Tag: Racing

GHIT extra: everyone sucks at racing

I was recently interviewed on the Garage Heroes in Training podcast and they asked me a lot of really interesting questions. I want to follow that up in a series of posts on YSAR where I get into a little more depth on a few topics.

I suck at racing

Guess what? I suck at racing. Most people do. There simply isn’t enough money to get the track time to be really good at it.

How many hours do you think it takes to become good at any of the major sports like basketball, tennis, football (either kind), etc? Playing 2 hours per day for 300 days per year for 5 years sounds like a good start. That’s 3000 hours, which includes some mixture of unstructured time, coaching, drills, and games. How many racers do you know that have even 1/10th of those hours on track? Very few. How many of those hours feature coaching? Next to none. Drills? Nope. Wheel-to-wheel races? Some. If you’re a basketball player who plays h-o-r-s-e and shoots free throws a few weekends per year, you probably aren’t going to do very well in the neighborhood pickup game much less any kind of league play. But driving is different from basketball because you drive to work every day, right? Not so much. Biking to work every day doesn’t prepare you for riding a half-pipe any more than driving to work prepares you for track driving.

Good news

Since everyone sucks at racing, it doesn’t take much dedicated work to be better than average. Racing isn’t usually measured against some absolute criterion. You don’t have to be the best, just faster than the next driver. The good news is that you can be the fastest driver on track and still suck at racing! So how do you move from the lower levels to the higher levels of suckiness?

  • Knowledge
  • Skill
  • Confidence

Knowledge

Racing is a complex activity because it involves optimizing the driver, the vehicle, and the interplay between the driver and vehicle. If you want to get out of suckville, you need to understand what driving data looks like. It doesn’t look like a stopwatch. At a bare minimum, you need to be able to understand what a speed trace is telling you. Is the driver braking too much? Is the driver fighting understeer at the exit? You can ask and answer these questions and many more with a speed trace.

GPS-based data loggers are not that expensive when you consider the costs of track time or car parts. It’s one of the best investments you can make to improve your driving. Should you get a dedicated unit (e.g. AiM Solo) or use a phone app with a 10Hz GPS antenna? Up to you, but using your phone without an antenna doesn’t give you enough resolution. If you have a modern car, your car is spitting out data for throttle position, brake pressure, wheel speeds, steering angle, etc. Capturing these requires a more sophisticated data logger that connects to the CAN bus (e.g. AiM Solo DL). These extra channels are really helpful, but also a little confusing to the novice. So start with the speed trace.

Video is also very useful because you can see driver activities that don’t show up on a graph (e.g. hand position while steering). The best place to put the camera is on the roll bar so you can see the driver’s hands and legs. If you don’t have a roll bar, a camera mount that attaches to the head rest works well. The picture below shows a mount I made from some box section aluminum, j-hooks, and a RAM connector.

Bottom line: if you’re not using data to improve your driving, you will keep driving around suckville for the rest of your life.

Skill

You’re not going to make it out of suckistan unless you can drive a car near the limit. And by limit I don’t mean your limit. Everyone drives their limit. In the speed traces below, you can see that the red driver and blue driver have very different ideas about what the limit is. In most corners, the blue driver thinks it’s much lower than the red driver.

Regardless of whose limit is higher, the real question is if your limit is close to the actual limit. How do you know the actual limit? Math. Find the radius of the corner and the grip of the tires (from data) and you can estimate the corner speed. Well, that only works to a degree because the real racing line doesn’t have a constant radius (see previous post). But a little math is good for the brain and will give you some feeling for what should be possible.

The very best way to measure your skill is to compare yourself to dozens of other people driving the exact same cars with identical setups and weather conditions. This is generally impossible in the real world, but is trivial in the virtual world. In other words, sim racing is the best way to compare your technique to other drivers.

Bottom line: If you’re not using data to compare your skill to other drivers, you might as well start buying real estate because you’re never leaving suckistan.

Confidence

Most drivers enter fast corners 10-20 mph too slow. Look at the speed trace above. The minimum corner speeds are the same for slow corners but not fast corners. Why? Because people fear losing control of the car at high speed.

Exiting a corner on the limit is like walking on a tight rope. Entering a corner on the limit is like jumping onto a tight rope blindfolded. — Mark Donohue

Walking a tightrope takes bravery/confidence/commitment. Jumping on blindfolded takes more. And yet this is what it takes to drive a car at the limit. If your confidence isn’t the equal of your skill, you will enter corners 10-20 mph off pace and your lap times will suffer. On the other hand, if your confidence is much greater than your skill, you will probably wreck your car.

If you’re not driving the limit because you lack confidence, you will always suck at racing. However, I’m sure your loved ones appreciate your extra margin for safety, so don’t feel bad about it. Also, no matter what you do, you will always suck at racing anyway, because there isn’t enough time and money not to. So lighten up, be safe, and have fun out there! There’s a lot more important stuff in the world than how fast you drive around a race track.

GHIT extra: racing lines

I was recently interviewed on the Garage Heroes in Training podcast and they asked me a lot of really interesting questions. I want to follow that up in a series of posts on YSAR where I get into a little more depth on a few topics.

The Racing Line vs. the line you drive while racing

Several of the questions were either directly or indirectly related to the racing line. When most of us think of the line we imagine the path we take through a corner that optimizes our lap time, and in the typical 90° corner this would be the standard outside-inside-outside late apex line that we all know and love. However, in an amateur endurance race, this is almost never the line you want to take. When there are 100 cars on track, there are much more important things to think about than optimizing your lap time.

Grip, line, awareness: pick two

When I’m racing, awareness is always at the top of the list. The only time I’ll let that go is if I look behind me and I can’t see any cars at all. But as soon as I’m in any kind of traffic, my mind set is “how do I position myself in case the drivers around me do something unexpected?” If I’m optimizing awareness, it means I generally can’t drive the typical racing line as I’m positioning the car to avoid potential disaster. But wherever that line happens to be, I’m driving near the limit of grip. Ultimately, when racing, I almost always throw away the line and optimize the other two.

Does the angle at the apex matter?

Another question I was asked was if I thought the angle at the apex was important or was it just good enough to be at the apex. The angle is critical. In the picture below, both cars have reached the apex. Car #1 is going to have to do a lot of steering in order to finish the corner. Car #2 may have to make some steering corrections to prevent itself from spinning. In other words, Car #1 is understeering and Car #2 is oversteering. The angle you arrive at the apex determines how much throttle and steering you can use in the 2nd half of the corner.

If Car #2 doesn’t spin, it will win the race down the following straight. Car #2 is ready to go to full throttle very soon. Car #1 will have to wait a bit. If Car #1 gets impatient and adds throttle too soon, it runs the risk of understeering off the exit.

Most novice and intermediate drivers position themselves like Car #1. Why? Because in order to position yourself like Car #2, you must have oversteer in the first half of the corner. Not throttle-on oversteer, but throttle-off oversteer. Most novice and intermediate drivers spin under such conditions. Because spinning will earn you a black flag and the humiliation/penalties that go along with it, intermediate drivers may find themselves perfecting a driving style that prevents the rear from stepping out. You can be a pretty fast and safe intermediate driver but unless you learn to drive with oversteer, you won’t be as fast or safe as the advanced drivers.

It’s easy to see why driving with oversteer can make you faster, but why safer? Because shit happens on a race track. Shit you can’t foresee, like being forced off track, having a tire blow out, getting hit, or driving through oil. When shit happens, your car control skills save you, not your work-arounds. If you’ve learned how to drive a sliding car, your muscle memory and experience will help you navigate a perilous situation. However, if you’ve learned how to avoid sliding at all costs…

Handicapped Pro Racing?

I just got this advertisement in my email, which describes Handicapped Pro Racing. What makes this “Pro”? Um, cash prize for winning?

The rules are interesting. Is it a time trial, road race, or bracket race? Well, it’s a little of each. You’re supposed to practice throughout the day to figure out your dial-in time. Once you decide on that, you never want to beat it in the race because you’ll be disqualified. So there’s the bracket aspect. For the event, slow cars start ahead of fast cars and the winner is first car over the finish line after 10 laps. In order to win, fast cars must pass slow cars and slow cars must prevent that. So there’s the race aspect. What’s the time trial part? The minimal safety requirements.

While this sounds like a fun format with all of the cars competing for final positions near the finish line, is this really a good idea without roll cages, neck protection, and fire systems?

Regardless of safety, the math doesn’t work out. Fast cars at Thunderhill lap at around 2:00. Slow cars are around 2:25. After 10 laps, that 25 second differential is 4:10. That’s a couple laps. Put another way, after about 17 minutes, the 2:25 car has completed 7 laps. But after 17 minutes, the 2:00 car has completed 8.5 laps. Meaning, that even if you release the fast cars at the last possible moment, they still lap the slow cars somewhere in lap 7. There are a couple ways around this problem.

  • Make the race shorter so that the slow and fast cars are expected to finish around the same time
  • Limit the lap times of the cars (floor, ceiling, or both)
  • Release the fast cars after the slow cars have completed a lap and change (I got an email response from them, and apparently this is what they will do)

Even if you can make the math work out, do you really want a bunch of street cars with HPDE drivers all vying for position on the final lap with cash on the line? This is the kind of dumb shit that’s fine until it isn’t. I have to admit, it sounds like a really fun format if the “racers” respect each others’ space.

Beating a dead horse

At the last Lucky Dog race at Thunderhill, the following incident was caught on video. This turned into a big debate on the Facebook page Lucky Dog Racers with armchair analysts laying fault to one, the other, or both sides.

YSAR Official

I thought I would give the official YSAR opinion of the incident. By official, I mean armchair-official.

  1. Turn 10. At the start of the clip, you can see that the POV Miata is cornering faster than the BMW ahead. It’s clear from the driving of the BMW in T10, that the BMW driver is not an advanced driver. That’s okay! This is Lucky Dog Racing League, and all levels are welcome. So how do I know he’s not an advanced driver?
    • At the entrance to turn 10, the driver has left a half car width on the right. There’s no reason not to take a larger radius. Even if you were sandbagging so as not to pass the Super Dog time, you would still take the largest radius to save on consumables.
    • The driver chose a late apex line, but given how short the following straight is, there is no reason for this. Experienced drivers at Thunderhill know that T10 is an early apex corner.
    • The driver tracks out to the middle of the track and then steers out to the exit. That’s a low-intermediate level interpretation of the racing line.
  2. Turn 11. The car is way over-slowed at the entry of turn 11. You can see this by how much the Miata catches up in the braking zone. At this point, the Miata driver has some idea about the driver ahead and should be thinking “welcome to LDRL racing, let me give you some room so you can have great race”.
  3. Back straight. The race down the back straight shows that the Miata isn’t only faster in the corners, but also down the straights. It’s a faster car with a faster driver. By the time they enter the braking zone, the Miata has overtaken the BMW and is probably 1 car length ahead. The pass is now complete. At this point, the race for this corner is over. It’s time for both drivers to get through the final pair of corners together as fast as they can, to the benefit of everyone. By everyone I mean the drivers, their teammates waiting for their turn to drive, the car owners who don’t want to repair perfectly good race cars, the drivers’ loved ones who want them to return uninjured, every other team on track who doesn’t want the race shut down for a yellow flag, the organizers who want to deliver a fun yet safe event, the people at Walmart who don’t want to deal with angry customers, etc.
  4. Turn 14. The BMW driver re-passes the Miata in the braking zone. At this point, the BMW becomes the car attempting to make a pass. It is now the responsibility of the BMW to make a safe pass.
    • The Miata driver already knew the BMW driver was inferior and now had knowledge the he is also aggressive and dangerous. It’s time to give that car a lot of room and avoid it as much as possible. I have no idea why the Miata driver continued to race for this corner. He endangered the success of the team by endangering the car. This is the first stint of a 14-ish hour endurance race. What the hell are you thinking?
    • The minor contact between the cars is silly and both drivers are at fault for driving so close to each other.
    • The BMW has entered the corner way too fast. There is no way for the driver to navigate this corner without either braking or going off track. Dive bombing followed by braking mid-corner is no way to make a safe pass. It’s reckless and irresponsible.

Some of the discussion on FB turned to “why didn’t anyone ask if the drivers were okay?” I have to admit that I didn’t. I’m ashamed of that. I should have thought of the drivers first. From the POV of the Miata, it didn’t look like the BMW got hit particularly hard, but apparently the car ended up on its side and the driver was shaken up. After watching the video again, I could see how the BMW might end up in the K-wall at 60 mph. That would suck. So yes, if you’re the BMW driver, you have every reason to ask “how come you weren’t concerned with my well being?” I hope you also understand that by fighting for a corner you had already lost, you endangered yourself, another car, and reduced the race time for every other team on track. We have a right to ask “what the hell were you thinking driving like that?” Where is your apology for driving like a jackass? We all need to own our faults. I’m sorry I didn’t think of your well being. Now it’s your turn to apologize.

I saw a couple comments that said “why wasn’t the Miata farther out on the left?” I’ll tell you why. Setting up on the typical school line in a race with people of suspect skill and intentions is a great way to get punted. Want someone to hit you in the rear tire and break your suspension? Set up on the outside and cross the whole track to the apex. Rather than positioning farther to the left, I would have made the pass and positioned myself in front of the BMW. That would close down the inside line and make the cars go through the corner in a line rather than side-by-side. Yes, that would have ruined the speed through the next corner, but since the Miata was faster, it wouldn’t have mattered.

LDRL TH5 2020 recap

Late Start

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we left for the track about 9 hours late. We were supposed to leave Davis at 9 am but David was delayed and he didn’t arrive with the truck until almost 6 pm. We quickly loaded up and then headed for Esparto where the Yaris was vacationing under the care of Mike “Tinyvette” Meier. We made it to the track just about 8 pm when the tech inspection was supposed to be closing, but there were 10 cars still in line, so no problem. Everything checked out fine for us, but my old Miata was getting some extra scrutiny.

Miata #581

Before the Yaris, I was on a team that raced a Miata. It participated in Lemons, Lucky Dog, ChumpCar, a bunch of HPDEs and even an SCCA race school. It went through half a dozen Lemons themes, hosted an all women’s racing team, and was rented out to a friend’s team while their car was getting fixed. During its tenure with us, it grabbed 3rd place in B class in Lucky Dog (Laguna Seca) and 3rd place overall in ChumpCar (Thunderhill). Eventually I started to spend a lot more time with the Yaris and the Miata sat in my driveway for a year with a bad engine. And then we got a JDM engine and it sat for another year doing nothing. I was going to sell it and then instead I donated it to Deaf Power Racing, a new team whose mission is to get more deaf people into motorsports.

Under DPR care, #581 has had a whole host of problems. They inherited an incomplete build and a partial Lemons theme. In their first outing, a few weeks ago, the engine bent a valve. So they went into the Thunderhill race needing to install a new engine, which they did the day before. Their reward for all their hard work was LDRL officials giving them a hard time for the cage. Not only was the cage built by Evil Genius Racing (owner John Pagel is head of Lemons tech), it also had previously passed inspection by NASA, SCCA, Lemons, ChumpCar, and even Lucky Dog themselves! Anyway, their cage issues got resolved but that was just the start of their problems.

When the green flag was thrown on Saturday, they didn’t make it through the first stint before they came in with a broken diff hanger. That never failed on us, but I guess they fail eventually. The next calamity was that the axle wasn’t replaced correctly, so the diff oil leaked out and the diff over heated. So after working for several days straight they had a pile of broken bits to show for it.

Guest Drivers

I run guest drivers on my race team all the time. There are lots of people who pay money to enter a race only to find that the car they were supposed to drive has died for one reason or another. Being the sap that I am, I like to give such unfortunate people a chance to walk on the mild side. I’ve met some really nice people doing this, and that’s probably what reinforces the practice. DPR had 3 arrive-n-drives and no car. So we cut our stints down and made room for them. I would have made room for the owners too, but they thought it would be best to prioritize their paying customers.

Lucky Coincidence!

It turns out that one of the drivers, Taylor, had a rather unexpected connection to me. Not only does he know Ben Dawson, a dear friend and former teammate of mine back at the start of my racing adventures, he had also driven on his racing team. That meant Taylor had actually driven the second car I had given away: my 1986 BMW 325e. That now lives in North Carolina with Winsome Racing. Now if you’re counting cars, you might think that Miata #581 was car #1, but actually that was #3. The first racecar we gave away was our 1988 MR2. Don’t get excited, I don’t have any immediate plans of making the Yaris #4.

Lucky Find!

Guest driver #2 turned out to be a really important person to meet. Ryan is a former StopTech employee. Not only could I share with him my love for the StopTech 309 compound, he also told me what was wrong with my brakes. The Yaris doesn’t use stock calipers because the pad choices were so limited. It was either EBC Red or Hawk HPS, neither of which was very good. So I upgraded to a larger caliper from a Corolla. You have to use a different rotor, but otherwise they bolt right up. StopTech 309s are made in Corolla sizes, which is why I made the swap in the first place. Here’s the problem: the Corolla piston is probably a little bigger. That means it takes more pedal travel to operate the brake and it results in a softer pedal feel. And here I thought I could never remove the last bit of air. Ryan said he would give me a professional brake analysis if I sent him my part numbers and corner weights. How cool is that?

Change Happens

Lucky Dog Racing League is changing. While some change is inevitable, the direction the league is going is away from me. It’s probably better for the health of the series to embrace fast, expensive cars, but it’s leaving budget, grassroots racing behind. Sure there are a few teams showing up with single axle trailers, but there are more with stackers. And while there’s nothing in the rules preventing someone showing up in a 1980s econobox, there’s also apparently nothing stopping people from bringing cars that compete in NASA E0. The speed difference isn’t safe or fun. Next year they will have a B-Spec class. On the one hand, that’s a nice concession for newer cars like mine that are currently illegal because they are too new. On the other hand, B-Specs are rare, and I’d probably be the only one in class. Participation trophies don’t motivate me. I want to dice with cars of similar speed. The growing speed differential between my Yaris and the top cars is making racing less enjoyable for members of my team. As a result, the Yaris is leaning towards more Lemons and less Lucky Dog in the future (I think).

Video!

I drove a half dozen laps at the start of the race on Sunday before the double yellows came out. I got to dice with a few Miatas during that time. Thanks, that was fun!

FWD vs. RWD in the rain?

A recent comment from an old post sent me down the path of attempting to quantify the difference between FWD and RWD in the rain. How much faster is FWD? A little? A lot? Here’s my first quasi-quantitative attempt at answering that question. I’ve taken a bunch of graphs from SpeedHive from the Lemons Thunderhill event in 2019 where it rained suddenly on Sunday. In the images below, you can see the lap times get slower as a “swell” in the graph. If there’s a big difference between FWD and RWD, the swell for FWD should be much smaller than RWD.

FWD Acura Integra

RWD Mazda Miata

RWD Lotus mongrel

FWD Hyundai Elantra

RWD Mazda Miata

RWD Porsche Boxster

RWD BMW E30

RWD BMW E30

FWD Dodge Neon

RWD BMW E30

RWD Mazda Miata

RWD Toyota Celica

AWD VW Vanagon

FWD VW GTI

FWD Hyundai Accent

RWD Mazda RX-7

I don’t see much difference between the swells of FWD, RWD, or the one case of AWD. This is just a random selection of graphs though, and maybe with a larger selection I’d see the trend. Here’s the last graph showing our Toyota Yaris. Note the Y-axis! We had a 35 minute stop, which has the effect of making our rain laps look better than they were. But of course we did rock in the rain, as evidenced by the video linked below.

Post-race analysis: drivers

Let’s take a look at some of the telemetry traces of the Triple Apex Racing drivers from the last race.

Danny vs. Danny

The first thing I want to discuss is Danny. I’m usually a couple seconds faster than Danny. I was on Saturday. Then we switched tires on Sunday and everyone went faster. But was it really the tires? In the speed trace below, Saturday is black and Sunday is red. I’ve displayed the top 3 laps each day. Saturday he was doing 3:39-3:40 while Sunday it was 3:36s. What I see here is that he’s driving differently. On Sunday (red) he started backing up the corners. He gets his braking done earlier and gets on gas earlier. Most of the time, his minimum corner speed is higher despite the change. The fresh tires may have contributed a little to his higher speed, but I think it’s mostly because he’s getting better at driving a low powered FWD car with an open diff. His usual car is 911 GT3, so yeah, it’s a little different!

 

Danny vs. Ian

Due to yellow flags, I didn’t get many fast laps. I did a 3:38 and 3:37 back to back. You can see these starting at the 10:00 mark in my video from the last post. In my 3:38 lap, I lose 1 second passing an E36 in T2 when it changes line mid-corner. Then I pass the yellow Miata in T5, messing up my T6 entry, causing another loss of a second on the run up to 9C. The 3:38 could easily have been a 3:36. On the 3:37 lap, I lose a little time making a pass in T2 and then 1 whole second in T3W while I wait for a fast E36 to get around me. So that too could have been a 3:36. Had I gotten a bunch of clean laps, I’m pretty sure I would have been doing a bunch of 3:36s. Could I have broken into the 3:35s? I don’t know. For the most part, Danny and I drive pretty similarly. Below, the red lines are Danny’s fast laps (as above). The black is my 3:37 and the blue is 3:38. This is a speed trace from 7W to the SF line. We have a slightly different way of doing 1W, but the rest is similar enough that you might think it was the same driver.

Randy vs. Danny

So I’m sure everyone wants to know how fast Randy was (green lines below). Faster than Danny (red lines). Where is he faster? You might expect it’s the fast corners, but it’s the slow ones. He gains nearly 1.5 seconds in T9C alone! And he was only 1.8 seconds faster than Danny. T9C is on the far left of the graph. But he’s also faster in T7W and T11. How? Mostly by running over curbs. As the car owner/builder, I don’t really approve of that.

Randy Pobst is a sweetheart

The Lucky Dog race at Thunderhill was good fun. Ultimately, we didn’t place particularly well, but as we’ve found out over the years, it’s more fun racing for giggles than trying to win. So we were leisurely about pit stops and put some guest drivers in the car. One of those drivers was the Internet celebrity pro driver Randy Pobst. Randy has a reputation as a fast driver but there’s a lot more to the package. He’s very approachable and knowledgeable, and he listens as well as he talks.

FUUUCK. I only had one camera working on Sunday when Randy was driving and it was pointed to the rear.

When Randy got in the car I told him to “bring it back whenever”. Given that he drove it until the end of the race (~60 min), I think I believe him when he said he was having a lot of fun. Apparently the Yaris reminded him of his old 80s Golf. Randy wasn’t the only person who had a great time in the econobox of doom. Lemons veterans “Crazy Mike” and Steve “Chotus” Warwick also drove and loved it. Mike was an “official” Triple Apex Racing driver this race and Steve was a stud driver, piloting some 4 or 5 cars on the weekend. That reminds me of a quote.

I never had a 10, but one night I had five 2s… and that ought to count for something.

— George Carlin

Every time I race the Yaris, it reminds me of why I built it. I love driving and hate wrenching. Despite appearances, the Yaris is a great driving car. It’s also cheap to run and tougher than it looks. It got side swiped twice during the race and just shrugged them off. The one annoying feature of the car is inside wheel spin from the open diff. That’s something I may address in the off season.

Look for some video and telemetry posts in the near future.

Aero Thoughts

I haven’t looked at the data yet, but here’s my seat of the pants impression of what it did.

  • The wind deflectors on the A-pillars did something. There seemed to be less noise in the cockpit. Did they improve top speed? I think so. In the last Lemons race we lost a few mph on the main straight and I think we got that back.
  • The wing probably added useful downforce in T1 and T8. I always take T8 flat out, but this time it was a really boring flat out. In T1, I usually brake lightly, but this time I would just breathe the throttle off for a heartbeat and then go right back on. No brakes needed. That allowed me to make some passes on higher powered cars.
  • The interior of the car still smells a little of catalytic converter, so I think some fumes are getting in from the rear. I want to fix that somehow.

I won’t know if these impressions are correct until I check the data. I’m fully prepared to be wrong!

Thunderhill Ready

Before the last race, I did a lot of lightening. The biggest win was getting an extra set of doors and gutting them to metal skins. While they weigh 50 lbs less each, they leave a larger hole and have no mirrors. That probably negatively affected our drag as top speed was off by 5 mph. Lap times were about the same though, probably due to better acceleration. Since there wasn’t much to do to get the car ready, this weekend we added some features that may improve our aerodynamics.

In the picture below, you can see a white piece of plastic on the A-pillar. This bulges out a little which we hope will deflect some of the air outward, so that the window doesn’t act like a parachute. The plastic is very heavy and shouldn’t move even with high air speed.

I also added a wing to the rear. This is a present Mario gave me that we had at one time installed on the front of the car as a sight gag. Now it’s installed in the correct place with mounts I hacked together. It’s more sturdy than I would have thought. No idea if it works, but even if it doesn’t give much down force, maybe it helps prevent air from the tailpipe going back into the cabin. Or maybe it creates lift and gives us carbon monoxide poisoning. Who the hell knows?

The last piece of our “aero package” is an air dam that I will attach once we get to the track. It will be interesting to compare data from the May Lemons race to see if top speed improves on the main straight and if we get any extra grip in the fast corners.

The only thing I’m concerned about at this point is the rear tires. The 8″ rims aren’t fully covered by the wheel wells. I guess I’ll order some fender flares.