The Road to ChumpcarThe home of "Apex of Failure" a crap-can racing team.

There seems to be some conflict brewing between Chump Car and 24 Hours of Lemons.  For me, racing is racing.  More races at more tracks on the west coast makes me happy.  I can appreciate both of their takes on the idea.  Judging by the number of entries turned away at the last Lemons thunderhill, it even sounds like the market can support two series as well.  Maybe people are just kicking dust.  See the linked blog post and form post from John @ chumpcar with more of the history about where they started and how open they have been with the Lemons team.

The Lemons side of things:

http://presssnoop.com/?p=1498

The ChumpCar side of things:

http://forum.chumpcar.com/index.php?/topic/396-why-all-the-fighting/page__pid__3024__st__0&#entry3024

(I wrote this shortly after chump car’s first race in early Nov 2009.  Seemed like it needed to be here too.)

ChumpCar (http://www.chumpcar.com/) has just finished their first event! This is a new crap can racing series similar to 24hrs of lemons. This event was held at Portland International Race way over Halloween weekend. I was lucky enough to be invited to join the action as a driver on my friend’s team, Free Range Racing (http://freerangeracing.blogspot.com/).

All the cars at the race had to be worth less than $500 (not counting safety gear).

Starting at noon on Saturday all the cars were to be driven for 24 hours straight (there was a break from 6-8pm for a Halloween party and trick or treating for the kids). Each team had to have 4 drivers. We had 6. One team had 12. 38 teams made it to the starting line with 247 drivers.

The event was held at Portland International Raceway. It has been 42 years since PIR hosted a 24 hour race. A small army of volunteers from the track, Cascade Sports Car Club, SCCA, The Friends of PIR, the fuel truck drivers (no gas station at the track), ambulance staff, and a number of other organizations made this event possible. We were especially lucky to rope people into working the corners for nearly two days straight.

It started life as a first gen MR2. It’s something more than that now but I’m not sure what. When it was being built it wasn’t function over form, I think it was just “function”.

The general theme was green racing. The windmill is actually a 3rd or 4th generation idea. This car has competed in lemons events with even more primitive windmills. This is the first fully mechanical one. It actually made 1psi of boost at 60mph. That’s a torque plate from an auto tranny hooked up to the compressor side of a turbo out of some truck. It didn’t last very long into the race. This video was taken before the event: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsUQ0YnrOu8&feature=player_embedded

This race was not it’s first rodeo, it had already developed a number of handsome scars. With a fresh set of tires and a fresh motor we were ready as we were ever going to be.

A couple members of our team were part of the event staff so we spent most of Friday getting the race ready. I got to help with vehicle scruteneering. Each of the cars there had already developed a rich history during their construction. I don’t think a single team was found cheating. Everyone was there to have fun.

The wrecking crew setup camp here. This is how chump car hands out penalties. You go off track? Do something unsafe? Break a rule? You have to answer to these guys. A crew of community college students run by a retired southern racer would do their worst to your car. Your team then had to repair it before you could go back out on track. A couple cars had their tires swapped. One team had their distributor and spark plugs wires handed to them in a box.

One of the more serious violations involved this Porsche. Their wheels were taken off and the lug nuts hidden all over the car.

Oregon normally treats us to a wet Halloween and this was to exception. I was given the first stint out in the car at noon on Saturday. The track was wet and I had a lot of problems on the first couple of laps keeping the back end in line. I spun twice in the first 15 minutes. After getting over the titters of my first wheel to wheel circuit race I really got into the grove. I made at least 20 passes during my nearly 2 hour session. The track started drying out and there was some great battles already under way. I got us a decent way up mid pack.

The track had a WiFi network that allowed us to stream race results live to our laptops. Seeing the live board with laptimes really added a lot to the race. Running the pit and race strategy was almost as much fun as driving.

A break was scheduled at 6pm for a Halloween party. After 4 driver changes we were up to 16th place. During the 2 hour break we were allowed to work on the cars. The impreza that was there did a tranny swap and didn’t miss a second of laptop time (they ended up getting an award for consistency).

I wasn’t scheduled for another stint till around 2am so I decided to try to get to sleep. With the cold and adrenaline running through my system I really only got about 4 hours of “rest”.

I was woken up around 1am to get ready. A shifter linkage problem that caused us to pit 5 extra times had dropped to the mid-low 20s. The alternator was cooking the battery. Our voltage regulator had gone out and we were putting out 16v+. The starter was showing some signs of impending failure. To make matters worse, it didn’t want to idle any more. The only time we could afford to shut the car off for was fueling. The rest of the time someone had to constantly try to keep the engine running. We also had an oil leak. The oil pan had been “loafed” to increase our capacity but it looks like the work had a flaw in it. The leak wasn’t bad enough to stop us. We had only lost a quart over 12 hours of racing. The car was definitely showing signs that it might not make it.

(One of my teammates pictures here) The driver change went without incident and I was out on track. Our mirrors weren’t great so it took quite a bit of energy to keep an eye out for passing cars. It took me longer than before to get into the grove.

ChumpCar has built their own lighting system to take when them to tracks. Instead of flags there was a traffic light kind of array with three orange and three red lights. There was only two instructions the flag stations could give, full course yellow or full course red. Under yellow everyone had to slow to 1/3rd race pace and passing was not allowed. Under red everyone had to just stop right on track.

This is when the fog started coming in. It started showing up in turns 3 through 7. Turn 7 was especially bad. I’m so glad they had put out cones for the braking zone before the cone it was literally the only thing I could use to know where the track was. You couldn’t see the apex of the turn until you were already committed to your line.

I managed another hour and forty minutes or so in my stint. The fog kept getting worse. Our next driver was relaying conditions to us over the radio and he was pretty much as this limit. We called him in when the next full course yellow it. Right as we had grabbed the fuel rig to do a pit stop they red flagged the whole race and stopped all work being done on the cars. Apparently we weren’t the only ones having problems.

At 4:45am drivers meeting was held and it was decided that we would delay the whole race due to fog. Another meeting would be held at 8am and we would decide what to do then. I think this brief sleep period for everyone (including the workers) ended up preventing a lot of accidents. I managed to finally get some real rest.

This is from right before the restart from the fog delay. The race was restarted at 8am and they even moved the checkered flag back to 3pm for us!

At several points in the race we were putting in the 5th or 6th best lap times. We made it up to 19th after 30 minutes back on track. The fog was still there but the visibility was decent. Another fast driver in the car got us another couple of positions. Mechanical failures started showing up in all the teams. That brought us some positions too. Our car pitted with throttle failure (a homemade line bracket had slipped out and needed to be reattached). That cost us a long pit but it could have been a lot worse. The fiat next to us (La Famila) broke their cable and didn’t have a spare. It took them over an hour to get it working again.

At around 11 in the morning, we realized we were in with a real shot at the top 10. We were lapping 10 seconds faster a lap than most of the cars ahead of us and catching them.

This team had never placed that high before and we were going to do it. Our race plan was hatched to do as fuel driver changes as possible. Sitting in 12th, we had two teams to beat. Team Partridge in a protégé (I think?) was only a couple laps ahead of us and we were pretty sure to catch them in the next hour. The real challenge was “Beach Dudes” in a datson 510 wagon. They had been in the top 10 nearly the entire race and had build up a big lead on us. We were catching them but was it fast enough?

The radios had been spotty all weekend but this is when they failed for the final time. The pit could give instructions to the driver, but the driver couldn’t communicate back.

We had 3 hours left in the race and one hour left on the driver who was on track. That meant one last driver change for us. The car was smoking a little at the end of the front straight. The oil pressure gauge looked ok but how bad was that leak getting?

Spies!

One of my buddies was working as a pit marshal and we got him to go down to beach dudes and collect some intel. He delivered. The good news was that they had destroyed their race tires over the night and had been forced to switch to their backup street tires over the night. The bad news was that they only had one driver change left like us (we were hoping that they had more so we could lap them while they were in the pits) and they were about to put in their fastest driver.

We continued to make progress on both the teams with 1 hour and 30 minutes left in the race on our last driver. Beach dudes had 10 laps on us and while we were much faster than them on track right now, we wouldn’t have the time to make it up. At this point, we were hoping for last minute mechanical failure to take one of the leaders out completely.

I gave our driver encouragements and updates but he couldn’t respond. We could hear his radio key up and that he was trying to say something but we had no idea. Fearing he was reporting impending failure we were on the edge of our seats each lap. The car was smoking more but he was sitting pulling in the completion.

We made a dramatic pass of Team Partridge on the front straight and claimed 11th. That needed to happen on our way to 10th but the numbers for beating beach dudes kept looking worse and worse.

We got our miracle. The Volvo wagon which had been tearing up the track all weekend was towed into the pits. The rumor was that the diff was gone and they had no spares. We were also told later it was the axle. Either way they were out of it. They sat 20 laps ahead of us when they failed with 40 minutes left in the race. All we had to do was put in 2 minute laps (we were sitting in the mid 1:40s) for the rest of the race and we could claim 10th. Nearly assured of our victory our pit was out of their seats with excitement.

That’s when I saw our car in the distance coming down the pit lane unaccounted. I was the stand by driver in case we needed to change at the last minute but I didn’t have all my gear on. I desperately started changing in case we needed to change drivers when I heard “NO BREAKS!”

The front wheels were wet with brake fluid. Then flame. Then smoke. Our car was on fire. Luckily we had several people with fire bottles already in had when he had come in and we got it out quickly. The driver didn’t seem to connect someone yelling “fire” with needed to get out of the car. All he could think about was getting back on track. We had completely destroyed the pads. The brake pistons had pushed out and the hydraulic fluid had caught on fire. There was no way we could fix that fast enough.

The oil leak was also much worse now. There was a constantly set of drips coming from the oil pan.

We push the car out of pit lane into our camp defeated but happy that we could go down with so much excitement. Unwilling to accept defeat we came up with a new plan. We would push the car back into the pit lane on the last lap and he would nurse the car around the last lap at 25mph.

Just as we finally push the car down into the pit lane, the last lap sign was show. He got out there. We finished under our own power! We even got to claim 13th in the end!

Yes, that’s all caked oil. It was clean when we started

We even got an award for ugliest car. No one else was close.  What a race.  Time to get our own team going!

It’s true, someone had this brilliant idea and is trying to sell it to the networks.  At the Portland ’09 event there was a camera crew filming for a pilot.  Doug here is getting interviewed.  More information can be found over on the ChumpCar forums.  They have finished a trailer, check it out!

Welcome to The Road to Chumpcar!  Gabe invited me to help contribute to this here web log.  We hope to chronical the trials and tribulations of starting a crap-can racing team and getting into the sport.

What is crap-can racing you say?  It only the most accessible form real paint trading wheel to wheel road racing… [clarkson] in the world [/clarkson].  You bring a group of idiots team of brave individuals to compete in a true 24 hour endurance (Le Mans style) race with a $500 car.  An organization called the The 24 Hours of LeMons helped bring the sport to this country several years ago.  More recently a similar series ChumpCar is also offering events.  Since ChumpCar is the only one at our home track (Portland International Raceway) we will be aiming for them for our first couple of entries.  Luckily both series share the same spec of car so whatever we build should be eligible at both kinds of events.

We have finalized our core team and our car.  Moving forward I hope to update this regularly and try to back-fill when I get some time.

Welcome!