How I Killed Sponge Bob Square Car
On the third lap of the last race of 2004, the choleric yellow BMW 2002 known as "Sponge Bob" to his friends was foully murdered.
By me.
While it's true that he'd lived a long life as a car, his life as a race car was much too short – exactly one season (minus one race, technically).
Somewhere around the middle of the year, Scott Adare, BMW club instructor, and the ICSCC race steward for 2004, had provided a good name for the '02's color. With such an indefinable shade of yellowish-green, it could be referred to either as Green-Yellow – "Grellow" for short – or perhaps Yellow-green – call it "Yereen." My pet theory was simply that the particular shade of yellow actually became temporally displaced at highspeed – the car looked like it was in one place, when it was actually in another. Good trick. Call it the Ultrayereen-shift.
That’s a tough one to explain to a race steward, however. In point of fact, it bears directly on the events of October 3rd, 2004, as the chronically yellow car was entirely visible, but temporally displaced to be when it wasn't supposed to be where, which might possibly be as confusing as it sounds.
The weekend had begun very well. First, I had qualified Saturday afternoon at 1:47.178, a record time for me by a large margin. I had out-qualified Dave by a tenth of a second, and we would start gridded next to each other. We had qualified within a second of the class record. In fact, we had both qualified so fast that we decided not to qualify at all on the very foggy Sunday morning. Which was probably a mistake, as the track was at least a second faster and track records were falling. All the same, we were 25 and 26 out of 50 cars – a terrific result for a couple of slow G-P cars. We were well ahead of any G-P competition.
Frankly, it was moot. Dave didn’t need to race with me – all he needed to do was finish the race to win the championship. If that didn’t happen, Linda Heinrich and Dave Rinker were still in a better place to win than I was, as the extra points from the Spokane race in July had proven too hard to overcome.
The murder itself was very simple. As we entered the straight, on lap 3, I was close on Dave’s tail. Dust was in the air and several large rocks smacked my windshield. The air cleared, and when I pulled out to pass mid-kink, Dave’s car wasn’t where I had expected. I thumped his bumper, he began to rotate, hit the inside wall and bounced across the track and hit the outside wall, trunk first.
The first thought through my head was something like, “Oh golly, what the fudge just happened, gosh darn it,” except more exclamation points and less suitable for my grandmother.
As I drove under the full course yellow, I tried to put it back together in my head. It had happened very quickly, but all I could think of was that his car wasn’t where it should have been. It had moved. On the first, the emergency responders were out and Dave was standing by his car. He was wobbly, but otherwise looked intact. That was good – I already felt awful.
When the race restarted, I gave my driving little thought, as I replayed the incident over and over, in Technicolor ™ and kept repeating something coherent and articulate in my head, like, “fudge fudge fudge fudge fudge fudge” (note grandmother comment above). I drove in clean air and stayed out of the way of the Rabbits, Rx-7s and Miatas all jousting for championship points. I expected that my race result was irrelevant, as I would either lose a lap or be disqualified. All the same, I drove well, with a best-time of 1:47.090, and I finished 17th of the 50 cars – a terrific result completely undercut by Sponge Bob Square Car’s untimely demise.
Sure enough, I was DSQ’d, which primarily meant that I did not get my $5 trophy, or the admiring looks from small children and dogs that I had come to expect.
In the weeks that followed, Dave and I shared the urge to find out what had happened, more precisely. We discussed it in great detail, but it wasn’t until we received the tape from the Rx-7 behind us that we really understood.
The events were these. A Miata well ahead of either of us dropped two wheels on the outside of the track, which explained the dust and flying rocks. The Miata then pulled back on to the pavement, but rather than staying off-line had pulled quite suddenly back onto line – directly in front of Dave. Dave’s reaction was predictable, which is that he went for his brakes – but that happened even as I had already begun to pull out for my pass. In the video, frame-by-frame, his brakes lights go on the instant I contact him. Or, to put it another way, even as I began to move the wheel to pull out from behind, he had already lifted off the gas pedal and was going for the brakes. The few feet of space I had was gone in an instant and Mr. Newton’s physical laws took over.
The primary mistake I made was failure to anticipate. This was magnified by the trust I had for Dave’s driving after the extremely close racing we had done in the past. Ultimately, I should not have attempted to pass. I was not aware that the Miata that had begun to Dave’s left had been the one had been responsible for the dust and rocks, and thus was going much slower than it should have been. Even while I couldn’t reasonably have known that, it was clear that a car had had an off-track excursion, and I should have backed off and waited to see how things shook out – especially considering the high-speed nature of the kink.
That’s the nature of racing – nothing ever quite happens like it’s supposed to, and split second decisions cannot always be the right ones. I had learned that in my three year odyssey under the checkered flag. More importantly, from the people I had met: racers, wrenchers, supporters, safety workers, spectators, I had learned a great deal about racing, about cars and about friendship.
*****
This marks, by my count, the 41st Zundfolge article imprecisely chronicling four years of incompetent wrenching and inadequate racing. When I sat down to write the first article, I had no idea that so many people would respond, or that it would be four years until my last article.
What had begun as a series of mechanically-focused articles about my own learning experience, devolved naturally into a series about the dregs of amateur racing. I’ve had a blast writing each of my articles. Even when I wrote an article, weeks, or months after the events themselves, my pulse quickened and my hands shook when I wrote about a close call, or waiting in pre-grid for the last whistle, or a good pass. Each story had its little triumphs, whether it was solving a tough mechanical problem, or finding an extra fraction of a second in a corner, or meeting a new competitor after a sweaty, long race.
The 2004 season was a long year of sweaty races, and I took 2005 off to recoup my budget, repay Girlchief with a hard-earned cycling trip in France, and work on our house. To put it another way, without resorting to thin fiction, I have no more articles to write. I do, however, have plans that begin with the E30 325i parts car resting in my backyard.
The good memories are more clear than the events themselves, and the bad memories are dulled with time. Which is a nice way of saying that amateur racing is the triumph of hope over experience.
Girlchief, Racerdog, the fugly 1984 318i and the Unsage Mechanic will race again.
J. Sage Schreiner
Kirkland, WA
November, 2005