In endurance racing somebody has to take the stint nobody wants. Second driver in the rotation, out in traffic at the worst part of the afternoon, handing the car back…
Formula 1
Two timers at the same club race once gave me lap times four tenths apart. Neither was broken. One started at the transponder loop and the other at the start-finish…
There is a wooden ruler in my toolbox, and measuring is not what it is for. Dropped between somebody’s open fingers and caught, it gives you their reaction time by…
For my first two seasons of club racing I learned where I had lost time by reading a printout in the paddock an hour after the session ended. The transponder…
The most expensive noise I ever made was a missed downshift at Roebling Road. Third instead of fifth, engine past the limiter, and a rebuild bill that two months of…
The first time I was impounded after a club race, I stood outside a chalk rectangle for forty minutes while a scrutineer with a flashlight looked at my brake pads…
In club racing a flag and the honor system are enough to neutralize a race. The corner workers put up yellow at every station, everyone stays in position and the…
I can tell you what a front wing costs on my car to the dollar, because I have bought three. Two hundred and eighty each, plus shipping, plus the afternoon…
Our endurance team kept its accounts in a spiral notebook. Entry fee, tires, fuel, the brake pads we went through at Roebling, split four ways and settled by text message…
The first time a car of mine failed technical inspection, it was over a bolt. The fuel cell mounting hardware was one grade below what the rulebook specified, the inspector…