2002

The first event for 2002 was the NASA Virginia chapter event on January 10th. It was relatively warm for January, just like last year, and we had a nice 20 car turn out for the Pro class. Falkner took the win in the class over Richard West. I spent most of my day working, concentrating specifically on the timing. I can't seem to leave people alone with the timing equipment and not have to worry about delays, so I worked the timer until the fourth heat, at which point, I reluctantly took my runs. I hadn't even changed tires on the Camaro, and since Pat was my only competition anyway, it didn't seem like it was worth the trouble. He had brought the Lightning, complete with race tires, and was able to stay just about 1.5 ahead of me. Eh. Another event down, more of my autocrossing soul sucked away. :(

Matthew and I left the event site then, and got cleaned up for dinner. We went to an Italian place with Lee, Doug, Brian, and the Erics, and during dinner, Pat called. I told him where I stood, and wished he was there to share with me. I was worried that I would do my normal head-up-my-ass Sunday driving, and totally blow any chance to stay in the trophies (which were only four deep).
Next morning, I get there early, and walk each course once again. Jon Johle thought it was amazing that I could get away with so few walks. I just didn't feel like being there that early, that's all! :) Then, I took the car to a nearby car wash and cleaned it, something I should have done before I left on Friday, or at least something I should have done during all the damned down time on Saturday. When I came back, FS was starting to fill up on pregrid, so I just parked it in the third FS spot (!), and repositioned the magnetics. Dean was fourth, gridded next to me, and Chris Lindberg and Mike Johnson were ahead. How strange to be still gridded up front on Sunday morning! Well, the trash talking was severe. Anyone who didn't know the usual modus operandi for FS would have thought we hated each other. When called to grid, we're all revving on each other, and just generally being obnoxious. Finally, up at the line, that's when I got the shakes. My left side time was a second slower than my right. I really needed to improve there, but I also needed to go faster overall. As soon as Dean cleaned up his right side times, I was going to be no higher than fourth, so I had to work hard. But, for some reason, any time I'm lined up against Dean to start, I psyche myself out. Since reaction times actually counted now (yah!), I had to cut good lights, otherwise that would hurt me too. So, my first set of runs, I go no faster, and I cone! Yikes. That hurt, bad. I wasn't sure where I stood, since most everyone had improved with their first Sunday runs, so I basically sat in the car, and thought hard about how I was going to pull a trophy out of my butt on my last runs. I was going to be starting on the right -- where I didn't need a time as badly, but still now 0.7 back from fast time. The left, there was no question I had to go much, much quicker there. The 37.3s I was sitting on (both my Saturday times were 37.3) weren't going to cut it any way I looked at it. The good thing was that I'd be on warmer tires for the left side. Well, I didn't match my 36.4 on the right, but I did drop into the 36s on the left for my last run. It still wasn't pretty, but the 36.9 was good enough to hang onto the 4th and final trophy spot by 0.3 over Randy Keeton, who'd come out from Oklahoma in his '90 1LE. Dean had catapulted over Mike Johnson as well as me to finish 2nd. I was 0.9 back from Mike and 1.4 back from Dean. Chris won, another 0.3 ahead of Dean.

me and ron bistrais at the line; photo by evan gay

Ah, yes, the Petersburg ProSolo, where I thought I would stand yet another chance of trophying in open class.... after all, this is my "home track," so I should have some sort of advantage, right? Well, it's rapidly looking as if the Petersburg ProSolo is taking the place of the now-defunct Harrisburg Pro as my "worst event of the year." I can't quite figure it out. Maybe I went in with too high of hopes, and overdrove. Maybe I just really suck, and Ft. Myers and Houston were the anomalies.
All I know is that after the morning runs, I was 8th, and none-too-happy about it. For the afternoon, Ron Bistrais and I were paired up; Mike Johnson with cones and red-lights was behind us. All the LT1 cars were at the back. :\ Mike, especially, could do better, though all of us (maybe I'm being optimistic, including myself in there) could have been in the trophies. Saturday afternoon, I cut some excellent lights (0.5s for the most part), and that helped me creep back towards the top half, landing in 6th for Sunday morning. I still needed to work on the turn-around (which was less noxious than previous years, due to a change in course designers), and I felt I could do that for Sunday.

me coming out of the turnaround, photo by evan gay

Like I said before, my hopes for driving well on Sunday morning were crushed by pathetic launches (0.7s, mostly), and just plain overdriving on my part as I got more and more frustrated. At least I didn't destroy my front tires in my overdriving frustration, but I was in tears afterwards. I was lucky that Shane Pearson was too honest to let his unconed time remain in the standings; when he saw the mistake, he asked timing for an audit,

and that moved him to the back of the class. With the incorrect time on Shane's part, I would have finished 9th.
I was very, very depressed after this event, and left the numbers on the car and the tires in the back for three days afterwards. Just having to unload the car reminded me of how crappy I did. However, as I kept telling myself, at least I didn't have any wheels fall off and my tranny still worked.

LT1 1LE vs. LT1 1E at the petersburg pro; photo by evan gay

The next event I went to was 6/9, at Rosecroft Raceway. I wasn't planning on going. I certainly wasn't planning on running. However, Evan Gay asked me to come out and give him some pointers, as he is a novice, and he wants to be beating Mike Neary (who's been autocrossing for six or seven years). So, I cave and drive out to Rosecroft that morning. It was hot and icky, and, not having planned on going, I didn't bring sunscreen. This would prove to be a terrible mistake. :o I was soooo sunburned afterwards that the peeling didn't finish for almost two weeks. ick.
Well, Elaine Wong kindly squeezed me into the third heat, and Evan pressured me to run his car. I think he really wanted to see if the car itself was fast enough to get by Neary, who had a 67.1, or if the car needed work too. Now, I am actually relatively modest, and I consider Mike to be a pretty good driver, so I wasn't sure if using me to test how well set-up a car is was the best idea. In any case, Rosecroft is sandy enough, I would think that an AWD car would definitely have an advantage.

Evan's times were pretty good, and in fact, he had a raw time that would have beat Mike -- except he had an ugly cone on the run. The run itself would have been faster, and the cone was hit in order to stay on course. The time was still quick enough to be 0.1 better than Mike's best. Then, I came out in the third heat, and proceeded to dominate STX for the day. Sigh.....
I swear I took it easy for my first run. Really. Honestly. However, when I came across the line and Evan (who was riding along) saw the time was a 66.8, he didn't believe me. I wasn't pushing the car hardly at all, but it really is well set-up and easy to drive. My second run, Evan took pictures while another guy -- Alex, I think is his name; he runs a Galant VR4 -- rode along. I got the car out of shape in one area, and then

me sliding the car in the rosecroft sand; photo by evan gay

when I came back through (gotta love small courses that cross over themselves!), the workers had set the pointer cone back wrong, confusing the heck out of me. Well, they left it that way for the next few drivers too, so Marshall Cone and I talked to the OD (Eric Wong), who said we could take reruns if we wanted.
My third run, I again had Alex riding along, and this time I drove much more smoothly, looking ahead better, and it paid off.... 65.5!! And, when I looked at the exact times, it was a fast enough 65.5 to be leading STS over Eric Gallipo, which is excellent considering how few times this year, even at National level events, STX beats STS. The 65.5 was also more than good enough to take the STX win from Neary, by 1.6 seconds. I tried to better the 65.5 on my rerun, but only ended up coning and overdriving to a 66something. Oh well.

The following weekend was the Father's Day autocross that I was sponsoring (ie. NASA-Virginia was putting on) at Virginia Motorsports Park. I had been at Summit Point on Saturday with Pat, helping him out after a dumbass in a BMW couldn't figure out what a waving yellow flag meant. Pat had spun in turn 1, and then the car stalled and wouldn't restart. Several other cars came through the turn, heedless of the waving yellow, and then the white ITS 52 car lost control and hit the drivers side rear quarter panel. The whole rear end of the car is now shifted about 2-3 inches towards the right. The trunk lid emerged unscathed, possibly because the trunk release cable was hit in the collision, and so it popped open before being damaged. With some help, the car made it back on track for the afternoon qualifying session, managed to run even faster than the morning, and so Pat decided to stay for Sunday's race, leaving me to go to Richmond that evening all by my lonesome. :(
As usual, I was the first to arrive, and amazingly enough the gates were actually open when I got there at 8. I was lucky in that Chris had loaded most everything in the dualie before I got there (I had anticipated using my brother's S10), and so I took the table and timer out, then started to create a course. I was annoyed to see that the oil collectors had been moved back onto the edge of the pavement (for the ProSolo, they'd been moved about 50 yards away), and so had to compensate for that in the design. Ultimately, I used part of the ProSolo courses in my design, as the rubber laid down was quite noticeable. I set up a very tight seven cone slalom through the "danger zone" near the fence o' doom, and then showed Evan how to do registration. We actually started pretty much on time, and with only about 60 competitors, I said "five runs" and we still had time for fun runs -- about an hour's worth. Hey, people don't show up, it's their loss.
I wasn't really in the mood to drive, though I was hearing mostly good comments about the course and I kind of wanted to experience it for myself. However, more than anything else, I wanted to drive my car, which was sitting at home. Pat said that since he was group 1, he might come down after his race and bring my car, but he never showed. :( Ultimately, I did take a couple of runs in Evan's car again, but it was during fun runs, and the course wasn't really set up completely right at that point. It was a fun course, and even though some people initially complained about the tight, long slalom, they realized why it was present and even came to like it's rhythmicity. :)

pushing the car hard through the crossover

looking ahead, showing alex how to take the crossover at rosecroft; photo by evan gay

Oscoda was to be a looooong weekend. When I initially saw the date, I was happy, since it was after the last day of school, but then I took on a "teaching" job for a biotech career "camp," and suddenly, I was looking at a late arrival. Worse yet, I had tentatively planned on codriving with Mike Neary in his GS-R in order to get a full STX class, but then I find out Tuesday night before the event that he isn't going to go. So, I have to fix my steering column, and Wednesday night I can't find the proper tool to even take off the airbag! $80 at Sears later, Thursday night, it's 8:30 and I have the column torn apart, but I can go no further. I walk away from it, and my brother comes home a little later and asks me how much it's worth to me to get it back together. <grimace> I ended up paying him to fix it, otherwise I don't know how long it would sit in the driveway undriveable. Because it was done around 1:30AM, I didn't get a chance to wash it or to change the oil.... so I would do those things Friday afternoon before I left. I ended up getting to Oscoda at 3:15AM, after getting pulled over 10 miles south of the town and fortunately getting a warning for 57 in a 45mph.
I get to the event site, get checked in, get my tech sticker, and walk each course once. I then proceed to change my tires, and check things like the shocks and the swaybar while doing so. The front end of the car had been making a weird clunking noise for the previous week or so, and I thought maybe the swaybar was loose, or even an endlink broken. I found the driver's side rear shock was loose, and so I tighten it up, and then I find the passenger side endlink of the front swaybar loose. I think nothing of why it is loose, and proceed to tighten it before putting the car in grid.
My first four runs were atrocious. I started off on the left, and went into the slalom thinking the car was loose due to cold tires. I quickly realized that wasn't the case. After a horrible right side run -- I didn't even look at the times -- I came back to grid and dropped the rear tire pressures in a desperate attempt to calm the rear end of the car down. It didn't work.
After my last two runs, I immediately went back to my paddock space and pulled the right front tire off to find the swaybar endlink was "loose" again. Upon closer examination, I see that it is actually broken in a sense -- the metal shaft is punched through the bottom washer, driving the bushing into the control arm. The swaybar is free to move up and down on the endlink, though not so much side-to-side. I go over to Strano's paddock area and ask if he can help me fix it.
Between Strano and Karl Bender, I get the busted endlink off the car and replace it with pieces that I had extra and some bushings that Strano had. My first two afternoon runs are wasted learning to trust the car again, and then I am pushing the car harder on the two following. I move from DFL to one above, in front of Karl, for Sunday morning. I go over a second faster Sunday morning, but everyone else improves too, so I don't catch Shehan or Youngers (in a BMW 540i!), but I felt pretty good about my runs, knowing that if I had fixed the problem before I ran, I very likely would have finished much higher. In any case, my indexed time was only a hair behind Patty Tunnell's L1 winning time, ahead of Kathy Fitzpatrick, and I respect both of them as drivers. They have both trophied in open class before, and while I think they should run open class all the time, I know that sometimes the money is a difficult lure to avoid. I came very, very close to running ladies class at Oscoda, just to try to recoup some of the money I spent Thursday night.
Kevin and I both got picked to run the Bonus Challenge, so my prayer to get 4 more runs was at least partially answered. Kevin started off against Diane, while I was against an BSP Corvette. Unfortunately, Youngers got a little impatient off the line and redlighted on the first run. The same thing happened to the Corvette driver against me, so heading into the second round, I have only 1 run, and now I'm against Diane. It was quite frustrating to know she would getting a 0.6 head start on me, but I was determined to not redlight. No, instead, I'm quite asleep at the light, and manage to come in somewhere around 0.4 behind her. She almost throws it away when she doesn't stage until 1 second before the shot clock sounds off (I immediately pulled up and staged, she hung back). Again, she gets the lead, and I try to cut a close light, knowing I need every advantage on this run to make up the deficit. Unfortunately, I cut it too close, a 0.485 red light. Oh well. I at least got 2 extra runs.
The ride home was quite long, and I caravaned most of the way back with Tim and Rod. They both started doing the fade around Pittsburgh, so it took about a hour longer to get back than the ride up, but I got in around 3AM.... and slept most of the day Monday. :)
Peru National Tour.... 365 entries..... and FS wasn't even close to one of the largest classes. In fact, I swear it got smaller in the hours leading up to the first car off. Chris decided to run Paula's Miata, Kent Weaver drove Mark Presley's Corvette and Sam switched to ESP in Mike Snyder's newest acquisition. We ended up with 8 cars, and I had mine there, though I drove up with the impression I'd be codriving with Mike Johnson. I didn't trust him not to renege on the codrive, so I brought my tires and such with me (in fact, I just plain didn't unpack after Oscoda). However, he stuck with it, and so I just left my car in the paddock all weekend.
I wasn't sure what to expect from the courses, but when I heard Roger Johnson (Texas) was designing them, I know I expected better than what I saw. Sunday, especially, was pathetic, and both of them were basically rehashed Tour and Divisional courses most of us had seen before. I don't think Roger actually designed the courses, but I don't think they were exact replicas of old Doukas courses either. They were an all-together bad compilation of several previous courses to be sure.
Diane drove first in the third heat, and Mike and I were in the last heat of the day. She only had one competitor, Crista Bolinger in Kent's Mustang, and was beating her handily after Saturday's runs. I was thoroughly unimpressed with my first run later that afternoon, even though it was faster than Diane's fastest run, but I wasn't really sure what a "good" FS run would end up being. After first runs, Mark Shehan was in first, and I was in second, but Mike and Goodner both had cones. My second run was about 0.5 faster and my last run was a 45.0. That put me in fourth, less than a tenth behind Shehan, and 0.067 ahead of George Williams, who was in his 2002 Z28.

Sunday's course was a thoughtless bit of Solo Trials detritus. My first run, my thought when I came across the line was, "That's it???" The mid 37 second run was barely longer than the Oscoda courses a week before -- and those were at least ProSolo courses! Diane's best run, again, was slower than my first run, so I was pretty sure I'd started out okay. The only people with quicker runs after first runs were Goodner and Mike, and Mike had a 36.8. My second run was quicker yet, though I still was late through most of the "offset" type turns leading to the turnaround, and Mike improved 0.2 to a 36.6. Goodner had cones, Shehan -- who was wearing the Bud dress -- was struggling, and George was well back from me as well.
My last run, I'm at the line listening to the FM broadcast of the times. George comes across with a time that is still slower than my first time, and so I know I will finish ahead of him.

diane's car in my hands; photo by jeff cashmore

Goodner has just hit a cone in the slalom again.... and my mind clicks -- all I need is about 0.2, and I will beat Goodner! I was sitting in third at that moment, and knowing Brian would have to stand on his first run.... I was a little antsy. Shehan was also on course, and stood to improve a lot, but getting by Goodner.... he was the '96 FS National Champion, and if I could beat him, I would definitely validate myself as a driver! So, David Potocki (Mikey's son) is the starter, and he tells me I can go. I launch, pitch the car through the slalom without brakes this time, as Mike has told me I should be doing, get the car slowed down for the left hander afterwards, and then get on the gas -- carefully! don't want to spin the inside rear! -- and ease on the throttle until I'm full-tilt to the turnaround. I almost botch it due to the speed I'm carrying, and I'm not really looking at "I will brake here," it's more like, "Crap!! I need to be braking!!" I get the car around the 180, which leads into a straight followed by a slight right hand bend into a hard left. I'm full throttle into the bend, and then not-too-hard on the brakes so I can carry some speed out of the left. The car pushes out, and I'm fighting it to make the medium right through the timing lights. I figure I screwed the end up enough to blow my chances, then I see the time.....

36.885

A 36 second run? From me? I literally do a double-take, which causes time-writer Denise Cashmore to do the same thing. I'm thinking there must be a problem with the display, or someone else has just come across the finish.... it can't be me . I was late, I screwed up so much out there, and then Heyward announces my time, and it's true! I all but started screaming. When I drove past Tim's grid space, I yelled out to him, "I just fucking beat Brian Goodner !!!" and he was congratulating me.... And it turned out that it was a close "win" over Goodner... 0.019 was all the margin would be. I was 0.6 back from Mike, but man, I still can't believe that run was good enough.
I ended up staying for the awards ceremony, despite some issues with my luggage (had left it in Sam's truck, and he had left with it), and got my trophy -- my third open class trophy this year, my third open class trophy ever!! -- and then left to caravan home with Andy and Scott... arriving home at 3:40AM, in time to get a couple hours of sleep before going to work Monday morning....

The weekend of 7/14, I awoke to rain. I debated whether the $25 I'd prepaid was worth not standing around in the rain all day at FedEx Field, and then just decided to go. It was wet and miserable all day, and the announcers kept saying I was leading the class, and finished the heat by saying I won, yet when the results were finally posted, I supposedly came in second. To further throw a wrench in the results, Pat was "credited" with a cone that was never announced, and later in the year, I received a first place trophy, yet the points show a second place finish. Someone needs to straighten up their act. Good thing I don't talk local events seriously.

This past weekend was Wendover, and I just got home.... wow. What a trip. I will update this page when I have the energy to tell the entire, crazy, Red Bull-laced story. ;)

Check out the wheel coming off the ground! photo by Kevin Allen

The last serious event I attended of the year was a school put on by the Tarheel Sports Car Club on November 9th. Miles Beam had asked me waaaaaay back in August if I'd be interested in instructing at this school, and I said probably. I told him to ask Pat too, and he was excited by that idea. So, Pat and I were invited to be instructors, and as part of the "perks," we could attend the autocross the following day. Well, when the day finally comes around, we don't want to take three vehicles down (my Camaro, the Lightning, and the towed Foumula), so I just ride down in the Lightning, and hope I'll be able to score a ride on Sunday. For some reason, I just don't feel any urge to drive the Foumula, yet.
So, we leave Friday night, and it takes forever and a day to get to Laurinburg, where the school is. It's basically

in South Carolina. We get to the event site on Saturday morning, and it's basically a bunch of pretty broken concrete, and all I can think is, "Bergie does 200+mph on his motorcycle here?" I understand the jokes about his Ninja 1200 having ball holders on the gas tank now. Anyway, we're roughly divided up into groups, and the instructors are supposed to have a vehicle to take students through each section of the course (in the morning, we have 3 sections, and the afternoon, we start tying things together). I must rely on the Lightning (oh joy!), while Pat is using his Foumula.
The students, for whatever reason, get a huge kick out of the Lightning, and by the end of the day, we have a little bit of time to play around on Sunday's entire course, albeit backwards. Well, with a little goading, I take the Lightning out, with a passenger. It was tremendously amusing, and no one could believe I got the thing through the course with nary a cone in sight. As the daylight waned, I wanted to take one more ride around, this time with Tim in the passenger seat (he was also instructing). Scott Johnson and Mike Whitney were out making sure the cones were set up properly towards the end, but they were past the one point where I wanted to see what Tim thought of the truck. It was a slightly off-camber left-hand sweeper, and it was fast coming into it, though the truck liked to shift in the middle, which would cause a four-wheel drift. Much like the Evolution school in February, when this happened, Tim and I were laughing so hard, we were in tears. Now, I had to shut it down right after that to avoid inducing cardiac arrest in Mike and Scott, but damn, it was still funny!
On Sunday, I ended up getting a ride in Tom Hoppe's WRX. He had race tires on it, so I ran in ESP instead of STX (which is what it's prepped for now). His roomie was also running it, in SM. Pat was running ESP also, but the street tire class, so I wasn't really directly against him. Well, I wasn't sure what to expect from Tom's car, and my first run, I managed to get it completely sideways. I figured it was cold tires, but when I did it again on the second run, I thought maybe one of the front tires was losing contact with the ground. The pavement was quite torn up in the area, and the turn before the looseness was pretty severe. I wondered aloud to Tom if the inside front wheel might be coming off the ground. He didn't think so; he'd never seen a WRX pull a front wheel off the ground. I remarked that usually the same could be said for F-bodies, but my car was witnessed by several people to be pulling the front wheel off the ground with the help of a little bump at Fentress (when Terry and Tim were driving it). Well, a couple of days later, the proof came on I-club when Kevin Allen posted the picture above. Tom was actually in the car during that run (see the Hawaiian shirt?!), and he was shocked to see the picture clearly showing the wheel off the ground. :)
So, anyway, I take the WRX out, and even with the squirrelly runs, I manage to win ESP over the pony cars by an embarassing 1.4 seconds. I kept apologizing to the "regulars" for running ESP, because I knew this was the last points event for Tarheel, and I just didn't want to cause any problems for those who still had points battles. I think it ended up being a moot point, but they didn't seem to care. At least they were nice about it... at a DC region event or a VMSC event, my experience shows that the "regulars" don't like to be beaten that badly by an "outsider," and there would have been a lot of griping about me being in the class.

The green terror at Grissom Aeroplex; photo by Michael Clevenger

The last event of the year was the following weekend. The last NASA Virginia autocross I will ever have to put up with was the 17th. Again, it was cold and wet.... those who think I am some kind of weather witch might just start to believe that I just didn't care enough to "order" good weather for the event, and they'd be at least sort of right. I could have cared less what the weather was like. I didn't have my car (Pat towed the Foumula down again), and I used the Lightning as the timing vehicle, and just sat there running T&S the whole time. Only 30-some people showed, so I gave everyone six runs, and free fun runs afterwards. What was it to me? Finally, Randall Fish twisted my arm into me running his WRX wagon, so I took it out for a couple of runs during the fun run period. When I beat Evan's best time on my first run, Evan then asked me to take his car out, so I could compare it with Randall's. I ended up slightly faster in Evan's car, though some of that was likely just continued familiarization with the Kriemelmeyer-designed course. Speaking of EricK, he ended up running the Foumula! His Subie's tires were too bald for him to want to drive it down in the rain, so he called Pat on Saturday night and asked about a codrive. After Nationals, Pat could hardly say no. Eric had a blast, and maybe, just maybe I can convince him to take my F-body out for an event or two next year.