Shiny Side Down, Down, Down, (Part 2)

(c) 2004 J. Sage Schreiner

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Sunday morning's Group 2 qualifying session was dry and cold. The chill, dense air noticeably improved the power of my car – I was touching 120 mph just before the braking zone of Turn 2. A minor car-preparation goal had been to hit 115 mph by the end of the year, so it was nice to surpass this goal. This was a huge improvement from the days when the car wouldn’t hit 100 mph! Unfortunately, the track was a little slippery, and my best time was about half a second slower than I had been on Saturday's qualifying run and the novice closed wheel race.

The afternoon weather was beautiful – sunny, with a mild breeze. It was a perfect October day to end the 2002 race season.

As always, the hour or two before the race left me with butterflies in my stomach and shaking hands. The anticipation of the race was always difficult for me. I have heard other race drivers say that this is something that never goes away. As I sat with the other revving race cars in pre-grid, I visualized the track, reminded myself to breathe and repeated "look far, go fast" over and over to myself. The instant we were waved out on the track, the nervousness melted away.

I started in front of one other G-P driver, the white Datsun 510 that I had raced against the week previously at Portland. A few cars up from us was Margie in her yellow “Tweety Bird” Datsun 510. I had found that Margie was a faster driver than me, but had trouble keeping a consistent pace. I decided that I would put a lot of pressure on her early on, and hopefully squeak past and stay ahead. I was less worried about the recently upgraded Area driver in the white Datsun 510, as he hadn't really found enough speed to be threatening, yet.

When Start/Finish waved the green flag, I started to push Margie, using every trick I could. Group 2 race starts were always interesting – there were cars fencing for position everywhere and thick dust hangs in the air. Cars were using all of the track and plenty of the dirt. I tried to nose past Margie in the chaos, but she had no intention of making it easy. I went to the outside for turn 3a, but was held up by traffic, so she was able to get a better exit. For 3b, I went to the outside again, and this time was able to get a better exit than her. We raced down the back straight side by side, but the extra momentum was enough to pull half a car's length in front of her. She backed out and followed me into turn 5a – just in time to see a madly waving yellow flag.

A Scirocco was sitting on its roof. I could hardly believe it – the third car of the weekend shiny side down! In this case, the Scirocco looked like it was almost completely undamaged, and the driver was fine. I was a little concerned that an unseen yellow flag might had popped out at turn station 4 (the middle of the back straight) right as I passed Margie, and I considered waving her in front of me (an acceptable resolution for a borderline "passing under yellow" fault). After mulling it for half a lap, I decided not to, and this ended up being the correct decision.

We circled around for several laps behind the pace car while they yanked the Scirocco out of the bushes. On the restart of the race the pack stretched out so much that it was tough to see the tiny green flag at Start / Finish. Some drivers had radios and helpers who could cue them on a restart, but I had to make a conservative guess. I was a bit late to wide open throttle and the Tweety Bird car was all over me. Margie and I raced neck and neck through several corners. My hope was that if I could hold her off for a few more laps, she would start being pressured by the cars behind her. It was a struggle to keep her from passing. Finally, she tried to get by me on the inside of 5b, and as her car wasn't far enough up on my own to have the pass, I took the apex and forced her to back off. On the exit to turn 6, I looked back and saw that she had lost quite a bit of time – I think she had gotten loose backing out of the pass. After this, she receded in my mirrors, as I gained more and more time on her.

On the last lap of the race, I pointed by the first place E-Production Honda CRX. He ended up being the only car to lap me – a huge improvement from my first Group 2 race at Pacific Raceways in May, where half the pack had lapped me by the end!

I ended up placing 6th of 9 G-Production cars, ahead of the two Datsun 510s and the inverted DNFer. It was a good result for my last race of the year.

As I came in off the track, I felt a deep sense of accomplishment. I had just completed my first season of racing. I had started 18 races, and finished 17 of them, with a self-built, self-maintained race car. While I was still quite a ways from winning, I had learned a great deal and hadn't seriously bent my car or anyone else's. It's important, however, to point out how many people made this possible. Other racers offered me advice, parts and technical help: Ken and Wes Hill, without whom I could have never made it to the track at all, Greg Hinkel, Jeff Peneck, the folks at Strictly BMW and Kahn Team Racing, and many, many more racers. Numerous nameless bystanders pushed my car, offered a hand or helped solve technical problems. Friends and neighbors sacrificed their time to help me prepare my car or spent a weekend at the track helping out as pit crew. My awesome girlfriend Olona, whose good organization, better humor and willingness to help made the year possible and successful. Most importantly the extremely professional, yet entirely volunteer crew in the hot pits, the paddock, pregrid, Start / Finish, and the turn stations that put up with the worrisome antics of a rookie.

When I shut the engine off, I also felt an immense sense of relief in knowing the season was over. At times, the work required by the fugly gold car was oppressively exhausting. Forcing myself to work on the car, night after night, and almost every free weekend, was brutal. I was looking forward to quiet evenings at home, catching up on work that needed to be done around the house, and sleeping in weekends. There were, of course, plenty of projects left for the fugly race car – true race suspension was a must, and it would be nice to paint the car so that people stopped referring to my car as "that ghetto BMW" when they thought I wasn’t listening. And there were many, many more tasks needed to prepare the car for next year. But there would be a next year.

Paul Newman said something regarding his own race driving that I liked: "I tried skiing, tennis, football, all of those sports, but racing was the only thing I was ever graceful at." I understood that. I found grace in the concentration and awareness that was necessary to balance an automobile on the line between adhesion and destruction. Racing is peaceful, not violent; the silence is louder than the machine. That's why I would race again.

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