Shunt

Shunt

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It was like one of those flying dreams that turns into a falling dream:

I was sideways on the long, barely curving back-straight at Portland International Raceway. I was sailing gently across half an inch of water. I was not touching the pavement – just floating, rotating, sailing gently and very slowly sideways, and more sideways. There was water everywhere. Biblical quantities of liquid – in the sky, in the air, on the pavement. I counter-steered. More sideways. Added more steering input. More sideways. Gently added throttle, more sideways. Reduced throttle. More sideways. I was rotating very slowly and very inevitably. The inside wall looked close and was getting closer. I had a lot of time to contemplate the various outcomes. None good.

Yellow streaked across my hood and there was a thump and a shudder and I wasn't sideways. I was backwards. I was off the pavement, skittering across the soaking wet grass. From long habit, both hands were off the wheel (steering wasn't going to do anything) and the clutch and brake were both jammed to the floor. From long habit, my head tracked acutely over my left shoulder, the direction I would prefer to be going, but was not. The car slid in slow motion. It was very freeing. The result was absolutely out of my control. I watched the yellow streak resolve itself into a Datsun, contact the wall, deform, be spat back twenty feet, and stop. I grabbed my harness and straightened my head.

The car hit the wall obliquely on the right rear. It bounced and rotated and hit the wall again on the front right, slid away from the wall and stopped. Both impacts were violent. There was grass and dirt on my face. The engine was still running. I checked the gauges. They were good, but I could see that the hood was buckled. My race was over. My first emotion was one of disappointment. I had been in a very good position to win another race, and now I was DNF. On the other hand, I could tell that I was in better condition than the yellow car. I was in better condition than the red Miata that had stuffed it in the same place a lap before. That was something.

I put the car in first, and let the clutch out. The car crept. There were no funny noises. Since I could move under my own power, I drove behind the protective wall where the mid-back-straight turn station was located. I gave the turn worker a thumbs-up. He asked, "All electrical off?" I checked. All electrical power was off.

As I climbed out, I noticed with some annoyance that the sun was peeking from behind dark clouds. The rain was slowing. This is called irony, and I've noticed it happens a lot when I’m racing, mostly to me. Calling it "irony" is a literary way of describing the intense and irrational irritation when impersonal Nature gives you the bird, personally. After a few moments, the sun was very bright and everything was steaming. Pavement that was under two feet of water moments before was starting to look merely soaking wet. I watched the pack circle behind the pace car, as the wreckers zipped to and fro, mopping up automotive gore. There was nothing I could do now except watch. I watched. The cars raced, and I did not.

I had just had a "shunt". This is a fancy (in a white zinfandel, pinky-up Formula 1-watching) way of saying that I had just stuffed it. "It" being my shortly before attractively painted Inka Orange BMW.

The weekend had started much better. See my notes on irony, above.

Girlchief, Racerdog and myself drove down to Portland very early Saturday, May 5th, under gray skies. We arrived 15 minutes before my practice session was due on track. It was very important to me to have all the track time possible, as I had recently made a change to engine controller and tweaked the front toe setting of the car. My practice session would be a chance to validate these changes.

The minutes were ticking away as I found a paddock spot next to Jeff Peneck, ran to registration, and then ran all the way back across the paddock to tech with my safety equipment and logbook. Girlchief helped every step of the way. When I made it back, I unloaded the race car, kicked the tires, donned my safety equipment and drove out on track. The engine ran well. My RPM change to the circuit board hadn't busted anything. On the other hand, the car was driving very crabwise. My feeble attempt at tweaking the toe had obviously messed something up.

Toe is the angle of the front wheels in relation to each other. "Toe in" means that the distance between the front of the wheels is smaller than the distance between the rear. The car is pigeon-toed. "Toe out" is the exact opposite. I had tried to set the toe at dead neutral, on the premise that the reduced drag down the straight would make me faster.

One of the Strictly BMW pit crew (and a former student) was walking by as I grunted around under the car. I explained my problem. A few minutes later he was back in my pit with a simple measuring system that would set my front toe in relation to the rear wheels of the car. It took us about twenty minutes to fix the problem.

For afternoon qualifying, the toe problem was fixed. The car felt fast. The skies were still gray, and rain was beginning to drizzle. I could feel the track getting wetter and slicker, so I focused on getting a few quick laps. I came in early, as the rain had started to come down harder and I was on slick tires. I must have done something right, because when the Group 2 times came out, I had qualified first in GP. Sunday times are usually faster, and I knew it probably wouldn't stand Sunday morning.

Sunday dawned clear and gorgeous, but I watched the weather report of "thunder showers" with some trepidation. All things being equal, the front drive cars have a pretty nice advantage in the wet. I kept my fingers crossed that it would be wet for qualifying (so no one could beat yesterdays time) and dry for the race.

Qualifying looked like it might be wet. I put rain tires on my car on the premise that it would be good practice if it rained for the race. Qualifying was dry as a bone. Sliding around the track on full-tread depth tires was fun, but it wasn't fast. I could tell, however, that my increased RPM limit was making me faster. I could spend more time on corner exit in a lower gear. That was good.

It was dumping rain at our lunch driver’s meeting. The first race started in the wet, but the rain stopped and it began to dry out. I took the rain tires off my car and put on dries. Then it started to rain again for the second race. I took the dries off on put on my rain tires. There were a lot of people like me, standing in the paddock, staring off in the distance and trying to figure out where the hell the weather was coming from. About 3 laps in the second race, the rain turned off like a faucet, the sun came out and the track dried off. Within a few minutes, it was bone dry. Huh. Okay. The weather was clearly not predictable.

I had a tough decision to make. With a top qualifying time I was clearly in a position to win again in Portland. If I went out on rain tires, and it ended up being dry, I'd be at least a second per lap slower AND it would end the useful life of the tires for the rain as all recognizable tread was scrubbed off. And it did look dry. On the other hand, trying to drive, much less race, on completely treadless tires in the rain isn't just slow, it's downright hairy. And the weather was unpredictable. But it had looked like rain before the morning qualifying and had been dry. And now it was sunny. It would be awfully silly to be out in blazing sunlight on rain tires.

With just a few minutes before I was due in pre-grid, I made the decision to go with dry tires. I torqued them on, then drove down to sit in pre-grid. At the five minute warning, the rain switch short-circuited and all the rain fell out of the sky at once. Girlchief did her best to keep the car from floating away. Ken Hill sauntered by said something helpful along the lines of, "It will just drizzle a bit – survive a few minutes and you'll be fine."

Drizzle? Dude?

We cast off our moorings to follow the pace car. I realized I had a bit of a problem when keeping up with the pace car was… challenging. At thirty miles an hour, the car was floating sideways through the chicane. This is generally considered an undesirable handling characteristic. I believe in boating jargon this is known as “leeway”.

We came around on to the front straight. I couldn't even see the car in front of me from the rain and the spray, much less a flag at Start / Finish. The car jerked and shuddered back and forth as I hydroplaned across deep puddles. The cars started to speed up, so I presumed the race had started, and started to increase my own speed. As we came into the chicane, I got on the brakes and immediately hydroplaned. I was able to "pass" (aka slide past) several cars, mostly because my brakes weren't working. But, everyone was turning in for the chicane, and I was still sliding. This was not good. The white RX7 who had hit me at previous race in Seattle turned just in front of me. We bumped, and I finally got enough traction to turn in.

The lap that followed was a nightmare. I could see only water. Hydroplaning wad bad at 40, and constant at 80. The car wouldn't brake, wouldn't turn, wouldn't accelerate. We entered the back straight and there was a red blob of a Miata embedded in the wall. I gingerly slipped past. My G-P competitors on rain tires were flying by me. Linda's 123 car was out of sight instantly. Dave Rinker's blue MINI seemed like it had hardly slowed down at all for the rain. I considered just coming in and sitting in the hot pits, but I've always had trouble giving up. I was not racing any more, I was trying not to crash. I pointed cars by as fast as I could and tried to think sticky thoughts.

As I swept through the curves leading to the back straight, I could see the yellow 510 of Scott Morton behind me. I had no chance of staying ahead. We came onto the back straight, and I moved to the left to let him by. I moved off the crown of the road in to the streaming flood waters. I was going about eighty miles an hour. The car left the pavement and began to slowly rotate. The wall on my right suddenly looked very, very close. I was going to hit it, inevitably, except that Scott hit it first, bounced off and collected the front of my car.

The change from occasional driver and mostly passenger from the previous few laps to undisputed passenger was a relief. The stress flooded away as I rode the car into the wall.

At the end of the race, I crawled into the paddock under my own power. The carnage had been extreme. Many cars had been damaged, several severely. Mostly, I was disappointed that I hadn't been able to finish the race. It would set me back in the championship. But there were more immediate problems. The car was U-shaped; and peeking under it, I could see that the steering rack was seriously deformed. Before the car was raceable, this was going to have to be dealt with.

The next race was going to be at Mission, the following weekend. The clock was ticking. The first thing I did on the way home was ring Jeff Butler of Haury’s Autobody – one of my sponsors.