Peer review of newbie safety plan

[sdwarf36]

My advice: Stop worrying. You ever drive fast down the road you live on? Not shooting for FTD fast-just comfortably quick? You can because you know the road. Just keep that pace. A fast country drive-not pushing any limits. If you do that same mental pace all weekend, your time will have dropped by 20 seconds or so doing nothing different but knowing the road better. Everyone is faster at Okemo 2 than Okemo 1-just because you have more laps under your belt.
As I tell everyone in rookie orentation-It takes less time out of the day for you to do a 4 minute run that it does for Don to come up + fish you out of the woods. And you NEVER hear anyone bad mouth a rookie going slow.

[Rabbit Farmer]

A fast country drive-not pushing any limits. If you do that same mental pace all weekend, your time will have dropped by 20 seconds or so doing nothing different but knowing the road better.

Good advice for anyone new to hillclimbing.

[KevinGale]

I'm with Sherm. Don't worry about it and just take what comes easy.

In my case it was a combination of bad judgement, bad luck and bad equipment. The braking zone going into the rock at Philo was slick. A few other people had problems there that day also. Dan Rutan even left the road in the same spot. I also had a partly frozen front caliper. Under normal braking it was fine but under hard braking the car pulled to the left and that started the car rotating. Still the real problem was I just was pushing a bit too hard for my first event. Easy to do in a light weight high power car. About 10 different people told me over the next few years that I should start in something with less power. So you're already ahead of me.

[Chief Geek]

Thanks a lot. You guys are great.

Kevin - So, you're saying your chief mechanic made a pretty large oversight, your team principal over-specified your equipment, and the rookie driver got over his head. It looks like your early staffing choices weren't very good. ;)

Paul

[sachilles]

Its easier to say stop worrying than it is to actually accomplish it.
It's a real long off-season when you've never done it before. It's like climbing that first hill on a roller coaster. You know it's going to be fun as hell, but the suspense and fear of that first climb almost kills you. Instead of that hill taking 5 minutes, it takes 5 months.

Of course I'm a compulsive worrier. I'm lucky if I get three hours of sleep on the friday before an event. I sleep so much better saturday evening.


To summarize.
-Don't worry
-Stay in your comfort zone
-Brake early at the rock turn at Philo
-Have fun.
-97 days until Ascutney

*Drink so damn much water first thing in the morning and hold it until after your run. You'll spend so much time worrying about not peeing your pants, you won't worry about the run.

[KevinGale]

Kevin - So, you're saying your chief mechanic made a pretty large oversight, your team principal over-specified your equipment, and the rookie driver got over his head. It looks like your early staffing choices weren't very good.

In my defense I wasn't the chief mechanic at the time. I was co-driving the old modified for the first time with my then brother in-law Ray. Ray as it turned out never used the brakes hard so he had no idea they did something weird when you really stepped on them. I think one of the pistons in the 4 piston calipers was frozen. Under light to moderate braking it wasn't really noticeable but under hard braking it caused the car to pull. Even that wouldn't have been a problem if I hadn't made the initial mistake of driving too fast into the corner. There was a slick spot and the car wouldn't slow down there. When I did hit good pavement I got on the brakes hard and then the car started to rotate. I backed off the brakes until it stopped doing that but then I realized I wasn't going to make the corner. So I just stomped on the brakes and the car proceed to spin around, Across the grass then across the road from holding. I then went over the bank, the car flipped over and hit a tree. It looked a lot like the picture Seth just posted. I ended up about that same spot.

Amazingly the damage was easily repairable. We cut out and replaced one tube and few other parts and the car was racing the next week.

[Chief Geek]

In my defense I wasn't the chief mechanic at the time. I was co-driving the old modified for the first time with my then brother in-law Ray.

Wait... The modified you shared, years ago, was your starter car?

You must have been really young to think that was a good idea.

Paul

[KevinGale]

Wait... The modified you shared, years ago, was your starter car?

You must have been really young to think that was a good idea.

Paul

I think I mentioned that you're not the first person to question the wisdom of that plan. Crashing at my first event driving didn't help. It wasn't so much I was young. Ray had been racing the modified a few years. (He started with a half ton pickup truck before he bought the old modified.) He was just about to give up racing for a while because he just didn't have the money. I'd been going to the events and helping him work on the car for a while and I wanted him to keep racing. I had money so I said I'd co-drive and pay half of whatever we put into the car. So he got to keep racing and I got to start racing without having to buy a car. Later after Karen and Ray got divorced, Karen got the car and I co-drove it with her for a while until she crashed it hard at Burke. All this stuff just happens by chance. Karen was in my UNH computer science class and she introduced me to her twin Kelly. So if I hadn't happened to meet Karen in my intro CS class I wouldn't probably wouldn't have discovered hillclimbing or be happily married to Kelly for 23 years.

[walterclark]

Wait... The modified you shared, years ago, was your starter car?

You must have been really young to think that was a good idea.

Paul

Modifieds have LOTS of performance available from a very low relative cost platform (look at what Smokey has been asking for his). A $1000 used VW GTI could easily cost more to get minimally prepared (full cage, race seat, harness, new brakes, race rubber and assuming the drivetrain is in good shape - tuneup) than a turn key car like Smokey's and it would obviously be a lot slower in almost every situation. So I think it takes a great deal of maturity for an inexperienced racer to NOT jump into the modified. And just forget maturity and common sense once one of those fires up. You have to be dead to not want to put the loud pedal down on one.

A great part of cars like yours and mine is you can hammer down on the throttle almost any time you can apply power keep it down thru many of the turns and not get into trouble so the secret to fast times is learning how fast into and when to initiate for the tighter turns that your setup will tolerate so you can carry max possible speed thru and accelerate earliest out of them. For instance at Okemo, in my car, on a dry day, the first time I really need to lift is coming into Check 2. It is VERY for me hard to not lift in the right curve approaching Check 1 and again when entering the woods at the condos because it seems my sphincter muscle is wired to my right foot somehow. Try that in Kevins car and you will not get to Check 1...except perhaps coming at them from behind while making bizarre crop circles in the open field, but more likely you will find out there is a creek at the tree line behind them like Alex Grabow did when his steering broke.

[KevinGale]

I know what Walter is saying and I've thought about the crop circles more than once! I haven't even managed to keep my foot down through turn one at Okemo with the current motor. The car gets a tiny bit light over that very slight crest and I'm pretty sure the rear wheels will lose traction under full power. I've been creeping up on it. I think I might have pushed the throttle down another 16th of an inch last time through.