The weekend of 7/10-7/12 was the BeaveRun Historic Races, part of the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix. This event is held every year at BeaveRun, the weekend before the actual Schenley Park PVGP event. It is a great event, and particularly for those of us who race with BMWCCA, it allows us to race and participate in the PVGP without actually having a “vintage-legal” racecar. This year it was a BMWCCA Club Racing Premier event, meaning it had three races (two of them worth 150%) instead of the usual two races. It was because of those points that the weekend was particularly important for me in my quest to repeat as the I-Prepared National Champion. I got off to a GREAT start at the VIR Premier event in April, with two big wins, but Mid-Ohio set me back a bit when my head gasket failed. So I needed to re-take the initiative at BeaveRun if I was going to get back in front of Bill Heumann for the class points lead. Unfortunately, as I’ll describe in detail below, the weekend didn’t go as planned for me. In the first race Saturday, I not only lost the class win that I had in my hands, but in trying to regain it, I accidentally caused a minor incident with Bill and got a penalty. The incident was minor, and Bill was able to go on and claim the win that he deserved, but I (again) damaged my front splitter and also received a penalty from BMWCCA for touching Bill’s left rear wheel. The incident was my fault, and I immediately claimed responsibility, but deservedly so it carries a mandatory probation penalty and loss of points (all from the weekend, and also a championship-killing -20 overall for the year). So below is a full recap of the weekend…..
I had arrived in Pittsburgh Thursday morning, and my Dad and my brother-in-law Bob picked me up at the airport with the truck (with the ATV pit-vehicle loaded in the bed) and we went up to McB. While Bob unloaded the ATV and got the trailer and truck hitched up, I did final prep on the car. I needed to replace the engine cowling, add the TireRack windshield banner, re-install the Traqmate, give it a quick alignment, and wash it. All went well and we were ready to head down to Dad’s for the night with the trailer and car by mid-afternoon. We were planning on heading up to the track early Friday morning.
Friday morning we headed up to BeaveRun, from Dad’s it is only a 25-minute tow, so we got there nice and early and got a good paddock spot. The weather for the Friday test day was great, and we unloaded and got ready to run. We were scheduled to run about 5-6 practice sessions. I was hoping that the head gasket repairs that we had made were going to be OK, there were a lot of variables that I was worried about. The first practice session went OK at first, my ABS as usual wasn’t working for the first session, but even more alarming was that the car died and sputtered a few times right at the end of the session. I pulled in, but it went away and everything seemed to be fine. The second session it happened several more times, but this time I noticed that it seemed to be electrical, as the tach also seemed to immediately die along with the engine (the tach would die, and instantly go all the way to zero, despite the fact that the engine was still physically turning 1000′s of rpms. After Mark and I talked about it for a few minutes, we correctly figured out that engine gets the rpm signal from the crank sensor, and sure-enough, we found that the sensor wire had fallen down into the belt pulley and was shorting out. We replaced the crank sensor with a spare, secured the wire so it wouldn’t happen again, and the car performed perfectly the remainder of the day. The handling was very good, loose enough in the low speed turns, but aero-stable in BeaveRun’s high speed areas. I got down into the 1:03′s for the first time ever, and I wasn’t even pushing it too hard yet. Things were looking good! We did discover a small oil leak out of the head gasket in the front, near the timing chain cover, but it isn’t near any combustion areas, not near any of the cylinders, so it will just be an annoyance and shouldn’t cause any problems long term.
The entire weekend for me was very emotional, because of the death of my close friend and fellow racer Kent Rafferty only 10 days earlier. And at the end of the day Friday things got even more emotional when the RAFF memorial stickers were dropped off….. Karen Rafferty and I had worked to design them and have them made, and when they showed up for people to put on their cars, it was a very emotional time. I put two of them on my car, one on each wing endplate, as you can see in the pictures below. I was already tired by that time, and the car felt well sorted, so I called it a day. To be honest, I wasn’t in the best mental state after seeing the RAFF stickers, and truly was in no condition to drive any more that day……
Here is a picture of the car from Saturday coming onto the front straight, not sure what session, sent to me by a friend:
Saturday’s schedule was supposed to be an early (8 am) practice, mid-morning qualifying, then two points races. But early in the morning we found out that the timing and scoring system at the track wasn’t functioning and that the session format was in question, especially qualifying. First practice went well, my ABS started working much earlier, and the session was solid. Qualifying was good, I got down to a 1:03.665, and I felt that there was more in the car. But I knew the 1:03 would put me in a good spot on the grid. But the lack of timing and scoring data made the grid problematic. Originally they were going to let the grid be on a first-come-first-served basis, organized within class (Mod first A-E, then Prepared A-M, then stock, etc.). Since there were so many I-Prepared M3′s (at least 8-9), we convinced the race organizers to use our qualifying session times from our data systems. Bill was able to get down to a 1:03.4, and I had a 1:03.7, so I was second in IP. Unfortunately, there were two Mod cars on the grid in front of us – one of them, Mark M’s C-Mod M3, was extremely fast, and he would have easily gotten pole anyway. But the other, an E-Mod 1600, was placed in P2 (outside pole) in front of me, which would be a problem. It wasn’t that driver’s fault, but that car did come into play on the start, as I will describe later. So it was Mark M on pole, the EM car on outside pole, Bill H in P3 behind the polesitter, and me behind the EM car. I’m usually pretty good at starts, but with the EM car right in front of me, I knew I would have a problem making a solid move on Bill, who would be clear with the fast C-Mod M3 likely pulling away cleanly. Sure enough, when the green flag flew, Mark pulled the field easily, but the slower EM car held me up. I got my usual good jump on the flag, but Bill was easily able to keep me bottled up on driver’s left, against the edge of the track and behind the slower EM car. Fair move, and something I would have done had the roles been reversed, so we tucked into turn 1 in order, and it took me a few turns to get around the EM car and start to try to chase Bill down.
Things settled into a rhythm, with Mark pulling away, and Bill maintaining a few seconds in front of me. About half-way through the race, Bill made an error and went off exiting turn 4, and I was able to capitalize and take the IP lead and overall position #2. I pulled a few second advantage on Bill, and then I made my first strategic error…. BeaveRun is very, very hard on cars, and to get really fast 1:03 and 1:04 laps there, you have to hammer your car pretty hard. It’s one of the things that I don’t like about that track to be honest. Given all of the car problems I’ve had this year, and given the fact that there were still two races to go that weekend, I made the decision to back off a little and try to save the car. In hindsight, it was a HUGE mistake, because instead of backing off 0.5 seconds or so, just a slight amount, I actually backed off too much, about 1.0-1.5 seconds. Bill caught back up to me after a while, and I had wasted away any lead that I had from his off. It was a stupid error, and I will never let it happen again. I paid for it about two laps after he caught me, when we came up on traffic. In a mess of traffic in turn 1, he got under me, and was able to take the position back from me. I was furious with myself, and for the first time in my racing career, I let my emotions take over too much and let them dictate my actions. For the next three corners, I tried way too hard to get the spot immediately back, and sure enough, in turn 6 I accidentally tapped Bill in my frantic efforts to regain the position. I had a decent plan, but I executed it very poorly and without good emotional judgement. Going up the hill to turn 6, I got a great run, and I had planned on trying to get into his mirrors driver’s right, then dive back under him driver’s left into 7. But my run was actually TOO good, and not only did I get my right front corner beside him (too far anyway for my planned fake), but the turn 6 apex curbing to driver’s right pitched me much more than I had planned, and it sent me into his left rear corner. I was so upset with myself….. I had done over 185 track days and races to that points, and had never touched someone else, I couldn’t believe my error. My right front wheel touched his left rear wheel, and sent us both gently spinning off track. Bill did a gentle completely spin, and I got my car straight again, but in the process went across a rough part of track runoff and tore my splitter off. Thankfully, given that it was completely my error, Bill was able to restart his car and move off and take the class win anyway, for which I was very grateful. Had I not only tapped him, but also caused him damage or caused him to lose the race, I would have been even more devastated. I pulled into the pits, had a quick chat with the tech steward and explained what had happened, then went back to the paddock.
I took full responsibility for the accident, and Bill was very cool about it, and in the end the only real damage was to my splitter, my points, my pride and administratively – the penalty was a 13-month probation. Although I’m not happy about the outcome, it is fair, and those are the rules. Mark Connolly and I were going to try to cobble a splitter together and run the rest of the weekend, but I decided to pack it up, since my points for the weekend were already DQ’d (you lose all of your points for the weekend if you are at fault in an incident, again that’s always been part of the rules) and I really don’t enjoy BeaveRun anyway. I’m fast there, but it’s not that enjoyable of a track, and it is very hard on equipment. So we packed up and headed back to Dad’s for the night, planning on taking the trailer and car up to McB Sunday morning.
Bill’s car wasn’t damaged hardly at all (part of his left rear rim was scraped a little from hitting my right front rim, and he was able to rub out a small tire mark on his left rear quarter panel). Bill went on to win that race, and also the first race Sunday morning (they adjusted the schedule because of the timing and scoring issues). But in the third and final race, Kevin Ogrodnik, my McB Autosport teammate, won I-Prepared, his first big IP win in a tough field. Congrats Kevin!!!! Kevin made HUGE strides that weekend, and is really running well!!!
Immediately after the little incident Saturday, I had decided to NOT run the rest of the year, for several reasons – it would give me a chance to save a little money, I was more or less out of the points hunt anyway (I’ll explain below) and if I have another incident while on probation, I could get placed on suspension. I consider myself a very clean racer, so being the responsible party in a non-contact series was very disappointing to me. However, several people, including Bill and the race stewards, all convinced me to keep racing, that nobody views me any differently, and to move on and not to worry about it. So after that encouragement, and after thinking about it further, I decided to move ahead with my normal schedule – Nelson Ledges, Road Atlanta and Mid-Ohio. My car is fully functional, all it needs is a new splitter tray and a normal track prep, so why not. I have the vacation time, plenty of tires and I need to get back on the horse. Since last summer, I had also become obsessed with the national points hunt, so maybe this will force me to stop that obsession and focus on having fun again and enjoying myself. As I had mentioned at the very beginning of this post, after VIR I was in a very good spot for points. But at Mid-Ohio, when my head gasket failed, that definitely put me into a hole, so if I had any hope of repeating at national IP champion, I needed a strong showing at BeaveRun. But not only did I get zero points for BeaveRun, but I believe that any infraction like I had carries a minus 20 point yearly penalty, which will effectively end any hope of a national championship points run. I-Prepared is the most hotly contested class in BMWCCA (last year I won by only 1 measly point, and two years before that were both won by only 3 points), so a 20 point penalty is pretty much a guarantee that I will not be able to repeat. But like I said, perhaps it is best that I refocus on having fun again instead of the constant pressure of points. So after initially being very unhappy and depressed about the BeaveRun outcome, I’ve actually started to look forward to the rest of the season again!!!
However, my bad luck DID continue that day, and into the next week…. Saturday night I went to a friend’s house to continue to mourn our friend Kent, and I was talked into taking a new 997 Porsche 911 Twin Turbo out for a joyride. I initially didn’t want to drive it, because like I told him “I have already wrecked ONE German car today, I don’t want to make it two in one day”, but he talked me into it. So his wife jumped into the passenger’s seat and we went out to the back roads near Oakdale for a quick spin. The car was AMAZING, just silly power (480 hp, all-wheel-drive) and acceleration. Well, about 5 minutes into the drive, on a narrow country road, a damn deer jumped out and hit us while we were going about 50-60 mph. ZERO chance to miss it, came out of nowhere and tagged the right front corner and front side panel. Car was drivable, but the deer was killed instantly, and as a parting gift left some fur in the head light (see pics below) and also crapped all down the side of the car. Unbelievable end to a day. Not only did I bang up my race car, but I also put a nice deer dent in a 911TT. Amazing…. and then a week later, someone hits the back of my M3 in the parking lot at work. So hopefully I have gotten all of the bad luck out of my system. Another week like that and I’ll be ready for a new sport altogether…..
