Tales From The Trackday Club: Part Zero
Tales From The Trackday Club: Part Zero
Or, In The Shadow Of The Terrifying "BLAU BIRD"
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If you are currently a free subscriber to ACF, you have the option of upgrading to the “Trackday Club”. On most Substacks, this is known as a “founding membership”. You get a little icon next to your picture and you have the satisfaction of lording it over the regular-subscription proles. Here at ACF, you get all of that PLUS I will coach you at a trackday, should you be so inclined, and subject to our mutual availability. So far we have just fourteen Trackday Club members, all of whom I personally cherish of course. And this past weekend marked the first time a TC member and I have sat down for coaching together. This story is free to all subscribers, since it is secretly an advertisement!
How I Spent (Almost) A Thousand Dollars Per Lap To Coach An ACF Reader, Not Dying In The Process
This past weekend was my first chance to work with a Trackday Club member, whom we shall call “Rick” just in case he wants to stay anonymous. Rick has a very nice first-gen Mini Cooper S that has been in his family since it was new. This was his third weekend on track. After checking our schedules for a while, we’d settled on a Porsche Club event at Mid-Ohio. He registered his Cooper and I registered my “big Radical”, the SR8.
Unfortunately for me, my crew chief was booked for the SRO race that same weekend, and I didn’t like the idea of trying to run the SR8 alone; it’s as finicky as a Hawker Harrier, probably because it was built by about the same kind of people. So we decided that I would take my “small Radical”, the PR6, over for the weekend. Except I’d already planned on not running it again in 2022, so I had work to do, like the Isley Brothers. First I spent two days stripping and sanding the car down to bare fiberglass. Then, in the course of a 18-hour day, my crew and I swapped out the master cylinders and did other basic maintenance on the car, some of which required removing and replacing about 40 rivets. I was armed with a “Chicago Pneumatic” air rivet gun from Harbor Freight so it went fine, if slowly.
In the course of reassembling the car we made a very big mistake. More about that later. But first… wrap! I’d chosen the VVivid Lime Carbon Fiber and asked an old friend of my brother’s to wrap the car. It didn’t go very well. The lady in question was way over her head wrapping a race car, as opposed to a street car. After three days she quit and went home. My son, God bless him, painted and striped the rest. Unfortunately, that meant he got to choose the colors, which is how I ended up with a bit of a pimpmobile:
From fifty feet away it looked, to my eyes anyway, like it commanded the $90k purchase price of a new Radical PR6, as opposed to the twelve grand I originally paid for it… or the [REDACTED] I have in it after a new engine, suspension, and many other parts. My son polished the wheels up to a mirror shine, too. I mounted a light to the rollcage that flashed blue and white so people in Porsches and whatnot could actually see me; the highest point of this car sits just under the doorline of a 911. Alright. Time to go… not racing, mind you. Just time to go.
Saturday, in which the Author is removed from the track, via two different methods
The last time I went to a PCA track day, George W. Bush was the president of this fine country, but not much has changed. Porsche Club events are almost unique in the hobby. Very hierarchy-conscious, to the point that the top “A Group” is split into, basically, Nice Cars and Not So Nice Cars. There are multiple parade-lap opportunities. A lot of awards are handed out, and you’re asked to clap for various people. There’s a special clothing item handed out at registration, in this case a fleece top mimicking those worn by European Porsche pro racers, that most of these idiots immediately put on, giving the whole weekend an oddly conformist feel.
Compared to a TrackDAZE or (God help us) a Chin event, the PCA weekends are much more about the cars. There is a lot of looking at cars, a lot of discussing the cars, a lot of odd deference paid to the most expensive cars. There are vanity plates. Oh yes. Everywhere you look. PCA leads the country in stupid vanity plates.
And then we had the BLAU BIRD, a new 911 Turbo S piloted by a dude who wore a fuckin’ Sabelt fireproof suit for the whole weekend:
Remember this dude, because we’ll see him again.
I took the Radical out in the Instructor/A Group, Shitty Car Subgroup, because I didn’t know if I’d have pace for the GT2RSes and whatnot in the Instructor/A Group, Not Shitty Car Subgroup. In two laps, I think I passed twelve cars, most of them basically 911 or Cayman street cars but a few caged ones as well. But my little green wagen was misbehaving for real, twitching left and right under braking then, on lap 3, refusing to accelerate at all. I pulled off and came to a dead halt. The car wouldn’t move. They got the hook for me.
Further investigation showed the right rear brake had locked solid. After half an hour the brake had released. I bled the brakes, took it for a test drive, and it seemed okay enough. In the second session, I got one lap before I started feeling the brake locking again. I was mystified, but my wife, the infamous Danger Girl, looked into the crash structure and spotted the issue. Can you see it?
That’s right! Apparently we’d riveted the crashbox ONTO THE BRAKE LINE earlier in the week. There was nothing for it but to drill out two dozen rivets and reattach. How had we been this stupid? Reattaching the crashbox showed how: the brake line kept popping back up there while I was trying to put the rivets back in.
Once that was fixed, I decided to go out in the Non-Shitty Car category, only to find that the clutch was slipping so badly the engine would stall when I hit the brakes. I brought it back in and started fussing with everything. Eventually I realized that when we’d swapped the clutch master, we’d reassembled the pedal box with some light pressure on the pushrod, thus ensuring that the clutch was always about one-third thrown. I got that fixed and went out for the last session of the day, in the Non-Shitty Car run group.
By my own standards, I wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire; I was about 2.5 seconds off race pace. But that was enough to cut through the quarter-million-dollar club like the proverbial pitbull in a preschool. Most of them were so impressed with their own pace they didn’t see me until my flashing light appeared in their mirrors from twenty feet back, at which point they would jerk the wheel and I would get to see Porsche Stability Management prevent them from killing me stone dead. One Cayman GT4 just flat drove off Turn One when he saw me behind him.
On my fifth lap, by which time I was getting ready to come back up on the Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2-shod GTxx cars I’d passed in Lap One, I was black-flagged. “You have no brake lights,” I was told.
“So what?” I replied. “It’s a sports racer — and, not to be uncool about it, but I don’t have anybody coming up behind me who would notice.”
“Safety violation,” the fellow said, “You have to leave.” Then he got back on his radio and there was a lot of discussion, during which I got the distinct sense that I was being black flagged not so much for having no brake lights but more for simply being unwelcome in that group of very expensive and pedigreed cars.
Was I being a bully? I’d say hell no. My Radical weighs 1310 pounds with me in it and makes about 160hp at the crank. Most of the cars out there weighed 3000-3500 and had between 500 and 750 horsepower. On the back straight at Mid-O, I can’t quite touch 130mph, but the GT2s and whatnot can hit 175-plus. All of them are faster at the Burgerkingring than my little single-seater. In my SR8 — yeah, I’d have been the bully of all bullies, and that’s why I wanted to run it. But in the small car, I shouldn’t have any more pace than, say, a Cayman GT4.
That being said, I will admit to fundamentally misunderstanding the event, and willfully so. The PCA days are meant to be a celebration of ownership, where you can take out your GT3RS and rip it down the back straight in safety. They take some nice photos of you that you can put up at your office. And you can tell everybody you raced last weekend. There’s no room for someone running a single-seat race car at warmup pace, even if it is a slow and humble single-seat race car.
I should also mention that the PCA club officers were really nice and decent people, there was lot of enthusiasm there, and that I liked many of the people I met. There are plenty of wonderful folks in PCA, many of whom work very hard to put on these events. It’s not an SCCA race, but that’s fine; not everybody wants to be in an SCCA race.
Since I had no easy way to fix the brake light issue, and since there was rain on the forecast for Sunday, I loaded up my trailer rig, seen below, and decided to focus solely on my student, Rick.
Enough About Me, Let’s Talk About Rick
Reader, I will admit that I had my concerns about Rick — or, rather, about his car. The “C Group” in which we would be driving had everything from a Gen V Viper to a Cayman GTS 4.0 in it, with many entrants trailered in and shod in Hoosier or Michelin race rubber, but we’d be in a 160hp Cooper S on street tires. This would be a genuine test of Rick’s nerves, because few things are as worrisome as having some idiot run up your back bumper in a 500hp car that may or may not be chock full of boiled brake fluid. As previously discussed, the sudden appearance of a faster car causes TRAINED PCA INSTRUCTORS to wander off track. What would it do to someone who was going on track for just his fifth time, ever?
I needn’t have worried. Rick was as cool as Miles Davis under pressure. He missed a couple of corner entry points when idiots were doing idiot things in his rearview mirror — but he missed them by feet, not yards, and we never had anything approaching a loss-of-control incident.
This was good, because another thing about TRAINED PCA INSTRUCTORS is that they like to “solo” their students and head home for a relaxing evening instead of staying until the job is done. In one case, we had a four-liter Cayman nearly hit us twice in the Keyhole, angering me to the point where I finger-wagged the driver as he went by and then asked Rick to help me find said driver in the paddock afterwards. When we got there, we found a contrite young man. “I know I was out of control, I’m sorry.”
“Where’s your instructor? I’m annoyed with him, not you.”
“Oh… he left?” Not that it would have mattered if he’d stayed, because time and time again during the weekend I saw misbehavior from cars with somnolent or disinterested instructors in the right seat. Listen — I can’t absolutely guarantee that you won’t crash a car when I’m coaching you, but it is the role and responsibility of an instructor to do everything possible to get you and your car home safely. I have been coaching since 2005, with over a thousand students to date, and I’ve had one incident, courtesy of full brake fade in a Z06 on the back straight at Autobahn. As an instructor, you have command of the car. If you let your student fuck around, because you’re too meek or uninvolved to address the issue, then the student will suffer the consequences. He doesn’t know when he is putting the car at risk. He doesn’t have the experience to tell the difference between going fast safely and the conditions that lead to a crash. He is reliant on the instructor to know the difference and to, ya know, instruct accordingly.
Over the course of our eight sessions on track, Rick improved massively, to the point where he was driving consistently in the neighborhood of the car’s limits. Time and time again we would be passed by some 400hp-plus car, only to have Rick catch back up in the corners that followed. In our two damp sessions, he was absolutely superb, correctly estimating the available traction and acting accordingly. He was also very good at avoiding contact (see what I did there) from… the BLAU BIRD.
Around corners, the BLAU BIRD was no faster than Rick, which made me chuckle inside my helmet — but on the straights he had 640hp plus “overboost” horses and he wasn’t shy about using every one of them to tuck the nose of his brand-new 911 under the old Cooper’s back bumper. We’d see him twice a session, the car jerking left and right in our mirrors as he tried to INTIMIDATE US RACE DRIVER STYLE and his worst excesses were restrained in digital fashion by Porsche Stability Management.
Having owned a few Porsches with PSM, I can only conclude that most Porsche Club events look like a fuckin’ disco from inside the car due to the constant and rather bright flashing of the PSM INTERVENTION lights on the dashboard. How do you not notice this? Or does everyone think it’s okay that they’re being jerked and shoved around by the computers devoting a space program’s worth of CPU time to preventing several incompetent spins per lap?
And this dude had an instructor the whole time! How can you sit in that car, repeatedly ripping up to 160-plus on four straights per lap then watching your student BRAKE AND TURN at the same time into every corner? Is this some sort of suicidal ideation thing?
It’s possible that BLAU BIRD was an important person in the region and I just didn’t know it, because he attended both morning instructor meetings despite not being an instructor… and they let him park his car in the garage next to where the briefings took place. He stood there, quiet and composed as he no doubt is in his medical practice or C-suite, and afterwards accepted the obeisant compliments of the instructors as they examined his brand-new, totally stock automobile.
“That’s the game-over car, the holy grail. It can do everything,” one instructor told him.
Well, it can’t out-corner a 2003 Mini, from where I’m sitting, I thought, but BLAU BIRD nodded and replied, in a tone accustomed to command, “The holy grail, yes.” His Sabelt Hero Superlight suit was pressed, wrinkle free. I considered my own appearance — wearing an Iron Maiden T-shirt over Gustin jeans ripped by a wayward Radical cockpit weld and soiled by lying on the ground with a rivet gun the previous day — and realized that BLAU BIRD had his life ordered and assembled in a way that my broke, unemployed ass would likely never approach even from a distance. He looked like a racer, while I looked like a homeless person. If you had to guess which one of us held multiple track records plus wins in a dozen different classes, you’d pick him without hesitation.
How much of all our lives is cosplay? The only answer I have is: more than we think.
All that bullshit aside, it was a genuine pleasure driving with Rick, and it helped assuage a secret concern I’ve had, namely that the Trackday Club was a risky and stupid idea on my part. I gave up coaching strangers a while back, largely because I want to see my son live to adulthood — but if Rick is representative of my founding members, I’m in good hands. I hope he continues in the hobby and I’m hoping to work with him again.
My next Trackday Club appointment is in November, on the West Coast. I’m looking forward to that, too, even though I won’t have a car of my own. Which might be for the best. I put a lot of money into the PR6 so I could drive five trouble-free laps. It ended up being something like $780 per lap when everything was added up. And I’ll have to re-wrap it over the winter, because Bark’s friend wrapped the seams backwards and it was delaminating even at a modest 127mph. So that was not a good value. And it kind of undermines the true purpose of the Trackday Club, which is to support my extravagant lifestyle! If you’re not put off by the prospect of using your hard-earned money to let me buy tasteless green carbon fiber wrap, then I would encourage you to SUBSCRIBE, starting now! And to those of you who are already Trackday Club members… I’ve spent your money already, PLEASE RENEW!
Finis
Was the BLAU BRD wearing a white or black dial Rolex Daytona? Just a hunch.
the very best part of this column is seeing the Mahindra hauling your trailer. I can only imagine the reaction of Blau Bird and others like him when they saw Mini-Me Jeep putter up to the paddock and disgorge a Radical.