we got home late and that combined with work meant I was tired whaa whaa whaa whaaa whaa. Sometimes this hobby feels a lot like a job, but we wear the chains we forge in life.

My co-driver Dave White wasn’t coming down so I was faced with driving 2 hours in the hottest part of the day. The most dangerous thing I think we face driving on track is dehydration. Racing a car requires tremendous concentration, and nothing goes out the window quicker when you’re hot and your body is lacking what it needs to work properly than your higher cognitive processes. That sounds fancy but what does it mean? For me it means instead of thinking “brake here, watch for the shift light, check mirrors, etc” (or at least their instinctive counterparts) I’m thinking “man I’m hot, this sucks, what is that over there in the trees” or in other words your mind wanders and you’re not paying attention. So it makes driving and concentrating that much harder. It also means you have to strike a balance between drinking enough Gatorade to stay hydrated but not so much that you have to pee the minute you’re in the car. Believe it or not “Big Time” endurance drivers (or Al) pee in their seats a lot. I’m not sure how much money would have to be on the line for me to consider this…..

My race preparations consisted of putting the dash back together from my ill-fated attempt to diagnosis an electrical problem I was having (I stood as much chance of figuring this out as a monkey does of doing calculus, but at least I tried). That and packing the truck took the little free time I had left to devote to preparations. As I was getting ready to put the car on the trailer, I turned the key and nothing happened. Battery was dead. Now normally this is as much trouble as a cloudy day. Not sure if you’ve ever noticed but when you’re tired and grumpy the littlest things rub you wrong and everything seems to take twice as long. It was now 9pm on Thursday night and the last thing I wanted to do is screw with a non-starting car. My low maintenance plan was to roll it down the driveway and drop the clutch (known as ‘bump starting’ and one of the many awesome features of a manual transmission car). For some reason that didn’t work and now I was faced with a non running car that was at a 45 degree angle blocking our road outside in the dark. Run and find my jumper cables, bring the other car down to jump it since the truck was hooked to the trailer, etc. Get it running. Sounds loud and ‘racey’ too loud / too racey. Like I have an exhaust leak. M#@## F#@$%.

Wake up bright and early; convince Craig to move his 911 off the lift and into its proper home in his museum of non-running 1980’s cars. Amazingly the car still won’t start on the trailer. Jump again and send the battery off to Brendan to put on the charger. Shockingly the exhaust leak is a simple fix. Brake pads and tires aren’t up to Dave White spec, but more than adequate for Jim Robinson. Battery goes back in, and we’re off to the races. I thank God for small miracles.

Now each one of these posts are filled to the brim with my b!tching and moaning but to put it in perspective – I have little ankle biting bad days. Our buddy Ted was able to come up and help out on Friday. Usually Ted has to work, but it seems that earlier in the week Federal Agents raided his company’s headquarters and shut them down. The 5000 or so employees got an email around lunch time telling them – good luck finding a job. That is a legit bad day.

We got up to Road Atlanta secured our pitstop and got ready to go. One of the many things to fall by the wayside in terms of race prep was charging (or even finding) the batteries for the radio. We’d do this race in radio silence as a result. We’re in first place overall which meant I’d be in pole position for the start. Green flag flies and I get a good jump, the high horsepower cars get passed and I’m in fourth or fifth with a Vette right in front and a 944 in back. As we go into turn 5 the Vette checks up hard. I get on the brakes but the 944 behind me is too little too late and he hits me from behind. I feel the hit and then I’m 180 and facing traffic coming up the hill and waiting to feel the crunch of the wall. Miraculously I come to a stop about 8 inches from concrete. I watch as everyone drives past and then pull out on track. Car feels fine and I do a lap but Race Control black flags me so I have to pull into the pits. The rear bumper was loose so Ted and Brendan rip it off and out I go.

I’m surprisingly calm and ‘un-angry’. I decide to use this ‘alone time’ to focus on consistency and making lemonade. I’m clicking off decent 90% laps and turn the wick up as needed to make up time. A little after ½ way and I’m catching up to cars. I pull in for our mandatory 5 gallon fuel stop and that goes off without a hitch. Few more laps and I’ve passed class traffic and can see two guys I assume are in the top-5. They’re racing and therefore going slow. I catch up quick and make a good move going into turn 1 to get past both Jim Leive’s Spec E30 and another Spec Miata. Going into turn 3 – I’m suddenly sideways again and then crunch as the wheel is yanked from my hands. I sit for a second trying to figure out what the F just happened. I see the miata and Jim driving off and figure that the miata must have just punted me from behind and then hit me somehow again. I pull back on track and smoke is filling the cabin. I stop at the bottom of the hill not knowing the extent of the damage. Turns out sheet metal was crumpled on the rear wheel and the tire was getting cheese grated against it enough that the little Spec E30 that could – couldn’t finish the race. At the time we figured I had come from last place to a 2nd in class, only to get wrecked out with about 10 min. left to go.

Moral of the story - NEVER get a race car painted.

Street view of where it went pear shaped.

Clay showing how its done in a car. Not sure how you can get 'inside' on this line?

Aerial view. Green = good / Red = bad. I've seen some people try to pass here none have ended particularly well...

So now what. I get questions from non-racers about this so I’ll lay out what happens. Basically I’m SOL. No insurance on track, if you get broke you fix it, your dime, regardless of whose fault, why it happened, etc. The first guy that punted me came up and apologized he felt bad, of course me not being there allowed him to win so he probably didn’t feel ‘too bad’. But at least he made the gesture, we were in pretty heavy traffic and sh!t happens. I’m cool with a little rubbing since if you’re an amateur egg juggler from time to time you’ll have omelets. The Spec Miata guy I filed a contact form on with NASA. What does that mean? Roughly the equivalent of a complaint letter, with probably as much getting done. At the end of the day NASA is a business, so if they ban a racer from racing they just lost a huge chunk of change. So they have to balance the perception of caring (enough to mollify me) with not making the other guy mad so that he keeps coming back, but balance that with – is this A$$hat so dangerous that he will eventually kill someone and get us sued. IF this guy has been a source of constant problems NASA will tell him to sit the bench for awhile or pull his license and tell him to play somewhere else. Why did I complain in one case and not the other. Well Jim Levie witnessed the incident and said the guy basically just drove in the back of me. Also this guy didn’t come and look for me. I wandered a bit to see if I could find him to see what his story was, but nothing. He didn’t show up for the awards ceremony and people are parked over a 5 mile square parking lot. I had Ted and Brendan by my car in case anyone stopped by (like the 944) guy. So we’ll see what happens, I’m guessing nothing. In the meantime I’m looking for a discount bodyshop.

Another ‘to put it in perspective’, ironically (sad irony not funny irony) poor Jim Levie got victimized by a Miata during the sprint races in roughly the same place. Unfortunately he didn’t get off as light, and his car looks like a wadded up pop can. Thankfully he was all right.

Poor Jim!

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2009-08-08T22:39:00.001-04:00

@dtomracing ...

Probably seen the pics on FB by now. Got spun on the first lap by a 944, came back from that, Got spun again and wrecked by a Miata in turn 3 at Road Atlanta after fighting all the way back to 2nd in class after 1.45 min (in a 2hr race). Details to follow. Sucks. Oh well.

What I did on my summer vacation...

2009-08-03T20:48:00.004-04:00

Indiana Hoosier Hound in profile at the beach.

By Jim R.

My wife loves the beach, I hate the beach. I love race cars, my wife doesn’t. She told me that she was going to St. George Island for a week before school started and if I wanted to join her that was okay. I called her bluff and decided I’d give the beach another chance since I hadn’t really been since our honeymoon years ago. My last beach vacation I almost died from food poisoning and dehydration so you can understand my reluctance to go back. I’m pasty white and inclined to burn, I hate being hot, and I don’t like sand. Other than that I figured it would be fun. She left with the dogs on Saturday; I had to work for a few extra days and planned on leaving mid-week.

It’s about 6-7 hours from Atlanta to St. George Island and the quickest route there reads like a treasure map. One of the 24 steps from Map Quest says “Turn left on Bob Bodkin Road”. I was running a bit late since looking out for all these goofy little roads meant I couldn’t make good time. Map Quest was also decent enough to be off on their mileage by about 10 to 20%. They say go 55 miles on GA27/1 South, they really mean 63-ish. This didn’t help improve my mood as I hunt and pecked my way through rural Georgia. Then I found a hidden gem of a road called FL65. Its 60 miles and straight as a ruler and flat as a board, it’s in the middle of a national forest and has no real place for cops to hide. SENTENCE REMOVED ON ADVICE OF LEGAL COUNSEL... you can do the math on why that road might appeal to a guy that races cars for a hobby...

SGI is a pretty nice place, and it really wasn’t that bad. I actually had fun. With my wife there to remind to wear sunblock I didn’t get burned. The wind, I can’t really call it a breeze since it was quite strong, coming off the gulf kept the temperature around mid-80’s which after spending years in Georgia passes for comfortable these days. Our little rental place even had its own pool so I only had to suffer the beach sand when we took the dogs down to do their ‘swim’ in the morning before the families arrived.

The last day I decided it might be cool to charter a boat and see the rest of the island. If you wiki SGI you’ll see that only a portion is available to regular folk. There is state park at one end, and a gated community that is rumored to house Kid Rock and Hank Williams JR. among others, it even has its own runway so you can land your private plane. Since we couldn’t get past the gate I figured we’d go Omaha Beach on them. Unfortunately the weather conspired against us, but “Capt. Jack” was cool and said lets try and do it before you leave on Sat.

The rain let up just as we were resigned to cancelling the trip altogether that morning. Capt. Jack met us at the dock and we loaded up the dogs and headed out to sight see. We quickly saw dolphins up close and personal which for some reason Indy started to bark at thinking he was going to play with them or something? We saw big houses, and then on the way back saw a shark feeding frenzy. That was pretty wild. Jack said in his years growing up and working on the water he’d only seen it once before. My words won’t do this bit justice, but thankfully I have some shaky and poor video I’ll put up eventually that got the dolphins and shark stuff.

Look I'm a dog on a boat!

I should have suspected things were going too smoothly at this point. As we pulled into the dock Indy decided he would jump out of the boat and be the first on land. Thankfully Jack was close behind and was able to drag him out of the water before he hung himself on his leash, drowned, or was crushed by the boat smashing him against the dock. As he sputtered and coughed we noticed he was favoring the leg that he just had surgery on. We had been watching it lately since it seemed to be getting worse, and sure enough it was bleeding / weeping again just like it did prior to the antibiotics, crazy fungus medicine. I hosed him down to get the fish cannery smell off for the trip home and we started the easter egg hunt in reverse.

We made it about 5 hours into the trip when on 85, construction caused traffic to come to a stop. I was following Christine in the Lexus and had to jam on the brakes to keep from hitting her. Unfortunately the dude behind me wasn’t so lucky and hit me doing about 20-30 mph. We had to drive about 5 miles to find a safe place to pull over and the GA. State Trooper was waiting for us to fill out the paperwork. As he was completing the forms I went over to the truck to talk to Christine and see the dogs. Rubbing Indy’s head I noticed his ear was swelling up again too. So he was right back to where he was 2 months ago.

Nissan 0 - Lexus 1

Anyone know a good insurance agent - @!$!%!!#$ State Farm

Today we took him to the vet, and they knocked him back out sewed his ear up and took another biopsy so we know if he needs more / different antibiotic, or more / different fungus medicine, or if its something else entirely. I called our great insurance company since the Trooper assured me all I had to do is give them a call and give them the report number and they would take care of the rest. State Farm said they’d be happy to take care of it, minus my $500 deductible. I questioned this since I was clearly not at fault. The chuff girl on the other line said I was welcome to sort that out on my own with the other guy’s insurance company. When I questioned what exactly was the value they added, she again stated they’d be happy to help if I wanted to claim it on my own. Needless to say the first thing I’ll be doing after this gets straightened out is change all of my insurance over to someone else, that will probably be equally unhelpful and incompetent but at least different.

In the meantime I should have stayed home and worked on the car. We have a race at Road Atlanta this weekend and my car is in pieces in the garage and I’m not very motivated to put it together.

Shark Week video and Road Atlanta race report next week, stay tuned..

Happy Birthday America!

2009-07-08T19:58:00.001-04:00

Back in the day a bunch of dudes said, “We’re getting taxed to death by the Man and what do we have to show for it? Nada, zip, zilch. And when we complain he sics his goons on us. Nuts to that.” They got their squirrel guns off the mantle and showed them what time it was. 200 years and some ‘change’ later and we have a government that wants to tax us to death and doesn’t listen to the common…never mind.

To celebrate our forefathers the NASA SouthEast road show had a one day race blowout at Lowe’s MotorSpeedway. The Lowe’s MotorSpeedway - you may have seen it on TV. We’ve done the oval thing before at Rockingham, which was fun until we almost got kicked out and subsequently banned. Comparing the Rock to this place is like comparing a Denny’s to a four star restaurant. It is MASSIVE, it has two go kart tracks inside of it, a dirt track outside of it, along with a drag strip and a huge RV dealership. The best part of going to the ovals, in my mind, is the sweet garages we get to rent / use. The one day event meant it was going to be jam packed with action. I had some routine maintenance to do to the car and since Craig has reclaimed his garage lift I had to roll old school with jack stands.

My extra small, crowded, and awkwardly positioned garage space, coupled with jack stands, and the 99+ degree heat made me dread this even though all I really had to do was replace some fluids (oil, etc) and change the brakes. Stuff I’ve done approximately 1000 times, that should take around 2 hours to complete, ideally. Unfortunately that 2 hours doesn’t include the 2 hours it took me to just unpack my garage enough to let me get to the car in order to jack it up. With that accomplished I remembered why working on jack stands sucks. Everything is harder to get to, and if you forget a tool it takes 5 min. to find it and get back to the position you were in when you realized you needed it. Not to mention the constant risk of hitting your head, or the fun of lying in a puddle of whatever it is you just drained out of the car. It took me two days to finish, but I triumphed in the end and only lost about 10 pounds of water weight in the process. My advice as usual is to pay someone to do this stuff for you.

[Speaking of hitting your head. Two episodes stand out in my mind. The first is pretty common I was concentrating on something under the car and my cell phone rang on the “workbench” that is really my trash barrel. I popped up and WHACK. But the worst, if you own a Bentley or Haynes auto mechanic DIY manual, the first step in any of their instructions is ‘disconnect the battery’. I was removing my power steering hoses and pump which are perilously close to the starter. Of course I didn’t disconnect the battery, inadvertently I touched the starter with an open end wrench which kicked off a massive spark and promptly scared the sh!t out of me. I popped up and WHACK. I was pretty sure I removed scalp with that one, but I guess my head is harder than I thought. Left a nice bump and saw some stars though which was cool. I climbed out from under the car and disconnected the battery…]

The Lowe’s folks apparently don’t value our business too much since they opened the gate from 4pm to 5:30pm. Now to get a car there so that you can finish your registration and unpack everything so that you’re ready to go at 8am the next day is a bit of a trick. Craig and I took about 6 hours to get to Charlotte,which should be a 4 hour trip. I can safely state that North Carolina has the ABSOLUTE worst drivers. Now you’re probably dismissing this as mere hyperbole. Examples – more people in the left lane doing below the speed limit but refusing to clear the lane than I can count, a man in a Cadillac on a busy two lane highway on a blown out donut tire not stopping but proceeding to drive along as if nothing was wrong, another dude that came to a complete stop in the middle of an intersection (in the middle of 3 lanes) with his turn signal on only to proceed to go straight once the light turned yellow stranding everyone behind him. It was so bad that Craig and I almost kissed the ground when we got to Lowe’s. Towing is a close second in sucky aspects of racing, right behind car maintenance, at least in my mind.

Threading the needle from the banking into the infield. If you hit that wall on the right (or left) you win a trip to the hospital and maybe a helicopter ride!!

Having gotten to the track in one piece we began the cannonball run of unloading, getting paperwork signed, etc. Craig didn’t have the foresight to rent a sweet garage so he was stuck out in the sun with the rest of the ill prepared. I think that was his punishment for not allowing my car on his lift. Since I’m a generous guy and you can squeeze two cars into a spot I let him park behind so he wouldn’t have to roast in the parking lot. We then did our obligatory race dinner at the local strip mall Mexican restaurant where the Rev. Al Taylor Esq. entertained us with his usual adventures in hoboism, and Brian Jones showed us his malformed elbow and attempted to buy liquor for high school girls. We retired for the evening at the luxurious (for track accommodations) Embassy Suites. It seems that when there isn’t a race going on Concord, NC has a lot of extra hotel space they aren’t afraid to let go cheap. Dave White rolled in around 11 with a night offering of 24 oz. PBR Tallboys. Not really the nightcap I needed since we had to be up at 5:30 ish to make our driver’s meeting and free breakfast.

[These are the things that actually make racing fun for me. I could sit around a table and listen to these characters BS and tell lies for hours at a time. Honestly, Al should have a spoken word album or something. I can attempt to describe him but it doesn’t scratch the surface of what he is like in person.]

Al was the only one of our crowd that had actually driven at Lowe’s before, and he was determined to make the most of it. He had a ‘new’ motor (as in used low mileage), a new paint job, and an Al first - NEW tires. No one had ever seen Al run new tires. He was clearly gunning for a strong finish. We lined up for practice and got ready to do a few yellow ‘orientation’ laps. The banking and NASCAR portions of the track are pretty straightforward, the infield road section not so much. It is like a parking lot with some stripes on it ‘suggesting’ the course. Once we did a few laps it all became clear, and actually was surprisingly tricky, much more so than what we had at Rockingham. I was right in front of Al as we pulled out but I let him go by after the yellow laps so I could follow and learn any of his tricks. As we got on the banking doing about 110+ I’m firmly attached to Al’s bumper and suddenly my windshield is filled with brown liquid. I immediately think Al’s car has blown up and I’ll soon be spinning into a wall. After that initial reaction I realize I’m not spinning but I can’t see. Reluctant to hit the windshield wipers since if it is oil it will just smear it around and make it harder to see, I’m left with no choice. Hmm, it just appears to be brownish water. Well with Al this could be anything from catastrophic failure to some type of amateurish smoke screen device or worse since he literally had to wet his suit and seat in a Lemons race after being in the car for apprx 15 mins... I go around him and continue to learn the track. As we’re pulling in I see Al and some corner worker dude pushing his car back towards the garages.

Racing is a cruel mistress and she had chosen Al and his big dreams to crush this time. He smelled rubber and thinking it was one of his new tires rubbing body work he didn’t slow down. Turns out it was a belt that came apart leading to a coolant hose exploding. Since he kept running a lap longer than he should of the engine effectively melted itself together. This would suck for anyone, but its extra suckage for Al, since he drives his car to and from the event. Thankfully he was able to get former SE30 driver Travis Wilson to come and grab him with his truck and trailer. Travis retired from racing on the Craig Geegar scholarship for nannies in training. He talked a big game about his impending return to the grid, we’ll see…. JP Coates also made a heroic appearance apparently taking a ‘long lunch’ from work to visit.

Travis coming to the rescue - cue Sanford and Son theme..

Qualifying was eventful, I started in first place but fell asleep at the switch and Johan Schwartz jumped in front. Content to follow him for a bit he had a 944 (or miata I forget some h0m0 car) hit and spin him out I was forced to mow the Lowe’s lawn to avoid hitting him in the driver’s door. With that out of the way and my toughest competition wrecked, I figured to start from pole. I came in a lap or two early and Robert Patton using Craig’s draft was able to nip me by a few tenths of a second. Getting a timing sheet when you think you’ll be on pole and finding you’re not is like opening a xmas present you “know” is exactly what you wanted and finding out its socks instead.

Starting in second was good enough, I had a rare poor start and Geegar mustering his every ounce of mojo (and probably cheating the start) pulled past 4 cars to wind up in 1st place. Another spinning 944 in the very narrow and very scary entry to turn 1 that bumped / hit me and then I bumped / hit Patton slowed us down further. Johan came screaming up from the back of the pack and got by, I settled down to closing the gap and getting back lost positions. Following Johan we caught back up to Craig who was clearly in “I’m in first place cruising mode”. He saw us coming and tried to get back on his game, but that allowed us to get in tight and using the draft I bumped Johan past and hoped to follow. I couldn’t make it happen that lap but eventually got around Craig and kept chasing Johan. We had a thunder roadster get in front of us and he balked Johan in the banking on the final lap. I kept my foot in it and we had a legit photo finish as we both split the roadster to cross the line. Johan ended up winning by like .003 seconds. But it was a great race and lots of fun. I awarded myself first place amateur division. With Skeen and now with Johan we’re facing guys that a) do some type of motorsports for a living and b) have tons of kart experience. You know the guys that race F1, they all raced go-karts since they could reach pedals. Johan FREAKING owns a karting company called EnduranceKarting.com , it actually looks pretty cool, one of these days I’ll get around to trying it out. I’m a once a month guy like the National Guard, these guys are like Navy Seals training day in and day out. Not really apples to apples.

WHAT a 944 spinning out, no way!

The second race used our finishing position so it was Johan, Me, Craig. I changed tires and managed to screw up a car that had been working well for me. Johan just drove away after the start and I struggled to keep up and keep Craig behind me. Craig was content to sit back and bump me on the NASCAR portions so that we could both make time. This was pretty cool, but once Craig caught me with the wheels a little cocked coming out of the banking at probably close to 125-130 mph. He smacked me and the back end started to wiggle back and forth while I closed my eyes and silently cried. When I opened them back up I was – due to my remarkable car control – still in a straight line but a little frazzled. Eventually Craig got by and I tried to get my heart rate back down to 200 bpm and stay close to make a move. Traffic intervened and it wasn’t to be so I had to settle for a lackluster – but safe and sound – 3rd place.

Too much bump drafting.

Dave White woke up around noon and came for lunch and our enduro race. Since it was only 1hr 30min. we didn’t plan on doing a driver change. He would go from start to finish. There was a small field but Dave did what he does and knocked out quick laps. We took the victory, keeping us solidly in 1st place overall for the SE enduro championship and the E2 class lead.

For some reason every 4th of July we run the Peachtree Road Race. This is a 10k foot race that I believe might be one of the largest in the country. I always comment on what a bad idea this is since neither Christine nor our friends, the Garretts, are what you’d call “avid runners”. In fact I avidly avoid running, since I hate it. It was an even worse idea after doing physical labor, racing all day, and getting home late at night after driving back from Charlotte. As far as I can determine we do it so we can go out for breakfast at the Waffle House afterwards, but as I’ve also mentioned a few times before I don’t really need to run 6.2 miles to eat waffles. I’ve tried training for it and I run it in around 1 hour and 10 mins. I’ve tried not training for it and I run it in like an 1 hour and 15 mins. I went with the ‘no training’ efficient route this time and knocked out my 1 hour and 15 min pace. I look at this like a mini cardiac stress test. If I can run 6 miles in the heat with no practice and not wake up in a hospital or die I must be healthy. Mission accomplished. We mixed it up this year and went to the Original House of Pancakes where I had an Apple Baby the size of a dinner plate. Mmmmm.

I then celebrated by unpacking the truck and trailer and taking a nap like an old person.

Happy Birthday America!

FYI thanks to the internet I can steal all these photos from other sites since I'm too lazy to shoot video or take pictures myself. If I use one, thanks in advance if you want I'll buy you a soda or something.

Tell them what they've won Bob...

2009-06-16T19:00:00.005-04:00

Hey look at me!

I’d love to start this out by gloating and in general taunting everyone with my numerous victories from our Road Atlanta race, but due to sheer cowardice (my assumption) a lot of people didn’t show up. Steve DeVinney (which I think is French for dirty cheater, and he used to drive a miata - might as well wear a dress) and Robert Patton did their best to spoil my party, but after two years of racing the fates had finally run out of creative ways to cut the legs out from under me (foreshadowing). The worst thing that happened this weekend was stepping on my sunglasses.

Dog Update – thanks to everyone for their well wishing and asking about Indy. It will be awhile before we know for sure, but his leg seems to be much improved, and he had another minor surgery on his ear to remove stitches, and to drain another portion of the ear that had fluid but we’re hopeful he is now on the road to recovery. He was quite depressed for a few weeks, but got to go to the park last night so that and his short memory restored his optimistic view on life.

The racing administrators reviewed the timing and scoring records from our Barber “enduro” and ended up giving us the victory so despite the start mix up we managed to win. This was surprising and awesome since we’ve now won 3 out of the 4 races, however one of our JV team members got the call to attend the Varsity team match at Summit Point. It was a 12 hour event and my normal partner Dave White had committed to it before realizing he was double booked. Thankfully BimmerWorld World Challenge driver Seth Thomas has a flexible work schedule on Friday’s and was more than happy to lend a hand so losing Dave ended up being addition by subtraction. Since this was a double points race it was important to make a strong showing.

We were in our racer’s meeting around lunch when Seth made his grand entrance. Short of arriving in a helicopter I can safely say – if you want people to notice you, drive up in a bright red Ferrari.

One of these things is not like the other....

Seth determined that buying a Ferrari 430 was a good way to reward his recent World Challenge Sebring victory. Seth is one of 3 absolutely nice and polite people that I know (and that will associate with me), if you look up “Southern Gentleman” in the dictionary there is probably a picture of Seth next to Colonel Sanders.

[Interesting aside – During the VIR club race the BMW Club shares the track with a Vintage Group. Vintage racing is part racing, part renaissance fair / star trek convention. So you see some people ‘dressed up’ in weird costumes. This April we saw a man in a full tuxedo, with top hat and cane (alas no spats) and his wife was wearing a flapper-esque dress with some type of fox / rodent shawl. We also saw a crew chief wearing what appeared to be a doctor’s lab coat with some fancy embroidery. That night after several beers I suggested to Clay that in an attempt to make things at BW more professional he might want to get a lab coat for Jason Marks to help portray that level of cool efficiency and knowledge. We explored the idea further coming up with some compelling additions like piping and fringe tassels for the sleeves. Clay, however, remained unconvinced something about the tassels getting caught in a fan belt and workman’s comp. Knowing that he isn’t the man of vision that I am, I figured he just needed to see a prototype.

Craig was a child model for the JCPenny's catalog.

Paging Dr. Marks (BW Crew Chief) - notice the attention to details and quality!

Thanks to the power of the internet I was able to easily procure a bright yellow lab coat, and after interesting trips to a fabric store and an alteration shop this masterpiece was created. The Asian woman that spoke very broken English (and the entire shop) looked at Craig and me as if we had 3 heads as I explained the piping and fringe, but did stellar work. As you can see the coat is certainly reminiscent of Colonel Sanders with the piping. The deal was made that Clay would present this to Mark’s if they managed to win the 12 hour race at Summit. They did, I informed Jason it was dry clean only and to be brought out only for formal occassions.]

So I had Seth as my ringer, the usual suspects showed up and we adjusted our strategy to take advantage of Seth’s additional speed and ability. Using a tried and true Koni Challenge approach of one pro (Thomas) and one slow (Robinson) we decided to keep me out of the car as long as possible. Brendan and I also tried a new approach by thinking kind thoughts and not being angry to hopefully build up good karma. Thanks to my new 16 gallon fuel cell and two Full Course Cautions; Seth was able to stay out for 2 hours and 10 min. of a 3 hour race. Thus limiting the damage I could do to our position and allowing us to take a minimum amount of gas to get across the line. Our short pit stop and my workmanlike speed enabled us to cruise to victory and to a 3rd place overall finish. This kept us solidly in the E2 class lead, and leading the Series Overall Championship points as well.

Since victory, however satisfying and welcome, is somewhat boring, I’ll just hit the highlights. I was able to qualify on pole Saturday, and despite poor traffic management that led to Steve D. and Laura Patton getting closer to me than I would have liked I managed to not cr@p the bed and went onto my first sprint race win. I informed Steve D of our Spec E30 custom of not looking the champion in the eye and addressing him (or her oddly enough) as “Sir”. Laura managed to sneak by Steve after aforementioned traffic balked us both and she kept him behind for her best finish (I think?) ever. She was quite excited and since everyone likes Laura it was a good result and finish for her to celebrate!

How much did those trophies cost? Really?

NASA decided to try a format shift out on our Sunday race and instead of normal qualifying actually hold a qualifying race vs. just going off fast lap. We were to go out at 9:30am and the race finishing order would determine the grid for the afternoon race. This sounded awesome in theory and Christine and her mom (who is in town for a visit) came up to watch the day’s activities. I’m super paranoid since Barber about getting to grid extra early so I was parked in my spot and ready to go around 9:05. Then, what I call the ‘snowsuit effect’ kicked in. Roughly translated as, having to pee when bundled up in a bunch of stuff that will take you 10 minutes to get in and out of. Figuring that once we rolled on track I’d be able to focus on other things I bravely ignored my bladder’s cry for help. At 9:28am I notice yellow flags and our Medical flag waving from the turn 1 corner workers. I think immediately “well there goes our 9:30am start”, and despite my need to relieve myself I’m content since in this case a shorter race gives me the advantage - being on pole already. The starters say 5 min., then 3 min., then 5 min., then something about a car on fire. I am looking at our watch and it is 9:40am. I start to contemplate wetting my pants. With the luck that never deserted me this weekend at 9:45am they call our race due to extended clean up efforts and we drive back to our parking spots.

I call Christine to see where they are, “We’re at turn 10a we saw a ‘vette catch on fire and burn to the ground.” Probably not what you want to expose loved one’s to on one of their infrequent visits to the track. Apparently when a newer corvette senses an electrical issue it defaults to locking the doors. This made getting out of the car a bit trickier for the driver than usual, but he got out of the window fine. It did mean that the hood remained latched tight and the fire guys had their hands full trying to pry it open to put the fire out. Class Action lawyers should save that little nugget for the future now that Obama is running GM its deep pockets are backed with sweet sweet tax dollars.

Since we lost our first race NASA decides to add 10 minutes onto our afternoon race, thanks? Its 90 degrees and my little cool shirt thing isn’t working. Clay and ‘pros’ mock these things but I hate being hot and since I’d gone to the trouble of hooking it up I would have liked it to work. Oh well what is 40 minutes of hard racing in the blistering heat. I started on pole, Robert Patton came from 4th(?) and eventually got around me as I waited for the tires to come up to temp. He thankfully had used up his brakes getting past me the first time so I was able to sneak by under braking into 10a and then put my head down and started to crank out fast laps. Traffic mgmt is always important and we saw plenty of it, I ‘think’ I was able to stick Robert behind a few slower cars at optimal times that helped my get away. Taking the checkered flag for the 3rd time (and win) of the weekend.

Obligatory thanks / commercials. I’m not really sponsored by anyone but myself, but I’m lucky to have some really good friends that do their best to help me out and while I’m a jerk it would be churlish beyond belief to not mention a few people that have helped me and to whom I owe (in no small part) these victories (and really any victories).

Special DTOMRacing thanks to:

Brendan Digel – German Car Mechanic, crew chief, and race fan extraordinaire

Ted McMahan – retired Mechanic, good sport, and awesome helper

Craig Geiger – car storage, on site trailer repair / cat nanny, and soon to be ex-racer

James Clay – BimmerWorld owner, parts supplier, advice giver

Seth Thomas – awesome driver, Ferrari owner

Dave White – enduro co-driver, eater of massive amounts of cheese

Seriously?

2009-06-09T19:48:00.003-04:00

It never ends. So our big dog Indy's liver was okay so far, and our vet decided on Saturday to surgify his ear. That meant basically cutting it open and letting all the gunk drain out, then stitching it up like a quilt so that it will grow back together in one piece. Sounds awesome. Except they forgot to call us before he woke up so we could calmly put him back in his crate to come around.

We got him wide awake and terrified at being in the vets. When dummy sees me he drags the poor vet tech girl who weighs as much as he does practically down the hall. Then the vet tries to explain what to do to keep his ears clean as the drains they installed as part of this process, poor out blood. In 5 min. it looked like I was part of a horror film. She then proceeded to try and wrap his head with this crazy sock bandage while he freaked out. Finally we got everything in place and back home to our dog nursing ward. Only to find out later that we had to change this crazy wrapping twice daily, or just let bloody stuff leak out of his ear.

The first morning he had managed to get most of the 'hat' off his head and proceeded to vigourously shake his head as he ran outside to do his business. We reinstalled a new hat, and then proceeded to do a CSI style clean up that literally took almost 30 min. It was amazaing how far drops of blood can get flung. I observed to Christine that this is why you'd drown someone vs. shooting.

Having got our twice daily pill, ear cleaning, ear medicine, rebandaging act down to a slim 20-30 min. morning and evening routine. I figured we were home free and I could start focusing on my upcoming race.

That is until this evening when Obi our other stupid dog who is a hunting champion decdied to sniff out and then capture a baby (newborn, eyes closed) bunny rabbit. I got to make the critical decision on whether to finish it off or put it back in the nest. We opted to put it back after watching it for awhile and making sure it didn't suffer any ill effects from Obi tasting it. Now I'm sure Christine will make me monitor it daily to ensure its survival.

When Bad Things Happen to Bad People

2009-06-02T19:58:00.007-04:00

(Editorial note: this is pretty half a$$ed in terms of narrative, it is more a stream of consciousness’ rendition of events, but hey it’s a start)

First off to put things in perspective, I have my health, a decent job, all four limbs. So this isn’t the type of story that is going to make Extreme Home Makeovers there are people much worse off than I am – go see Slumdog Millionaire or something if you like that stuff. Also this isn’t some type of desperate plead for sympathy either, if anything it is more of an excuse on my p!ss poor updates lately. At one point on our way from Virginia to Atlanta Craig stated “God hates you.” He isn't the first to chalk most of my bad luck up to karma, but really at this point I’m not sure even that can account for the ankle biting madness that surrounds me since I'm just thoughtless and insulting vs. actually a serial killer - maybe in a previous life.

Strangely though I have a soft spot for dogs, I've never met one I didn't like. And I can't watch any movie that even remotely pertains to dogs dying. Like 8 below, it was a Disney picture not really hard core drama, couldn't make even 15 min. in, pretty soft I know. One of my good friends recently had to put his dog to sleep (we miss you Norm) right before a lot of this happened and I can't say that didn't weigh on my mind as we continue(d) our struggles with our dog Indy. IF you have a pet and haven't already, please look into getting pet insurance. We're lucky enough to have the means to afford (so far) all the various surgeries and medicines however I'd hate to ever be in a position where my financial condition dictates how I care for my pets. We didn't know it was an option when we got our dogs and I can safely say we've managed to spend more on our dogs than on my racecar and that is saying something. Our one vet who has become a friend was kind enough to point out that I could have gone to vet school for what we've spent surgery. Anyway enough about that.

I’ll try and condense the past 3 months into a few quick pictures and captions:

March – motor breaks unexplainably thus negating 3-4 months of work and putting the car back to where we started in December.

April – car goes to BimmerWorld for what, I had planned to be, “finishing touches” like safety stuff, paint, and fancy decals. They get it ½ done and I go up for a race and test drive at VIR, we confirm “Yep motor’s still broke”. Everyone inexplicitly shakes their head and says never heard anything like that before.

A rare site - an E30 coming off a pro team stacker transport!

An awesome track and fun time, especially since I got to drive Brendan’s car (we made some progress dropping nearly 5 seconds off his previously fastest time there). I’m second in the B-mod national championship hunt!

Fancy decal place semi-goes out of business. Engine comes out of the car stalling progress on fancy data / gauge solution, also means windows are stuck in permanent ‘down’ position. My truck overheats the day before a planned trip up to BW to pick the car up requiring a shuffling of plans. Mechanic states that this water pump failure is “uncommon”.

Craig and I make a pilgrimage up to BimmerWorld HQ the next weekend to see just how a pro racing team lives (the answer is they live much like I did in college). On the way home it is raining so hard that people are stopping on the highway and visibility is about zero. Since the windows are stuck down it is now raining inside of my ‘new’ car, complete with awesome new seat, and fancy new electronic dash. I’m imagining my car looking like an aquarium. It is here that Craig made his theological observations.

My wife takes our dogs to spring break 2009 and our one dog develops an odd sore on his leg. She goes to the vet and finds after 8 months his body appears to be rejecting a plate from his previous knee surgery.

Spring Break 2009 - Who let the dogs out!

He goes to the vet, who sends us to the surgeon. They take x-rays, plate needs to come out, bone might have a tumor. Surgeon says that less than 5% of dogs have this problem. Surgery goes well, biopsies go to the lab. We wait, I carry 90 lbs dog out into the yard every time he needs to pee, we don’t sleep much. Dog hates wearing goofy collar manages to take out stitches while we’re somehow not looking, new vet lectures me.

The big dog rolls in the grass after being carried outside.

May – car resumes its (rightful?) position in Craig’s garage. We do bare minimum to the engine to get it ready to go back in. Craig loans Dave White and I his car for CMP enduro race. We win and eat Mexican food. Brendan and Ted prep my old engine to go back in the car, I get sick with some type of mini-swine flu (despite first ever flu shot).

Dave White, the very pregnant trophy girl, and I, all hoping that black is as slimming as they say it is.

Dog results come back kind of, he has some type of crazy staph infection that requires 7 days of injections with an antibiotic that can cause kidney failure and hearing loss, also might have a fungal infection in the bone, but not cancer - still might have to cut leg off though. Surgeon and regular vet tell us the rarity of these types of things, especially the fungus. Christine becomes really good at collecting urine samples with those disposable Tupperware containers.

The Barber enduro is cancelled and we all sigh with relief since that gives us more time to finish things up. Barber enduro is back on, and we spend Memorial Day weekend pulling 8 hour days while Craig tries not to get divorced from his pregnant wife who is tired of us ‘visiting’ their house. Second lab result comes back, fungus isn’t in bone, but is present and needs anti-fungal medication that is very expensive 2 months worth, oh yeah by the way this will hurt his liver so we need to monitor that. Good news is full recovery expected, we sigh relief. Few days later dogs ear swells up with a hematoma (basically a huge fluid filled bruise, like wrestler’s cauliflower ear). They can’t fix it since his liver is stressed from the medicine so he walks around with a painful water balloon thing hanging from his head. He is miserable, oddly this is a common condition in Weims and the first time he has been ‘typical’ – regretfully so.

Is that a sausage in your ear or are you just happy to see me?

We get the car running, Brendan is now sick, I leave the car at RWL for him to finish a few things at work to make sure we’re ready for Barber. Since I felt that running the full weekend at Barber would be pressing my luck on a car that is almost 80% new and untested parts, I plan to just show up for the “enduro” race on Saturday. The “enduro” is now just an hour long, meaning it is a total joke, and a transparent ploy to get more money for NASA on what is a money losing event. Since I hate Barber and short enduro’s I complain a lot about this to no avail. See my feelings and description of Barber Motorsport’s Park here.

I pick up the car, and Brendan, bright and early Saturday morning. It is warm already and looks to be getting hotter, but at least no rain. We fiddle faddle with a few last minute things and load the car up for the trip to scenic Leeds, AL. The trip is 2 hours door to door and since we gain an hour with the Central time zone we’re there around 9am. We go to the gate to register and are told the entry fee is $30 a piece. Incredulously I inform them I’m racing in the event. The lady tells us it is $30 each, and please sign the waiver. This is kind of like your local county fair charging a $100 to get in; I’m $60 lighter just to entertain the ‘fans’. That spoils my good mood and brings back my “I hate Barber mindset”. I go to register with the NASA folks and they’re nice enough to refund me at least $30 for my entrance fee.

We still need to put stickers on the car, I had deliberately waited on this since I knew that Scott Mc MiniMe would be on hand. He is a true graphic artist (not like Craig who simply pretends). He is also really good at putting stickers on, however the festivities from last night have dampened his enthusiasm for working on my car gratis. I cajole him into the bigger harder stickers, but am left to fend for myself on the remaining. See the picture and see if you can guess who did what.

Don't worry it isn't finished this is just the 'interim' step.

Since we’re in first place overall (which defies explanation since there are much faster cars in the series) I should be starting on pole – meaning first guy in line. NASA, in a further attempt to stop the monetary bleeding, has let another group share the track with us, and they drive “Radicals”. (Really fast go-kart type cars with some flimsy bodywork on them.) They are a) very fast and b) incredibly hard to see in your mirrors due to being so low to the ground.

What is really radical about these cars is how bad the drivers are!

The race directors determine for safety to start them first. That means I’m now starting 16th. No problem, since these guys aren’t technically racing anyway. We manage to get most everything buttoned up and I go to the ‘gird’ where cars are parked in their starting order before proceeding out on track. There are numerous volunteers that work with the officials to get people in the right spots. The first girl confirms I’m looking for spot 16, I pull forward and the next guy motions me to the left row, I can’t see the numbers at this point so I follow his directions. As I pull forward I see that I’m not in the correct row and I need to be one over. The grid isn’t designed for parking lot maneuvers and you have a lot of people and cars moving around. I yell for help and a guy comes over. I mention the dilemma and he acknowledges and goes to talk to the head starter person. They chat for awhile and he goes back to staring at the sky. I yell again, he remembers me but doesn’t seem to have the answer for getting me to my spot. He walks off again. I holler one more time and he motions me into a blank spot #35. I’m thinking he is going to use this as a ‘conduit’ to the next row so I pull up. He is looking both ways to make sure I’m clear to advance. That is when the cars start to pull off the grid to begin the race. I’ve dropped from 1 to 19 before the first lap. I express my frustration on the radio and to the gentleman as I drive past.

"The Grid" imagine full of cars with me at the back instead of the front. I learned what Craig has felt like all this time..

Thankfully the race is uneventful despite being very crowded with fast cars / slow drivers that you can’t see in your mirrors and I manage to get past all of our serious competition and avoid manslaughter charges for killing any go-kart racers. Official results have me in third place, but we’ve lodged a protest since it appears that the top 2 finishers in our class didn’t do the mandatory 5 gallon fuel pitstop. So we may actually have won, we’ll see. I don’t have my hopes set very high since ‘unorganized mess’ is the best description I can come up with on how things are being run lately.

Is this the karma they're speaking of?

We’re home by 6pm. Sunday rolls around and it seems warm upstairs in the house. I check the upstairs Air Conditioner and it clearly isn’t working. I try the AC repair tricks I know (very few) and nothing works. Monday and I call the AC guy to come out and check. He says “Well here is your problem --- Good thing the house didn’t burn down, I’ve never seen anything like this before.” Well at least the car starts now.

To be continued…

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

2009-03-16T08:00:00.001-04:00

CAUTION – Lots of Words ahead. 40 degrees and rain is bare minimum weather (no photos or videos). Let my scintillating prose craft the images in your mind.

In Spec E30 terms I’m like the New York Yankees you either love me or you can’t wait to see me fall on my sword. Either way is entertaining I guess. (ed – for the record this is just my perception, in fact most people may be and probably are indifferent).

I meant to type something up after we got the engine installed since a lot of people put forth a ton of effort to help me out but I got lazy and in the end there wasn’t much to talk about just a lot of hours. For the install we had over 100 years of pro mechanic experience so that left little opportunity for me to screw something up and/or hurt myself. So before I go into the Road Atlanta race weekend, let me give my sincere thanks to the following folks:

Craig – for the nearly unlimited use of his awesome garage
Brendan – DTOM crew chief
Jason Mascow – the cobra
Chris Thurman – who handled most of the ‘heavy lifting’ for the install
Ted McMahan – retired mechanic and insurance specialist
My friends at RWL German Imports and BimmerWorld for parts and moral support.

***Just a quick note. Being a mechanic is a hard job, people that don’t understand cars always assume that they’re being cheated, people that do understand cars are always thinking they can do it quicker and cheaper (but won’t). Mechanics are paid on ‘book’ time meaning when you come in and say “I hear a clunk in the trunk”, the mechanic gets paid only for the time the factory thinks it should take to fix the problem, not for deciphering what that means and the actual time they take to fix it. So not only do they have to know and be able to pinpoint the problem, they then have to work against the clock and ‘beat’ whatever time it ‘should’ take them in order to do more work and make a decent wage. It would be very difficult for a mechanic (or service technician) to make a living on 40 hours a week of pay. Some of the best can get paid for 100 hours per week and maybe only in fact put in 50-60. It is still hard physical work and anyone that thinks mechanics are dumb manual laborers should try it for a day and see how quickly they change their mind. And oh by the way, they own all their own tools, in fact most techs that have done this for any length of time may have up to $50k in tools, which they have to pay for on their own. Now for an example, during this endeavor Craig’s starter went bad. We decided to change it out in our spare time. This is a hard job on our cars but one that we’re completely familiar with. The factory (or ‘book’) says it’s a 2 hour job. It took us 4 hours, we pointed that out to Brendan and he said “Not bad, but there were two of you, so that is really like 8 hours”. In other words Craig and I would be poor and hungry if we had to pay our bills this way.***

So after 3-4 months of weekends and making the project much larger than it needed to be, in the end all that went wrong is the junk yard transmission I had bought turned out to be from an early 5-series car meaning it was the right ‘type’ of transmission but the shift linkage wasn’t correct so it wouldn’t work without extensive inventing of parts. Of course somehow no one realized that until it was installed. That cost us probably an hour or so and we got to lift heavy transmissions into place twice, which is good for the pecs.

The goal, ironically (foreshadowing) of all this hard labor was twofold - One, to build a car with a bunch of new parts so that nothing could break without a freakish coincidence and Two, combine my amazing driving talent with amazing horsepower to unleash an unstoppable Spec E30 force on the SouthEast NASA Region. I would dominate all of the remaining races and then look to retire undefeated at the end of the year. I kindly kept the car out of the first CMP race as payment to Craig so that he could win the first two races in return for his garage.

To ensure that this would be the end result I cajoled my loving wife into letting me instruct at a DE the previous weekend so that I could test and tune the car in order to make sure that all systems were go. The motor felt good, everything was in place, I had a minor electrical glitch in the tach and with some of the gauges that we traced back to a loose ground wire, but overall nothing serious.

So I went into the Friday enduro with new tires, new brakes, a mostly new car and feeling pretty good about our chances. My illustrious teammate BMWCCR 2008 JP Champion Dave White was scheduled to take the start, I’d come in during the middle and depending on circumstances we’d see who would finish. At least that was the plan. Dave took off well and was comfortably in the lead after about 40 min. he radioed in to say the coolant temp was rising and he smelled coolant. He came into the pits and a hose had blown off the front of the motor spilling water. We refilled and fixed and sent him back out with a full tank of gas. After an hour he came back in to swap drivers and get a full tank of gas. I went to start the car and noticed the oil pressure light had come on, it flickered a bit and then went out, I shut the motor off. Brendan poked around a bit, I restarted and everything looked / sounded fine. I got on the radio and confidently stated that it was the old electrical gauge gremlin showing back up and that I’d do a lap or two and watch it.

I went out and ran two easy laps, the car felt fine, no lights or anything out of the ordinary. After about 20 minutes the temp started climbing up again on the back straight. I brought it back to the pits. The bleeder screw on the thermostat (another part of the cooling system) had come off and disappeared. We replaced with one from Craig’s car, but at this point with all the pit stops we were out of the race. I figured I’d go out and finish for points and to make sure the car was okay. It was and we finished in maybe 8th place.

Steve Foushee – spec E30 competitor – assuming he had the victory in the enduro stayed out after the checker for some celebratory donuts and burnouts on the front straight. Unlike TV and NASCAR no one at NASA thought that was cool. He was promptly DQ’d for his enthusiasm and forever earned the moniker “Donut King of Augusta” in the SE30 paddock.

Saturday came and it was cold and rainy. Standing in a parking lot with limited shelter and amenities while trying to work on your car in the cold and rain is about as fun as you would think. Like a dumba$$ I wore tennis shoes that were quickly soaked, I spent most of the day worrying about legionnaire’s disease or trench foot. By the time we went to qualify it was a full scale downpour and the track was like roller-skating on an ice rink with a blindfold on. You know how a semi-truck throws off mist on the highway multiply that by 5 and then do 120 mph with a stop sign somewhere up ahead. With 60 cars and 15 minutes you have to be quick and aggressive to get a clean lap, I was neither and earned an awesome 7th spot for my efforts. The race conditions didn’t improve and for some reason the NASA officials thought that combining all the different classes together would be a great idea. So typically I would have been 7 out of 20 because of this I was 20 out of 60. I would usually be racing people I know for points and cars that are about as exactly the same as rules and man can make them. Instead I got to race a bunch of dip sh!ts in 944 cup cars. Specifically Scott Campbell #82. I went to offer him some advice after the race but couldn’t find him unfortunately all racing people out of your class does is slow both of you down for no apparent purpose. (ed – as I pointed this out in my general b!tching and moaning that I’m famous for, an anonymous bystander pointed out WWSCD. To which I replied – Huh? He said, “You know What Would Scott Campbell Do?” To which I replied – Huh? The anonymous bystander explained “The sticker on the back of your car WWSCD, that is the dude, you didn’t know that?” To which I replied – Uh, no?. The anonymous bystander went on, “Yeah the 944 dudes printed those stickers up for him but I think it is an inside joke.”) Well Scott the secret is out of the bag, apparently a bunch of people think you’re a tool – I agree with them OSB – other sports beckon. Someone had put that sticker on my car (like most of my stickers) without my knowledge or understanding what it meant. I was too lazy to remove it, and now I’m glad I didn’t!! Hopefully he saw it when I finally got around him 2 or 3 laps from the end. (ed - A further editorial comment, I’ve had the most problems with stunts like this with the 944’s. Spec Miatas, despite being hairdressers of questionable sexual orientation, are generally good and considerate drivers. It could also be it is really easy just to stay close and overwhelm them with our awesome 150 hp down the straightaway. I don’t think the 944 guys have the car counts so they are always looking for a ‘friend’ to race with instead of realizing that we view them as rolling obstacles vs. a good time. In this specific example I was, generally speaking, 2 seconds a lap faster and when I went to make a pass through turn 12 (in the rain not cool) he came in on me and did even worse and more aggressive things to one of the Lasko / Walsh cars.)

We were scheduled to qualify Sunday morning early. I spent the entire night stewing over the race and my own p!ss poor performance. I put a lot of pressure on myself to do well and even more than usual since a lot of people had put a lot of time into giving me my best shot. I fully intended to be one of the first people on the qualifying grid, and any out of class cars that got in the way were getting the chrome horn. I went to start the car and get it warmed up while I changed into my monkey suit. When it turned over I heard a strange ‘clunking’ noise that I recognized all too well. I went and solicited several independent opinions on what that noise may signify and they all came back terminal – rod knock. I’ll have to save the suspenseful conclusion to this adventure for the future since at this time I don’t really know what happened. Our particular motor is notorious for having this problem with the number 6 cylinder. A piston is connected to a crankshaft by a rod, that rod is ‘suspended’ in oil. So when the car is running this oil provides a cushion that keeps actual metal to metal contact from happening (at least limits it). The number 6 rod may have been deprived of that cushion and then bad stuff happens. Of course I’m not an expert and I have thought things were “A” when they turned out to be “B”. So I have my fingers crossed that I didn’t screw things up too badly and I’ll wait for experts to weigh in with their opinions and judgment.

Of course stuff like this makes you sick to your stomach when it happens, more for the effort and help of friends that is seemingly ‘wasted’, unfortunately disappointment and general suckiness is a large part of racing. I think that is what makes this so addictive when you actually can succeed and triumph. You have to make your peace with these things or you’re in the wrong sport, but it is days like this that make it sometimes feel like a full time job (and not a good one) vs. a fun hobby. Of course it can always be worse, there were several cars that wrecked in the rain and one driver that was rumored to have broken an ankle when a wheel broke through the cage and got into the pedal box. I also thought a lot about when Clay and the BW team wrecked all three of their cars. They managed to put things back together and ended up winning the next race, so while this is a pretty big bump in the road and drastically alters how I envisioned this season working, DTOM will be back and better than ever.