Road Atlanta Recap

I'll give a bit of a different perspective.  I had the chance to volunteer for Lemons at this race.  I was the "new" guy working gear tech on Friday and pit road on Saturday and Sunday. I've run 36 races as a driver and always wanted to see behind the scenes and try working a race.  It was fabulous.  Don't get me wrong, I still like being on track more, but I had a great time.  All of the Lemons staff is nothing but first class.  I fully plan to work more races when I'm not driving, and am hoping to be at Barber to work.

Thanks to all of you drivers.  Everyone showed patience with me and was very friendly, which made my job so much easier.  When I was working pit out I did my best to get you on track as quick as possible while still checking everything I needed to.  Thanks for cooperating with me, especially those in containment seats as it's hard to see your HANS hook ups...leaning your head forward made it SO much easier.

Congrats to all the winners, and to all the new cars too.  If you're at Barber, stop by and say hello!

First time at Road Atlanta and only second Lemons race (CMP 24 2019) and had a blast.  Man that is a fun track.  The elevation change is spooky at first but very fun once you get comfortable.  Also very impressed with the spectator seating and various locations.  Wish we had two races a year here!

Congrats to all the winners and thanks to everyone who helped put this show together.

FYI: We usually say "20 mph" to the first car in line so we can get everybody on the track in one line to get a nice, orderly transponder check for the timing crew. Adding any additional complications to that order like "You can go faster on the second pace lap" is asking for trouble. Simple instructions get results in Lemons (and most racing).

(Note: links to Sunday video are in the pics/vids forum section. Saturday video is…unusable)

Licensed To Ill (Central Operations) had a great race at Road Atlanta. Indeed, it felt like #808 was the belle of the ball. Most Lemons folk on the West Coast already know this truck – it’s Jesse Cortez’s 1985 Chevy S10 done up 80’s mini-truck style. The truck now resides with yours truly in the Louisville, Kentucky area. It’d been to two races already this year: Pittsburgh and June’s Gingerman affair, where it happened to win class B.

We made the tow down in the Porkchop Express, my very lemony 1986 Western Star toterhome with 1996 S&S Welding stacker trailer. Fortunately, with the Jake brake and recent upgrade to self-adjusting drums at all corners, the tow through the mountains near Chattanooga went without issue. What didn’t go without issue: arriving Thursday at 7 PM into Atlanta rush-hour traffic in the 36° ceaseless downpour. Fuck that traffic straight to hell. 

Having been duly apprised of the extreme likelihood of terrible weather conditions at Road Atlanta and the historical basis for same, Jesse decided that bouncing out for the race didn’t fit his – or any other reasonable person’s – M.O.. Blame could not find him in that regard, but we were nevertheless saddened at marshalling the effort without his presence. The ad-hoc driver’s roster for the race consisted, then, of Cameron Kurth, Ben Dawson, and yours truly. 

Cameron’s an experienced 808 operator, but had never raced at Road Atlanta. In addition to being an excellent driver, Cameron’s a super-smart engineer who worked as a consultant with Falken on the very tires we were running (and also patient with my non-stop jokes about how the 615K+ is better because it has extra potassium). I handed him the pressure gauge and let him do his thing. Don’t ask me what pressures we were running – I don’t know. And I couldn’t remember even if I had once known. Get it?! OK just kidding we started at 35 psi cold.

Ben’s quite well experienced at Road Atlanta, but had never driven 808. In addition to being an excellent driver, Ben is…he’s…um…probably beautiful like on the inside, if that makes any sense.

Testing day was almost literally a wash, with the standard Lemons-at-Road-Atlanta 36-degree day-long downpour. Cameron was able to turn some laps in the wet to refamiliarize himself a bit with the track. I took like five practice laps to make sure everything felt OK and called it good.

Next it was tech time! Always a pleasure to head to tech and see John Pagel, who himself built the cage on 808. The body-on-frame construction requires a different cage building technique than unibody, something a tech inspector earlier in the year didn’t appreciate as he pointed out that the “spreader plates in the floor aren’t fully welded.” At BS inspection, we were given a choice as to whether we wanted B with laps for having won Gingerman, or Class A. We went with the former, as it’s felt that, as equipped, 808 cannot be competitive for an A win. So we started in Class B with six penalty laps.

By race start Saturday, the rain had mostly passed. The track started out wet and misty, but eventually dried out. The painted curbing, not surprisingly, remained extremely slick for the better part of the day. All of the 808 drivers had clean stints, and I think all of our pit stops coincided with either a double yellow or just before the black flag on Saturday. We’d managed to claw our way back to P2 in B, a lap down on the leader and 11th overall, by the end of the day Saturday.

Sunday’s schedule at Road Atlanta is unusual, with a 1.5 hour sprint happening from 8:30 to 10:00. Then jesus hours 10 to noon, with racing resuming noon to five. We sent arguably our most agro driver out for the sprint: Ol’ Benny Boy. His stint Saturday was (ostensibly) slowed by directive from pits to reel it in a bit and make two hours on fuel no problem. But now TEH ALABAMAH SLAMMAH Ben Dawson hisself was “weapons free” on an hour-and-a-half rage through traffic. In the first half-hour he’d not only passed P1 to get on the lead lap, he was comin’ on to take the P1 position shortly thereafter. That is, until he ran out of brakes at the end of the straight and went two-off saving a spin. He was flagged for four-off and reported to the penalty box, dick firmly stomped. Who amongst us hasn’t been there?  But no huge deal, these things happen, we can get it back, etc. etc. Ol’ boy goes back out and is immediately flagged again “for what I don’t know.” Turns out, mechanical BF because the brake lights were staying on. Quick trip to the pits and a bungee cord later, Ben went back out, but we’d already been set back quite a ways by the end of the sprint. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go! 

After noon, we kept fighting on, expecting the leader to break down or dick-step, either being likely scenarios in Lemons. But with about 1.5 hours left under FCY, 808 made a bad clanging noise that might be a rod, might be the clutch coming apart, might be something else. But in any event it was enough to cause me to shut it down immediately and get towed in. Womp womp.

During my 5.5 hours of driving 808, it seemed like most folks were driving pretty OK. I personally didn’t see a lot of scary moves, and I think only one BMW aggressively tried to block me rather than succumb to the reality that a leaf-spring Chevy truck was gonna eat its lunch. Surprise, dummy. This POS didn’t just materialize like some truck-consciousness Q on your BMW Enterprise. It’s going faster than you and will get by you. Just relax and let it happen.

Thanks for a great race y’all! Congrats to all the winners. Condolences to all the teams with cars that got stacked into a wall. Thanks again to the Singer clan for the bomb jambalaya, and everyone who made chili for the cook off.

Pittsburgh is likely next for 808.
(my statements are my own and should not be imputed to either of the fine gentlemen who drove with me this weekend)
xoxo

Thanks, man! The truck worked _surprisingly well_ at Road Atlanta. I figured our fast lap might wind up to be a 1:53, but we could regularly run 1:52-1:53 and had a 1:50 flier. I was out first on Saturday and seem to recall knocking through traffic for quite a while with #35.

Thank you Lord for the fine weather.  Lucky win for us, fully expected the Rod Throwers  to make it all the way they were running so well.  We try to be clean on the track and was very disappointed that the 411 team saw us as "asshats".  We normally hear from other teams that we race clean.  Without knowing the details (we live streamed every minute of the race) and after reviewing our video we can't identify what prompted the comment from 411.  We did have a rookie (but experienced NASA) driver who made contact but that was an isolated incident which did not affect any other team.