First Night Race - Extra Tips

I ran with a LED whip in 2020, but they would only let me run a single color, no flashing colors.  It makes it a lot easier to identify your car on track at night. There were plenty of cars with strip/rope lights as well.

I have a clip on convex mirror from amazon that clips over the existing mirror to give a wider rear view and side view.  If I were to run again I would get a second one, cover with window tint, and switch at night.

We're prepping for a night race in another series and I also mirror the HID advice. We had cheap LED lights from harbor freight, at pittrace we did a little parking lot testing after dusk and it was terrible.

This light bar is our "supplemental light", it's on its own separate switch from the headlights:
https://www.summitracing.com/parts/sum-890262
The LED beam is much more focused then the cheap stuff we got.

Our headlights are HID conversions from DDM Tuning:
https://ddmtuning.com/DDM-HID-Kit-Slim- … 35W-or-55W
you can order a harness with relays as well to make wiring really easy.

Other tips:
- Aim your headlights slightly outwards for better cornering
- Aim your light bar further down than you think you should
- You might consider using a rain light for your rear facing driving light, it's super visible and acceptable for most series, and as a bonus makes you tech legal in some other series like AER.
- Some strategically placed racers tape in horizontal strips over the back window can cut down the glare in your mirror from other cars coming up behind you. (think zebra stripes across the back window).
- Don't forget clear tape (helicopter tape, clear racers tape, clear gorilla tape) over any glass lenses
- Test at night if you can before showing up at the race.
- Mount a battery powered LED tap light on the roof of your car in reach of the driver. If the driver goes off, tell them to turn the light on so the safety crew can see they're ok. It's the difference between a full course yellow and ambulance, or a local yellow and a tow hook. This helps with pit stops too. Our car actually has a battery powered "service light" circuit that has LED roof lighting and small LED lights under the hood and wheel wells for nighttime service. All the 24hrs of LeMans (that one) teams had some sort of service lights as well.

For track ID it's pretty easy to spot the silhouette that doesn't belong (the merkur stands out), but we use blue underglow rock crawling lights (cheap LED kit from amazon) hooked to our headlight circuit. Some zip screws, 18awg wire and an hours work makes it an easy project. If you don't want to run the 12v wiring for it, then there's plenty of easy options with battery pack power. LEDs don't take much.

Cornering lights and projectors are great. Those amazon special jeep/miata/harley round lights are great projectors and can be found for about $30 a light. You'll need to fabricate mounting depending on what vehicle you have. As other have said, avoid cheap light vomit bars for projecting forward, but they work OK for corner lights. Keep in mind that you WILL get black flagged if your lights are aimed too high, and dealing with lighting during a race is annoying. Each corner is marked with reflectors, so you just need to project enough light to see those corner markers. It sounds sketchy, but you get used to driving off a few reflectors really quicky.

We tried tinting our mirrors and found it to ruin our daylight visibiliy and didn't seem to help much at night. I'd go without mirror tint, we typically ignored our mirrors at night, when we saw our cabin light up we knew someone was approaching behind us, we'd quickly scan the mirrors to see what side, and give them room to pass. It's not as bad as you'd think.

Don't rely on LED rope lights, although they're totally worth putting in. Best thing we did was add reflective tape around the perimeter of the car, and I think it should be a requirement for night races. If something happens where your electrical goes out (immobile or still moving), people can still see you. Also, having a perimeter gives the driver behind you way more information about your position. A car spun out about two corners ahead of me and I didn't notice it until I was exiting the corner that there is a car parked in the middle of the track. Almost T-boned him at 70MPH and I swear my mirror touched his car. Coming around the corner and seeing only two blinding headlights gave me NO information about where the ass-end is pointed... some $7 reflective tape could have made that lucky miss an educated miss.

plan plan plan. We had a driver cycle plan and nap cycle planned. Someone will get screwed, I took the 1PM day 1 nap cycle and just ended up not sleeping. Know who prefers driving at night, who can stay up late, and who can go without sleep. We had to throw our driver cycle out the window around 3AM because one of the guys fell asleep when his stint was time.

Brake pads.. HPR seems to chew up pads quicker than other tracks. We were running some sport pads and went through about 6 sets of brake pads over 24 hours when we normally got ~9 hours out of one set. Getting some ST43's would totally been worth it here.

Have a great team/great crew. Any resentment or inter-team issues WILL escalate with lack of sleep and stress.

Overall we had a blast and would do it again in a heartbeat.