Race Report: More Speed Than Luck

This is obviously a photo of a BMW 525i. But it's also a photo that is tremendously important to me, for reasons I'll explain, along with the usual racing excuses, below. The driver is my brother Mark, who shone in his second LeMons outing with solid laptimes, absolutely zero car damage, and just one penalty (for blend line). The guy kneeling in the Technicolour Rex hoodie is your humble author. The fellow in the blue shirt is our dad.

I've been racing four-wheelers now for close to a decade, but this is just the second time that Dad's come to see what it's all about. (The first time was an Atlanta National Solo Tour event, which he thought was pretty boring compared to LeMons.) He had a great time, although he noted that it made him nervous every time I did something like keep my foot on the throttle past the brake point so I could "shoot the gap" between two cars going into a corner...

Dad stayed on the radio with me and Mark throughout our stints in the car and offered his mechanical expertise ("Clearly, something's broken") when we were stalled with fuel and electrical issues for a big part of Saturday.

Okay. So. How'd we do? 40th out of 86 cars that took the green flag. That's the short answer.

Detailed answer: We fell all the way down into the seventies with the aforementioned problems on Saturday. Mark, Gary, and John, my co-drivers, worked their tails off to hand me a car in 51st place with two hours and ten minutes to go. I was able to hustle us to 40th, about 20 seconds behind the 39th place Miata.

On a personal note, I was mostly pain-free and felt much better physically than I expected I would. I don't know if I'm ready yet for a NASA enduro, however. During my stints, I set team fast lap and eleventh fastest lap of the race overall. I was never successfully passed by any car on course during either of my stints. Three times I was passed by a car while I was conserving tires, but all three times I made up the gap, passed the car, then lapped that car within my final stint. My fast lap was a 2:00.05, I had plenty of 2:00 and 2:01 laps but more importantly I repeatedly turned 2:02 and 2:03 laps while moving in traffic and making significant passes. I unlapped us from the race leader while we were both on-course, twice.

In other words, when we were hot we were unstoppable. But we had just a few too many issues to be top ten. We'll regroup and try it again in the near future.

I've won races before, though, and I'll win races again. What I'll remember this one for is the chance to share the sport with my brother and my father. With any luck, in the years to come Mark and I will add our sons to these weekends, as well.