IRL 2001: Curtain Call on a 16 Year Career

The 2000 season had been a tough one on me. With the onset of the 2001 season, a call from my old friend Sam Schmidt to join his new Sam Schmidt Motorsports (SSM) IRL team seemed like a fitting end to my tenure as a full-time racing professional. I’d been on the road in one series or another since 1986, and despite a life’s worth of dreams that’d been realized, the grind of always being gone, always missing home, and longing for a normal life had told me it was time to enjoy one last hurrah. Sam’s team, run by LP Racing, the team I’d worked for in 1999, was an easy and welcoming home for me to rejoin.

Larry Nash, owner of LP, was always a favorite of mine—an absolute gentleman, soft spoken, and someone with a history in Indycars that started back in the ’70’s. For me, the combination of Larry’s character, experience, and history is one I’ll always make time for. I’d worked for Larry in 1999, and Larry and I shared a simple, highly effective engineering and managerial relationship. His old school skills and my new school skills blended nicely.

Carrying over from 2000 into Sam’s team was my driver Davey Hamilton. I still chuckle when I think of the first time Davey and I saw each other inside the SSM trailer–it was like two castaways amazed to see each other had made it off a sinking ship intact, alive, and washed up on the same sunny and bountiful island. SSM was an altogether different, freeing world for the two of us after 2000. Sadly, Davey’s career as an Indycar driver wouldn’t survive the season.

Using the venerable, proven Dallara-Oldsmobile package, we’d started out with Ilmor-built engines. The first few races were unremarkable, not bad, but nothing special.

The only scary moment was when we got caught up in the middle of a fiery crash involving a number of cars. Our car was banged up a bit, but the fireball was just a scary visual–not something that hurt Davey (I do think his helmet was a bit toasty, though….) Casey Mears spinning overhead on Davey’s roll hoop was more of a concern, but that was an easy fix. Horsepower, as we’d find out, wasn’t nearly as easy to fix.

Front running Penske Racing and Kelley Racing had used the Ilmor’s to great effect, and we’d expected the same fortunes. That reality was soon dispelled as the timesheets over the first few tests and races always found our SSM car to be as many as 5mph down on the Kelley cars. Yes, engineering resources at Kelley were greater than ours, but at power tracks, where we’d pushed the outer limits of low downforce and minimal tire friction, we were still lacking mightily on peak horsepower. The Penske cars were a further jump ahead in the limited races they did in 2001. It was only then, and after a lot of Sam’s pushing of the Ilmor group, that options for an uprated version of engine was made available. Or should I say, available, but not for free.

The price tag for that uprated engine configuration came with a minimum buy-in of $250,000. The real deal, the “equal with Kelly” version was a $500,000 investment. Now, to the outside world that might not sound out of the ordinary; racing engine manufacturers have long charged different rates for different specifications of their engines. In the IRL, though, the rules didn’t condone such a “pay to play” pricing convention. Indeed, and with the heavy emphasis placed on engine and chassis rules that didn’t allow exclusivity, Ilmor had exploited some of the softly worded text on this topic. Their “Kelley Spec” wasn’t exclusive, but did cost a whole lot more than their regular customer engines.

The IRL had been built on engine builders like Speedway, NAC, Brayton, and a few others that refused to offer an advantage to one customer over the other, or charge more for a different spec. Companies like Speedway, winners of IRL championships with Hemelgarn and Buddy Lazier, and two more with Panther Racing and Sam Hornish, did all their own development, and passed that cost onto their customers equally when an engine was being rebuilt. A routine $25K rebuild would sometime be $30K-$35K, but that was all. Ilmor had gone a different route, saying that if you wanted to seed their development cost pool for between $250K-$500K, you’d get normal rebuild costs and the extra parts or tuning info they’d come up with as a part of your lump sum payment. They claimed Penske had sewn over $1mil into this pool and Kelley another $500K, so for a new team like ours, it just wasn’t going to happen.

It finally took a threat by Sam of changing to Comptech engines for Ilmor to relent; a spare Ilmor-owned engine was pulled from the Kelley garages at Indy for us to qualify and race with. Our times for the month of May weren’t anything special, and at a track that demands every ounce of horsepower available, we were a few pounds short. The folks from YearOne restoration, a huge muscle car restoration company, spent a good part of May with us, sending back pictures and reports to their website–their outsider perspective on Indycar racing was funny at times, but when it came to our complaints about horsepower, they offered to take our engine and return it in full NHRA spec! We’d gone far enough into the month, harping at Ilmor the entire way to help us somehow, mind you, that when they finally did help us, we had almost no time left to get in any running to properly balance the car to the new power and resulting speed characteristics.

We qualified 26th of 33, and hoped that with some much needed time to perfect the car on Carb Day, we might have the #99 chassis in a more competitive state to work with the better engine. Carb Day did go well, and while we never expected to impress, we came away confident that we could run close to the top ten. Larry and I had come up with a pretty solid game plan; with the excellent fuel mileage the Ilmor delivered, our goal was to save fuel and stretch our pitstops, hoping for an opportune yellow flag to leap forward. In the absence of raw speed, this is a fairly common alternative race strategy.

This plan had been working to perfection—we jumped into the high teens before too long, and then marched even further forward. We’d made out way better than we’d expected, climbing up to 7th with 20 laps left. Keeping an eye on telemetry, I’d seen that some odd things were starting to happen with the Ilmor with the checkered flag almost in sight. Our voltage was freaking out, and our water temps also started to spike. Something was certainly trying to end our day prematurely. My 2000 Indy 500 faltered when Davey had almost terminal electrical and alternator problems, causing us to finsih, albeit 50+ laps behind, so I hoped his mojo hadn’t gone sour on him again.

Turns out the water pump had begun to fail, and some high pressure water had been spewing on some of the electronics. No electronics issues, but as our Ilmor had tried to convert itself to steam power, Davey called in and said our day was done., motor broken.

%&*!!^!$&*%! Knowing this was my last ‘500, I was saddened that out pending 7th place would have been my best result.

My teams had led Indy, qualified on the front row, and barring Eliseo spinning alone in ‘99 to be the first car out, my drivers were always in for a good fight. Our 23rd finishing place was a bittersweet end for me, having been so close to a hard fought finish. My percentage of our $280,325 payday did make things a little easier…

Despite all this, and with only a few minutes of the race left, I packed up and watched Helio Castroneves whom I’d worked with in CART take his first win at Indy. With the race over, the entire SSM team did as teams have done forever and walked out to pitlane to applaud the incoming cars. Helio was almost out of his seat as he passed by, and a number of us reached over to give him a high five on the way past. He made no effort to hide the tears of joy on his way to victory circle.

As the last car passed, I made the long walk back to pits down pitlane from our pit spot, and soaked in the energy and ambiance that makes Indy my most hallowed of racing grounds. Just as I got close to make the left to the garages, I saw Helio and his crew climbing the trackside fence and thought how cool it was to see such a raw display of emotion being shown for all the fans. With traditions being such a big deal at Indy, I guess Helio’s break from tradition by climbing the fence didn’t sit well with all. The Monday morning Indianapolis Star had a shot on the cover of Helio in mid-climb on it—half of the fans were clapping. The other half were flipping him off…

With a fresh engine in place, albeit not the best-spec Ilmor wed had for the 500, the Texas night race would prove to be the turning point for our team. With an underwhelming powerplant back in the car, we only managed to qualify 22nd. In a 24 car field, the need for a change in engine builders was painfully obvious.

Concerns for power soon gave way for concerns of the life of our driver Davey Hamilton. Texas has always been the fastest and wildest track on the IRL calendar, and under the lights in the early Texas Summer, vision is critical. On lap 71, Jeret Schroeder blew the engine in his car at the apex of Turn 1 and Turn 2; speeds at this section are usually North of 215mph. Davey, the next car on the scene, was initially undisturbed by the flood of hot oil, had no place left to go when the spinning Schroeder slid up the track on the exit of T2 backwards. Davey’s wheels interlocked with Jeret’s, and Davey’s Dallara was launched over the concrete barrier into one of the dozens of steel poles that support the protective steel crowd barrier cables.

The Dallara, launched upwards and sideways without scrubbing much speed off, broadsided the 1′ diameter steel pole just forward of the dash bulkhead, breaking the front of the chassis off at the mid-thigh area.

Watching the race from pitlane sitting on the timing stand that faces the main grandstands, it took a second to correlate the disturbed yells from the 100,00 fans in front of me to the sudden loss of telemetry data on our team’s screens. Seeing that most of the fans in front of me were point behind the pits over towards turn 2, I knew that whatever happened to Davey wasn’t good. It was then that I heard the IRL officials call out a variety of emergency response commands that were different than what I usually heard in the event of an accident. Whatever code words they used, I knew they weren’t good code words.

We’d soon learn that if Davey had just enjoyed any form of luck, it was that his 200mph impact into the steel pole was somewhat a glancing blow. Instead of it being a pure side impact, he hit at about 45 degrees, with his momentum pulling the car slightly back and away from the pole (towards turn 3.)

This miracle meant that while Davey’s legs were almost entirely exposed to impact the pole once the chassis had broken away, the car had continued away from the pole somewhat, leaving his left leg just below the calf to impact the pole. In that whipping motion, his right ankle and foot were also free to impact the pole. This whole ordeal left Davey with two crushed feet, some lost toes, parts missing from his feet, and a lot of carbon fiber shards embedded in his lower extremities. The steel cables had caught and ripped everything they could off the car, and the pole, showing signs of the initial impact, had been bent about 3″ to the left like a horseshoe where the car hit. For steel, that’s a lot.

All of this happened in less that a quarter of a second. The Delphi impact recorder said his impact with the pole was over 100g’s. The impact recorder was attached to the front part of the chassis, and emerged with some damage too. Not much on the car forward of the fuel tank was worth keeping. Not much from the dash forward was even recognizable. It’s an over-sued expression, but in this case, the car really did look like it had been hit by a bomb. With replays of the crash now running on everyone’s monitors, all of our crew turned away once they saw Davey hit for the first time.

There’s no class to learn how to deal with things like this. Some of the newer crew members just sat on the pitwall in solitude, unsure how to react. Others like Larry Nash and I knew the sooner we could get home, the sooner we could put this brutal weekend behind us.

Davey’s condition wasn’t immediately released, but I did grill the tow truck driver that had returned the car to us as to Davey’s state. He said he was unconscious, and his lower legs were obviously in horrible shape, but that he seemed to be in stable condition when he was airlifted out. It didn’t make the job of wiping a few pints of Davey’s blood off the car any easier, but it was helpful to know our friend was going to hopefully survive his injuries.

With that nightmare over for the time being, a new race with a new driver was the only thing we had to move forward. It wasn’t easy.

Alex Barron, Richie Hearn, Anthony Lazarro, and Jacques Lazier all substituted for Davey from Pikes Peak onwards. Hearn was in the car for Pikes Peak a week after Texas. Davey’s mangled car was still in the upper portion of the trailer, and I had the unenviable job of climbing up there to retrieve a few sundry parts and pieces for the mechanics as they hurriedly build up our new car. I didn’t mind doing it–they were far too busy to spare someone, even for five minutes, to stray from the new car. What I did mind was seeing the reminders of how violent the crash was. As if mopping up Davey’s blood from the car immediately after it was retuned by the wrecker at Texas wasn’t bad enough, staring at this solemn hulk pushed to the far extents of the trailer deck was eerie at best.

While I was up there, someone handed me a disposable camera and asked me to shoot some pictures for our insurance carriers. Geez. Not fun.

The Texas crash was nothing new to any of the veterans on our team, but most of us had only ever dealt with the visuals of twisted cars, not the visuals of a driver being twisted up in a car. With a crowd quickly gathering to look at the smashed cars that night, we pulled all our team together to clean up the car, load it into the trailer ASAP, and get the heck out of there. Insurance pictures or pulling they salvageable parts from the car weren’t even a consideration.

Richie did an admirable job to get up to speed in the car on the 1mi oval and finished 9th, but nothing about the event seemed to be more memorable than we’d just encountered at Texas. We were auditioning full-season replacements for Davey, and although I was mightily impressed by Hearn’s 9th place, Sam opted to try Jacques Lazier at the next round at the series first Visit to the .75mi Richmond International Raceway.

Lazier quickly proved Sam to be a genius. Jaques simply clicked with the team right away. His debut race for us earned his first and the team’s first pole position. With our thoughts still on Davey, Jaques pole position was dedicated to Davey and we all felt a little bit better about our season. Lazier was taken out by Sarah Fisher barely after the race got underway, so our result didn’t match the promise shown.

Two races later, Jaques earned the team’s best result of the year with podium at the 1.3 mile Nashville Speedway. He earned the third place spot, but unfortunately, he never made it to the podium.

Ever heard of someone finishing 3rd and destroying the car on the cool down lap? Yeah, me neither until Nashville…

We’d been running in the top ten for the second half of the race, After a few pitstop errors in the first half cost us valuable track positions. Not wanting to temp fate, we’d decided keep the long-life Firestone’s on the car and only add fuel on our next to last stop. This moved us up a few spots during that stop, and had us closer to the front. with the laps winding down, and few fortuitous cautions to help stretch our mileage, we were faced with only needing a splash of fuel to make it to the end. Unlike most other teams, our tires were worn out. On a big oval like Nashville, grip from the tires isn’t a big factor—the cars have plenty of downforce to keep the cars glued to the track.

Regardless, new tires to offer a brief spell of improved grip that can help to pull off some daring passes that wouldn’t normally be possible during a restart. All the top teams opted for fresh rubber, but wanting to gamble, we decided to got for a timed three second fuel stop (about 9 gallons) to get us to the end, but to skip the tire change that would take as much as six seconds. With the other team fueling for as long as it took to change tires, we ended up getting out three seconds faster than most. This shot us up into 3rd place, the position we held to the checkered flag.

As we all jumped and shouted in excitement, Jaques radioed in to say “I’m OK.”

“I’m OK?”

What the h*ll kind of “Hey I just had the best Indycar finish of my life” kind of radio call is that?

Turns out we were at fault for the accident. The car was also a write off; the chassis had been punctured by the wheel impacting against the turn 2 wall.

What happened? Well, it seems that we forgot to remind Jaques of a certain little fact on his last two pitstops. While the tires were plenty capable of providing grip for this extended run, the thin construction of the tires wouldn’t allow repeated burnouts from leaving the pits. With them suffering a burnout when they were first installed, a second burnout in our second to last stop, and yet another burnout when Jaques sped away from our quick timed stop at the end of the race, by lap 200, he was riding on rice paper.

Rounding turn one at the end of the race, but still at a high rate of speed, his right rear tire had given up and was worn through the tread. Poof. No air, no control, and no more Indycar. I wasn’t surprised to learn the engineering staff wouldn’t be getting a cut of the $73,000 we’d earned in prize money. It was being put into building a new car…

Jaques did one more race for us, finishing 12th at Kentucky before he was able to use his fortunes in his short spell with SSM to be drafted into the powerful Menard’s team when Greg Ray was fired. Lazier soon won his first race for Menard, and although I’d wish he’d stayed with us to possibly win his first race in our car, I was glad to see his years of struggling to make it to the top finally pay off.

Alex Barron, recently orphaned by Penske in CART, tired out in the seat at the next race at Gateway in St. Louis. It wasn’t a positive experience. I’d seen Alex tear things up in Toyota Atlantic in his debut season then followed by mixed fortunes in CART with either lesser teams or Penske when they were in a freefall. By the time he was drafted into Sam’s team, it had been a while since Alex had been in a healthy environment.

Not that we didn’t offer a good opportunity, but with no testing and the heightened expectations for an ex-Penske man to be bang-on the pace, Alex spent the weekend just trying to get comfortable. That says nothing for his talent—he’s absolutely one of the best, but in a weekend like this where he was thrown in at the deep end, few, If any, would have come out with a positive result. Barron, doing his first hot pit stop in a while, was waved out a touch early by our Chief Mechanic, and moved directly into the far lane in the path of an incoming car. The crash, scary as heck with Alex’s car partially flipping the other driver’s car up in the air, ended both teams weekend on lap 41 of 200.

Alex, pissed off while changing and gathering his belongings back at the trailer, looked like he just got duped into a weekend he wished he’d never experienced. We shared a few pleasantries before he left without speaking to the rest of the team, and it seemed all too apparent that he wouldn’t be asked back. Sometimes, opportunity met with skill doesn’t always result in the expected outcome. Thankfully, Alex signed with Blair Racing for 2002, won a race, and was soon winning races for other IRL teams. Richie Hearn was back in for the next race, finishing 6th, proving again that his talent deserved another shot with a top team.

Anthony Lazarro drove for us in the final race of the year; I’d been a huge fan of his talents in Formula Atlantic and Formula Ford 2000, and had no doubt of his abilities to succeed in the IRL. Those races, all change and adjustment for SSM, rounded out a harsh year for us, harder for some of our drivers, but also brought some great opportunities for a couple of the other pilots. We’d switched to Comptech power, finally, for Nashville, and it’s no mistake that the pace of Jaques and Ritchie was indeed aided by the equal and uncomplicated mastery of engine the boys at Comptech delivered.

They were also a pleasure to deal with. What a concept. I’d known Doug Peterson of Comptech for a few years, and knew his company would be a huge upgrade. It’s nice when things like that work out as they should, isn’t it!

Davey has gotten back behind the wheel since his crash in 2001, serving as the driver of the IRL 2-seater at every track. His options as a regular Indycar driver are long past—he carries the obvious results of his crash, not by visible scar, but by his stilted walk. Davey lost a number of inches from his left leg, and like many Indy 500 driver before him, now walks with the unmistakable lilt of the “Indy Shuffle.” That “Indy Shuffle,” a term coined well before I was born, is a point of pride for some that were able to continue. For Davey, the sting of the accident didn’t come with a fairy tale ending.

I’d met some interesting characters at SSM during the season–6′8″ mechanic Dale Fife, now a top mechanic at Dale Coyne’s Champcar team, and Paul Taylor, Chief Mechanic on the winning Krohn Daytona Prototype team. Sam Schmidt and I keep in touch, and I ran Sam Schmidt Paralysis Foundation logos on my factory Subaru NASA 25hr Endurance car last year. Tony Stewart was cool enough to pitch in money for every lap we completed, making a final donation to Sam’s foundation of $2,000.

It might have been my last season on the tour, and I was highly burned out at the end of it, but I’m thankful for deciding to call it a day at the end of the season. It was the right time, and under the right circumstances. Once I’d put that chapter of my life behind me, all the things I’d always longed for came to fruition; a normal job in the Biotech industry came calling, I soon met the woman that’s become my wife, I finished college at the University of San Francisco.

These things might not sound like accomplishments, but for someone that spent his life on the road, something as mundane as having a dog was impossible without leaving a week’s worth of food out. Same goes for having and holding a relationship, a normal job, a normal life, or the better things one can find away from a race track.

When I walked away from my full-time career of 16 years, I’d achieved all the major goals I’d set for myself as a young teen. I’d worked in CART, the IRL, IMSA, Indy Lights, Formula Atlantic, competed in five Indy 500’s, stood on the Black Rock desert with Craig Breedlove and his Spirit of America, won countless races at every level, visited most racing tracks I’d ever wanted to, worked with dozens of characters, learned from fantastic mentors, and worked my way up from a 16yr old ‘gofer’ in the SCCA Pro Super Vee series to an Indycar Team Manager. With those dreams satisfied, I’m rather enjoying my new dreams of family, marriage, and enjoying racing at my own pace.

Not a bad life, eh?

Stories on Davey’s progress: 1 & 2

Atlanta Fireball

BBC Texas Race Report

Team Management: Building a new DP team in 2005

One of the greatest challenges I faced in 2005 was helping to establish the new CB Motorsports Daytona Prototype team. In addition to engineering the car, the hardest aspect of the project was to groom and teach Bingham’s business manager how to run a racing team. Building the team infrastructure in under a month—defining crew roles, pit lane duties, event schedules, operational documents, and about 50 other items all needed to be implemented ASAP.


With the deal coming together so late, our first event, the California Speedway event in April, was a long weekend of very little sleep. That’s not a complaint–just a reality. Between staying up until 3-4am each night in the week preceding the event and during the event creating the aforementioned infrastructure, making Microsoft PowerPoint presentations for the crew.

With many of them new to GrandAm, the litany of rules, procedures, and policies that had to be memorized was vital. The hectic but controlled pace of our debut didn’t end when our day at the track was done— it just meant it was time to scour the local Fontana CompUSA at closing time to find laptops best suited for data acquisition, buy matching pants for the crew, and various other items that were necessary for an impressive showing on and off the track. With all of this in mind, I’m quite proud of debuting with a very respectable 14th starting place and a finish in 13th place.

We team went from strength to strength after Fontana, but the investment of time, energy, and expertise to launch a brand new professional sportscar team in under a month will stand as one my most rewarding team management accomplishments.

A kind note from Chris Bingham:

“Marshall has been instrumental in the success of our team. Since he joined us the energy level and enthusiasm he has shown has been beyond all expectations. Maintaining such a cool head and building cohesion with a new team on a new car has been admirable. The dedication to the teams success and effort in reaching that success has been on par with many team owners I have spent time with. Marshall filled many roles for our team, often beyond those that were asked, and did so with a unique and positive manner. I am grateful to have the opportunity to work with him and look forward to future successes, in no small doubt thanks to his help.”

Chris Bingham
Owner/Driver CB Motorsports
Grand Am Daytona Prototype Team #15

IRL 2000: A Hard Year

I’m nothing if not straight forward about my experiences. As much as it might be tempting to paint a false coat of success and splendor on things, it doesn’t change reality.

For this little ditty, I can say that my time spent with TeamXtreme in the IRL was littered with the odd highlight, a bunch of lowlights, and left a bad enough taste in my mouth to consider quitting the game.

TeamXtreme, a Dallas-based effort, had shown great promise in its 1999 debut season. I also got to know a few of the crew during the season, and chatted frequently with my old friend Mark Wieda, the team’s engineer. I’d known Wieda for years since we were in Indy Lights, and he spoke highly of the team in the off season.

Plans for a two-car program were announced, with Indy Lights winner Airton Dare driving the second car. With the team on the move, my 1999 team without a program for 2000, and a young hotshoe in their fold, I accepted TeamXtreme’s offer to join as an engineer on the primary car belonging to John Hollansworth. The season started off with a two week stay in Orlando, finishing the cars and testing at the 1.0 mile Disneyland track. Initially, we only had one new GForce-Olds, and it looked like Dare would get the new car. I knew Airton was a better driver than Hollansworth, but this slight aimed at my side of the team seemed a bit iffy. Hollansworth, in his second year with the team, would be using the very old 1997-spec Dallara chassis, while Dare got the brand new 2000-spec GForce?

I’d quickly learn that shaky “behind the scenes” deals like this would become a daily routine. After applying a ton of pressure internally, a new GForce for John was delivered and underway to be prepared for testing. For reasons sill unclear, John was ditched after the first race for IRL veteran Davey Hamilton. That’s not a slam against Davey, but rather, another murky decision no one was told about.

Team owner shiftiness aside, the next season-long pleasure made itself known: relentless racism. Oh joy.

My father, a product of the Deep South, emerged with the ability to think for himself, and even tolerate the existence of non-white people. I’d (errantly) assumed working for a Texas-based team wouldn’t be too much of a tolerance or racism risk. Clearly, I forgot the “ass-u-me” rule I’d learned watching Benny Hill as a kid when selecting my choice of IRL teams for 2000.

Working in such a cloud of ignorance will also cloud the competitive environment; with so much time spent railing against every minority seen or imagined, large portions of the team failed to give a properly focused effort. With such a “good ole’ boy” culture within the team a Northern Californian like myself stood out like a fart in church. To complicate matters even more, my girlfriend at the time had the unfortunate distinction of being black.

Talk about a showstopper when she came to see me at the track for the first time.

It’s hard to forget that episode: she walked up to our garage stall and gave me a big kiss. One of the team owners, an ape at best, saw the impending kiss, and reached for the camera he had around his neck. I only noticed his actions as I opened my eyes after the kiss, saw him quickly snapping away at the two of us, and when I eyed him aggressively, he fumbled some bullsh*t answer like “oh, I, uh, just wanted to…..takeapictureofthehappycouple.” With him thinking I was satisfied with his hasty, hurried answer, he didn’t notice that I kept my eye on him as I walked away. When he mouthed to his fellow good ole’ boy next to him “can you imagine kissing a n*gger?” I wandered off to have a little heart to heart with the one non Cro-Magnon team owner (there were about six of them in total, I think, but only one that understood more than grunts.)

My discussion with him was pretty simple, but also foreshadowed a conversation I’d have with no less than three other team members that weekend. The message was simple: “I can’t change someone’s mind, but I sure as h*ll can change their ability to walk or continue breathing if they want to spout anymore of this inbred crap around me, my girlfriend, or anyone else of color.”

To my surprise, everyone I had that little exchange with seemed not only embarrassed, but wanted to repair whatever damage they’d done. One guy, who now, and to my mild displeasure, has won countless races as a member of the Ganassi IRL crew, lasted about two days of going cold turkey from his favorite vice of telling “n*gger jokes.” After he fell off his racist wagon, he just looked at me and said “hey man, I grew up with this, and I guess it ain’t going away. Don’t know what to tell you.” One of the other crew guys told me that that guy’s dad was a hall of fame racist, and made his son look like a failure in the sport of Negro hatred. I still feel sorry for the guy, and even more upset that his father, or any father, would ruin the spirit and soul of a young child with such venomous indoctrination.

OK, so the score so far is (I)R(L)acists 5, Marshall 1, but things would get better still. One of the crew guys on my car, an Ohio native, sheepishly told me that my girlfriend (whom he liked a lot, and though was very polite, apparently) was the first black person he’d ever had a conversation with. I told him he had to be lying. As he recounted, his high school was all white, and while he’d mumbled a few words to a black convenience store clerk or similar from time to time, he’d never truly conversed with a black person.

Wow.

I asked him how one gets to be 23 years old like him with never holding a discussion with someone that looks different than you. His only answer was “Try growing up on a farm in Ohio.”

Good point. I didn’t have a response for that one.

Indycar social experiment gone wrong aside, the rest of the season was marked with more underhanded ownership dealings, crew changes, and mixed fortunes. with the air so thick with B.S, I’d informed the team that I’d be working non-competing weekends with the first class Hylton Toyota Atlantic team, engineering one of their cars for fun. That endeavor managed to balance some of the IRL silliness, but barely so.

Indy was a tough event; the team had bought a third chassis and then rented it out to help fill the bank, so we ended up running all month with an extra degree of caution in mind. No spare car and no extra money will limit a team’s aggressiveness…

Davey had been running well in the race when alternator issues cropped up. We called him in and changed batteries, but after we’d killed our 3rd and final battery in a car that refused to charge, our race was seemingly over—we were 50+ laps down. We did cross the finish line, but our race ended long before the race was complete. If there was one moment during the month that stood out to me as cool, it was getting to meet and hang with Juan Montoya when he came by to chat with Airton. Very warm, funny, affable guy–I was an instant fan after watching him decimate the CART ranks. Other than meeting Montoya, the main thing I remember from the long month was that it seemed every time I walked onto pit lane, Nelly Furtado’s “I’m Like a Bird” song would come over the public address system. It was cute the first dozen times, but after a while, I was convinced someone up in a tower somewhere was messing with me.

Still hate that song today…

Like that song, though, the season did then fly by maintaining a high level of frustration, but a level I’d learned to cope with. I’ll save this for another story, but TeamXtreme’s owners had chosen to go with the unproven EFI data system, and we figured that these systems alone cost us numerous races, tests, and lost untold thousand in prize money from all the failures. The team sued EFI at the end of the season, and while I was on the receiving end of a lot of the problems caused by EFI’s products, I had to snicker at TeamXtreme’s valuing of saving a few bucks up front on an unproven system that would end up costing multiples of what the standard Pi system would have cost.

Airton Dare went on to win the rookie of the year in 2000, and to drive for A.J. Foyt, winning at Kentucky in 2002. Davey Hamilton would be a surprising late addition to my 2001 IRL team.

Airton, like every other Brazilian I’ve worked with, was really funny, a little twisted, and bloody fast. Speed, humor, and good natured ribbing were always welcomed from him. Most of the depraved videos clips his fellow Brazilian drivers Rubens Barichello and Tony Kanaan would email to Dare should be (or possibly are) banned in most countries. Dare, unconcerned about these bestial videos, had no problems playing them in airport lounges or crowded areas.

Pretty crazy.

Epilogue:

TeamXtreme folded after the 2001 season, and although it might come as a shock, I wasn’t the least bit upset.

Black Rock

If you’re lucky, REALLY lucky, you might be offered the chance to partake in a life-long fantasy. For me, and of my oldest and most prized fantasies, the invitation to join Craig Breedlove and his Spirit of America Land Speed Record (LSR) attempt project in the late ’90’s wasn’t one I took a second to ponder. Yes, yes, and yes, Mr. Breedlove, I’ll be there ASAP.

“There” happened to be the Black Rock Desert in Nevada–the dry lake bed is so long that when viewed from one to the other end, the curvature of the earth can be seen. Unreal.

For me, this childhood dream turned adult reality stemmed from a set of encyclopedias my father bought. I’d routinely read and re-read all racing content offered in the dozens of those bound treasures, but one section always stood out as different than the “Formula One” or “Indy 500″ sections I’d memorized. The “Land Speed Record Cars” section was just odd enough to keep me coming back to try and grasp the surreal nature of the men and machines that sought speed records but more often found a grisly end.

With this invite to help improve the engineering and data acquisition aspects of their struggling program, I was awestruck to actually meet Breedlove, the man I’d read about for 20 years and thought of as the automotive equivalent of Chuck Yeager. As it turned out, Craig was just an old-school cat from LA that loved hot rods, loved his dogs, and saw what he did pursuing the sound barrier on land as a normal part of life. The well worn cliché of someone being said to have “ice water in his veins” actually applied to Breedlove; only when his Spirit of America started to lift off the ground at 500mph did I see him react sharply to our ground crew at the end of a run. The ground crew, similar to a flight crew, were the first on the scene whenever the SOA rocket came to a stop. This time, it was a blessing the vehicle came to a stop on it’s feet.

With the hatch opened and his visor flipped up, it was plain to see Breedlove wasn’t his normal blasé self. His style, something the man has by the ton, was felt by all in the quiet but forceful look he gave us.

No yelling, no cursing–just a look and reaction that said “you’d better get this ‘trying to fly to the moon once I get above 475mph thing’ figured out soon because I don’t know how many more ‘get out of Heaven free’ cards I have in my pocket.”

We downloaded the data, and the car’s co-designer and chief engineer, the brilliant John Ackroyd, and I set about taking the aero pressure sensor data and drawing out a map of the registered downforce (or lift, in this case) during the run as the car reached it’s attempted liftoff speeds. The SOA also had load sensors on each of the three axles. The SOA features a central front wheel just behind the cockpit, and two outer wheels at the back of the vehicle, like a rocket powered tri-cycle.

A special light system had been installed in the instrument cluster with a colored bulb denoting each of the three wheels–a light would flash if and when one of the load sensors saw a drop in the weight on its specific wheel. Each load cell was programmed to go into alarm and trigger the its dash light to flash when a wheel saw less than 500 pounds of weight. With the SOA weighing in over two tons, the only reason for a wheel to register less than 500lbs of weight would be if it was starting to lift off the ground…

Breedlove had good reason to install this system.

Craig, having flipped over at 575mph in ‘96 on an initial trial run in the SOA, skidding almost upside down for nearly 3 miles(!) finally coming to rest in a shallow lake, and insisted that load cells and the dash alarm lights be implemented during the vehicle’s repairs.

His hyper-sensitivity to the SOA even getting close to taking off again at speed was understood by all, and his intense “get this thing fixed before you bury me and the car in the same grave” stare reminded us how serious this game was.

The load cells showed Craig that the right rear wheel had gotten down to 300lbs before he backed off the throttle, and the aero maps John and I made showed that at high speeds, the SOA was so light on downforce that even the slightest crosswind, a left-to-right crosswind in this case, would plant the right rear wheel and side of the vehicle, and push upwards on the left rear side and wheel. The loss of air on the left side cause lift immediately, and coupled with the change in pitch from the right rear wheel being forced further down into the playa (lake bed dirt surface) the delicate aero balance was upset.

As a veteran of land speed pursuits, Craig was attuned to his vehicle enough to feel the slight shift at the rear of the SOA, and said he noticed the light came on just as he felt the slight pitch at the rear. With the playa being untouched and undisturbed, the skinny wheels on the SOA drew clear paths in the playa during the vehicle’s 7 mile straight line run. With the data gathered, the SOA turned around and mounted for towing back to the base (or shed, I should say…) we took the time to drive back following just to the side of the SOA’s wheel marks.

It was VERY scary, almost chilling, to see that for nearly one mile towards the end of his run, just before he shut the jet engine down, the tracks for the left rear wheel was so light you almost couldn’t see it. Craig had just driven for nearly a full mile at over 350mph in a rocket that was bicycling on two wheels. More than his intense stare could have told us, seeing the visual proof–a lack of one wheel touching down, was enough for us to dig in and brainstorm our way to a solution.

I’d come from the last Indycar race of the year just a month before our Black Rock LSR runs, so I threw some Indy aero mods at the SOA. With 2″ tall wickers fitted to the trailing edge of the rear wheel spars, we made another run. I’d expected to see a marked increase of downforce–not more than a few hundred pounds of downforce, but enough to keep the rear wheels planted without creating too much drag. Boy was I wrong.

Not only did my ridiculously large wickers fail to deliver much in the way of measurable downforce, according to the Pi data system, they didn’t do much of anything. Craig, confirming that the right rear load sensor light came on again, backed off at the 375mph threshold again.

I took A LOT of heat from the veteran LSR crew, and many of the jet propulsion and rocket scientists (seriously, they really were ex-rocket scientists) that made up the team. My “Indycar technology” was laughed right off the SOA, and I was asked to rethink my next round of aero or engineering suggestions.

The reality of the situation was twofold: I knew the principles behind the wickers were sound, Indycars or not. Secondly, some bigger truths about the SOA were becoming hard to ignore. The English Thrust SSC team were located just a short walk from our own camp, and they’d been edging closer and closer toward the sound barrier without problem. A disparity in design, engineering. technology, and genuine modern expertise between Breedlove’s SOA team and the Thrust SSC was undeniable.

The Thrust team was always welcoming to us, and was keen to show their masterful active-suspensioned rocket to our crew whenever we wandered over. Without any sentiment of disrespect to Craig’s SOA effort, it became obvious that while Breedlove built the new SOA that targeted breaking the sound barrier with the same crew he’d used since the ’60’s, the Thrust team, barring a few of the crew members, were still in diapers when the SOA team were building Craig’s first generation of LSR cars.

In some scenarios, that veteran experience and guile is more valuable than youth and inexperience. When it came to building an LSR capable of breaking the sound barrier on land, the young, computer savvy, college trained, and open-minded Thrust SCC team designed and built their vehicle using more technology, more science, and more free thinking to overcome the insane challenges of traveling North of 750mph on a dry lake bed.

The SOA team, hot rod builders at heart, had followed a simple LSR formula they’d used since day one: build a long tube, install a jet engine, angle the jet downwards at one degree to provide downward thrust on the chassis to provide stability, and weld or machine everything in-house. The Pi data system on the SOA was fairly simple, yet a BIG leap forward in technology for the team; on the Thrust, our Pi system would have been inferior to computer they used to keep the pilot’s tea warm.

So, national pride aside, the SOA design was thirty years old before it was built in ‘96. As much as I wanted us to succeed, it was plain to see that the wicked technology, testing and overall engineering superiority of the Thrust wouldn’t be threatened by our Spirit of America. Realizing that the effects of crosswinds and shockwaves as they broke the sound barrier would necessitate an active suspension that could correct and perfect the attitude of their vehicle in a millisecond, the Thrust could deal with any of the scary aerodynamic fluctuations that would hit their vehicle.

The Spirit of America, devoid of any such systems, and build without the modern engineering and technological resources required to be competitive in the race for the sound barrier, was always destined to be second best. Wicker bills and the dozens of other solutions invented on the Black Rock would never overcome a fundamentally flawed and aged design philosophy.

While the outcome of this effort was one that saw the Thrust SSC team set the land speed record, the failure of the Spirit of America never registered as a point of regret or disappointment for me. I’d lived a childhood dream, met a childhood hero, stood on the playa and watched Craig Breedlove streak by at 500 miles per hour, and also saw the Thrust SSC inch forward, run by run, towards a record that still stands.

No matter what you’ve done in racing, be it F1, NASCAR, NHRA, or otherwise, until you’ve stood on a dried lake bed, panned left to right and seen the curvature of the earth in clear sight, watched the Spirit of America or the Thrust SSC explode past you faster than you can swivel your head as you listen in silence as you wait for the Doppler effect to deliver the sound that follows seconds behind, or peered into the eyes of a man that’s just challenged himself in ways you were never meant to try yourself, one’s motor racing experiences aren’t complete.

By chance, and by fortune, Craig Breedlove bestowed a great honor upon me to share the most incredible experience I’ll ever know in motor racing.

Managing and Engineering with Friends, Foes, & Accomplices…

I’ve been fortunate to know David Spitzer for some time now. We’d met when he was a powerplant engineer and technician for GM’s Oldsmobile IRL program–I was managing and engineering for an Olds-powered IRL team. In addition to our sharing a similar, exceptionally twisted sense of humor, Spitzer and I also shared many of the same professional perspectives. As he rose from the ranks as an engine guru to a program manager for GM, I was proud to see a friend and respected colleague earn the success he deserved.

While I can’t go into detail on any of the other assistance I provided to the Cadillac team beyond working with the drivers, I will mention that the Team Cadillac World Challenge GT program that Spitzer manages is a perfect reflection of his detail and success-driven character.
Even with a bigger budget and more resources, I couldn’t do any better of a job with the team than he’s done.

“Marshall’s a knowledgeable engineer and racing leader, with a healthy dose of experience and realism that is a rare mix. His expertise ranges from grass roots and street tuning techniques up to and including top level professional motorsports. I would not hesitate to recommend Marshall for a broad range of projects and team roles - he’s one of the best.”

Dave Spitzer
Program Manager
GM Racing

IRL 1999: For Us, By Us (but will the season ever end?)

It’s a minor distinction in the racing history books, but I do take pride in the fact that my 1999 Indycar team, LP/Nienhouse Racing, was the first racing team sponsored by a major African-American company, the clothing company FUBU. That was one of many memorable points to a year filled with the redemption of Eliseo Salazar, a driver that had suffered massive injury the year before, his struggles from race to race, and the team’s perseverance waiting for him to regain his lost confidence.

Salazar was a tough nut to crack, for all of his F1 experience, victories in the IRL, and wins in Sportscar racing, detuning his swagger to an acceptable, vaguely humble level wasn’t an easy transformation. Salazar was nearly broken in half in 1998 at the Dover IRL round—a mechanical failure shot his car into the high banked walls at a horrible angle, and he carried scars from the crash that ran the lengths of both legs, his side, his arms, and most everywhere else you could image.

Beneath his firesuit, he’d look like he’d been stitched together limb by limb. From the outside, his heavily limp told the tale of a leg that was shortened many inches by the impact. He’d spent six months rehabilitating, going through repeated surgeries for overall repair, and did daily cardio work to get back to the impressive competitive form he’d shown in the IRL.

With a large cache of sponsorship following him from his native Chile, Eliseo’s backers made a return to the IRL possible. I’m afraid that without funding few teams would have considered him for a drive, based on the last images they’d seen of Eliseo included him being loaded into a Medivac Helicopter and the gasp-inducing replays of his crash looped on the TV monitors.

Nienhouse Racing, owned by Phil and Bob Nienhouse, a front running and cash-rich program prior to 1999, found themselves without sponsorship or a team to run their Indycar efforts for the new season. LP Racing, coming off a successful bid in the IRL running Sam Schmidt, was an obvious choice for the brothers. Salazar, carrying 7-figures worth of Chilean beer, telecom, energy, and petroleum sponsorship, was an obvious choice for the Nienhouse camp to put behind the wheel of their GForce-Oldsmobiles.

I’d seen and exchanged pleasantries with Eliseo in ’97 and ’98 as we crossed paths, but I will admit it was a bit surreal for me the first time he came into the lounge/engineering office of the race trailer and formally introduced himself.

A lifelong F1 nut, I bought the 1982 F1 season review on videotape when I was a teen, and like many that have seen the WWF match between he and Nelson Piquet at the ’82 German GP, the images and infamy of two F1 drivers boxing after a crash still stuck in my mind.

When Eliseo walked in that first time, my immediate reaction was “Hey, it’s HIM! It’s THAT guy—it’s Piquet’s punching bag!” OK, sometimes I can be an idiot…

The season started out as poorly as I’ve ever been a part of; Eliseo struggled massively at the Orlando 1mi oval and never got to grips with the physical and aggressive nature of the track. Complaining of simultaneous l understeer, oversteer, sideways-steer, and vertical-steer, Salazar was quick to slam the entire team, our engineering, the setup, the food—everything about the team for Eliseo was just wrong.

For a new relationship, this one was seemingly headed for an annulment before the honeymoon was over. The inter-team frustrations spiked when Salazar, cursing the car while on his qualifying run, failed to make the cut! It was shock for me because in all my years of racing, I’d never failed to make it into a race. Orlando 1999 still serves as the only event I’ve ever packed up and flown home before the race started.

Phoenix was the next race, another 1mi oval that requires great feel and great commitment. Eliseo languished at the back of the field all weekend, finally retiring due to “handling problems.”

No one doubted his desire to get back to his previous competitive form, but the first two races highlighted a glaring fact: Salazar’s body had recovered from his nightmarish crash of ‘98 but his mind had yet to heal. We all understood his dilemma, and his need to overcome the psychological impact he’d suffered, but watching his slow, tepid mental recovery in the middle of the racing season was something I wasn’t sold on.

His funding was critical to seed the team, and he’d said all the right words and seemed his normal self when signing with Nienhouse, but really, he needed a lot more time to get his head back in the Indycar game.

Eliseo’s confidence on the bigger ovals wasn’t that bad, but on any track that was smaller than 1.5mi (Orlando, Phoenix, Pikes Peak twice, and Dover were all 1mi or less, and comprised 50% of the schedule in ‘99) Salazar drove in a hazy, traumatized emotional state. In testing at Atlanta, the 1.5mi track we visited six weeks after Indy, we came away with the fastest lap of all the major teams in attendance. Eliseo turned in an effortless lap at just over 223mph…

We’d done the ATL test before Indy, and a number of days of private test days at Indy, Firestone test days there, and all the official IRL pre-event tests. Nienhouse heavily overcompensated in Eliseo’s behalf to get him thousands of miles of testing at the Speedway and other big tracks to help conquer his Dover demons. What made all of this incredibly hard on the team was Eliseo’s refusal to admit he carried any lingering mental blocks or elements of apprehension n his driving.

A solo spin and crash during private testing tore up our primary car enough to pull it out of service for nearly a month. Any crash at Indy tends to generate multiples of damage severity, compared to any other track. The engine was cracked radially around the chassis mounts, holes were ripped in the carbon tub, and most of the other bits from the firewall back were wrinkled.

This all just menat a lot more work.

Fron this crash, the whole team knew he needed help, his practice and race results confirmed as such, but as a proud man, he was the only man in the IRL paddock that couldn’t see his true condition.

There was another hard event for LP/Nienhouse, and every other IRL team for that matter. At Charlotte, an accident involving a few cars coming out of turn four resulted in a wheel and tire breaking from one of the cars and flying into the main grandstands, killing three fans.

CNN still has a brief, safe video clip of the story online.

The race was stopped immediately, thankfully, and looking at the IRL’s event history, they’ve stricken the Charlotte event from the record altogether.

It happened right in front of the pits and most of us on the lane saw the wheel fly up into the stands. A wheel and tire combo weighs a little over twenty pounds, so the thoughts of what its weight and mass traveling freely at 200mph could do aren’t worth imagining.

Sports Illustrated later printed an alarmist story on the tragedy, offering their beliefs that the cars were at fault, rather than a mix of speed, low fences, and the always-present possibility of danger. True, in retrospect, the track should have had much higher fences to protect the fans, and wheel tether technology wasn’t in place yet. Tethers were soon developed and installed on all cars, and also became mandatory on everything from formula Atlantics to Formula One cars.

Sports Illustrated also took a lot of heat, and justifiably so I think, for running a picture in their story that showed the section of grandstands mowed down by the wheel and tire, and the three dead fans covered with a blue tarp, with a lot of blood surrounding them and running down the steps of the grandstand.

That was like pouring acid on a wound, much less salt.

The deaths at the Charlotte event led into our next race: Indy. All of the days spent testing at Indy before the event served little purpose once we moved into our garage for the month of May.

Started a promising 18th.

Spun by ourselves on lap seven.

Smacked the turn two wall.

First car out.

Finished 33rd and dead last.

That, my friends, sucked in every way possible.

It’s important to understand that not every season goes according to plan, or will register fondly as time goes by. The ’99 IRL season to date had all the ingredients for disappointment: failed to qualify for the first race, retired from the second race under the false pretences of “electrical problems,” the third race was stopped when fans were killed in front of us, and a complete month of eighteen hours days was wasted with a silly, self-induced spin five minutes into the biggest race on the planet.

This was the Indy 500 equivalent of training for three months for a marathon and tripping over your own foot and breaking your ankle before you’ve taken your first step. This was some Rodney Dangerfield “I get no respect” type stuff.

At this point, the only points of positivity came from the warm and personable crew. Working with them was a joy, and they served to help temper the underwhelming season we were in the midst of. Humor and brevity wasn’t sacrificed by them in the wake of Eliseo’s performances; I’ve seen that once a team stops laughing or kidding one another, a season can’t end quickly enough.

Some of the mechanics amused themselves whenever I’d walk out to the garage area after a routine debrief with Eliseo. “Let me guess, the car stinks, you stink, and we stink. Am I close?” became a common refrain…

No everything was bad—there were a lot of little things for me that made Indy fun; we’d visited “Whiteland” (classic name) Outdoor Karting, just as we did in ‘98, when I organized a “Friends of Marshall” event. A blast was had by all with some good friends and a few 500 drivers that joined us. Unlike the 500 where strict rules for driving are in place, the assorted drivers and crew brought some of the most underhanded driving tactics and vehicular sabotage imaginable. That I was the worst offender is completely immaterial…

Eventual Indy 500 Rookie of the Year, FF2000 champ and Formula Atlantic winner, Steve Knapp (a good friend, and cousin of my mentor, Thomas Knapp) won the Whiteland demolition derby. I’m sure his Whiteland victory meant more than his 500 R.O.Y. award.

Needing a proper helmet for the pending Karting fest, Eliseo was kind enough to give me his spare Bell Dominator. I’d originally thought he’d just lent it to me for the night; they ran about $900 back then, so it wasn’t cheap. When I tired to return it the next day, he was surprised, and said “No, I meant I’d give you my spare helmet, not lend it to you…”

It was a very nice gesture.

Dover 1999: site of where Eliseo’s vicious crash twelve months earlier. We’d had modest results in first practice as Salazar confronted a lot of fears and concern while lapping the track. Dover had the highest banking of any track we visited–scaling the side of a building would have been easier than trying to walk up Dover’s incline. The surface is also made from concrete–not a surface known for its grip, so the combo of a short track, low grip, and high banking required maximum downforce.

In the 2nd practice, the rear wing mounts on the GForce failed; the rear wing is connected to the gearbox in two places using aluminum vertical mount plates. The front mount tabs on these mount plates broke clean off of the gearbox, allowing the rear wing to lay back behind the car and drag on the track. By coincidence, a rather eerie coincidence, this happened as Eliseo was entering turn 3, the same turn his accident had happened in ‘98.

The rear wing now laying flat behind the car, Salazar lost all rear downforce as he turned in at 150mph. The GForce spun and crashed into turn 3 with the right rear corner. Thankfully, it was at a very slight angle, so while the chassis and engine were completely destroyed, Salazar’s body didn’t encounter the same kind of unabated smashing impact it had the year before.

Still, same series, same track, same crash, same exact spot, and most disturbing of all, he came to a rest in the exact spot he had in ‘98. With the images of that ‘98 crash fresh in everybody’s mind, seeing the car in the same predicament and same spot in ‘99 made a lot of people cringe.

Eliseo limped from the car once he was lifted out, but it was obvious he wanted to walk away from this crash rather than be bundled into a helicopter again. The IRL emergency response team had a handful with Eliseo refusing their forceful attempts to tend to him—I couldn’t fault him though. If that was me, and I was able to walk away from the second of two identical crashes, I’d throw ‘bows if that’s what it took to prove to myself and others that I’d moved beyond the trauma of ‘98.

His demonstrative actions outside the wrecked car spoke of someone that was done being treated as a crash victim. I think it was the first step he took towards breaking free from the fears of his previous crash, for he proved to himself he’d survived Dover again, yet walked away under his own power.

He seemed to decompress little by little after that, and by the end of the year, he’d made some major strides to healing all of himself. I was no less hard on him, and would continue to point out his weaknesses shown from the Pi data system.

Like the mechanics would kid Larry and me, Eliseo, in the last race or two, would come back to the trailer after a poor showing, walk up to me, and say “I know, I know. The driver sucks. He’s not trying hard, blah blah blah. I don’t need to look at the d*mn computer to tell me this…”

At least he was starting to be honest with himself.

The spare car was pressed into service for the Dover race, and Larry and I picked through the $500,000 Indycar yard sale the cleanup crew returned to us. Even in a big crash like this, you’ll usually be able to pick some salvageable bits from the wreckage. Not so with this one. Pedals? Bent. Steering wheel? bent. Sway bar adjusters? Bent. Electronics? Smashed and scattered. Suspension? Origami.

Firestone wanted the burst tires back, for they lease them rather than sell them to their teams. I think we were only able to return two at the time because the other two wheels were fused to the spindle and uprights from the impact.

Can’t dismount a tire if you can’t dismount the wheel it’s on from a broken bundle of suspension…

The rest of the season flashed by pretty quickly; if there were memorable points, they’ve escaped me. The Nienhouse brothers continued on with LP for 2000, but did so at the last moment, and missed the season opener at Orlando. I’d gone to work for another team, and was saddened to see the Nienhouse’s lose interest after their driver Scott Harrington, failed to qualify for Indy.

I’d flown out to help LP for Harrington’s Indy rookie test in April of 2000 (as I tell in my IRL 200 review, my team that year caused so much turmoil that they let me work freeweekends with other teams or in other series to help keep me sane) and really felt bad for Larry Nash when Scott crashed in qualifying for the 500, ending their hopes of making the race. A sour 1999 season and a lackluster 2000 season through Indy saw Bob and Phil Nienhouse liquidate their IRL assets immediately.

Sam Schmidt, LP’s IRL driver in ’97 and ’98, would hire Larry to run his new Sam Schmidt Motorsports effort in 2001, so Bob and Phil leaving opened a door for a brighter future for LP the following season.

Larry Nash deserved that, and still deserves to have an IPS or IRL team of his own.

Epilogue:

It was only the following year, 2000, when Eliseo signed to drive for A.J. Foyt, that he regained his missing form; he ran in the top three or four in points for most of the year and a constant threat for a win, that he reached out to LP Racing, and me separately, to apologize for his attitude and pissy demeanor in ‘99.

“It wasn’t the car…it was me” was the shortest and sweetest vindication he could have offered. It went a long way to mend a lot of sore feelings and to bridge some rather distant relationships that had strayed in our turbulent 1999 season.

Managing the 034 VW Jetta-Mahle Turbo SPEED World Challenge Touring Car Debut

I was asked by Christian Miller to manage and engineer his World Challenge TC Volkswagen Jetta in his team’s debut at the Laguna Seca finale. The car, an ‘05 bodied Jetta built in the late ’90’s by VW Motorsports, had a VERY strong Cosworth prepared 2.0L turbo engine (the engine is prepared by Mahle, the English arm of Cosworth’s customer programs). Chris and his family owned team are as warm and friendly as can be, and were also sharp enough to bring in a veteran to launch their effort.

The car was plagued with a number of issues in pre-event testing and throughout the race weekend; the VW Motorsports fuel tank and pump arrangement caused frequent starvation issues, a custom brake disc failed, etc. My notes to the team for the off season was to free the car from as many “VW Motorsports” custom parts, and replace them with standardized solutions that could be found or replaced at the track if necessary. In talking to Chris recently, the team has acted on that recommendation.

With fuel starvation (on a full tank) during qualifying, Chris only managed 3 hot laps with the car. Suffering an engine that was stumbling constantly under acceleration, he still qualified 28th out of 38 cars. Barring cutting the stock tank from the car and installing a custom ATL cell while in the paddock, something far beyond the fabrication abilities of any team at the event, the car was destined to suffer this problem for the race. The mechanics on our team had an indomitable spirit, and worked late into the night replacing all the fuel lines, the fuel pump, and fashioning new fuel pickups and a new collector can for inside the tank.

While this ended up being an improvement, it still didn’t solve the problem. Weekends like this are a great lesson on many fronts: no matter how well planned an effort might be, when dealing with a modest budget or an aging car, one’s first race weekend will usually have some big challenges to overcome. In a perfect world (or a world with a nice budget and new car), those problems can and should be minimized. Plenty of testing is prime solution to ridding your car of gremlins.

In this scenario, and because our 3-day test just prior to the race was cut short in the first 15 minutes of the test when the flywheel had a VERY messy divorce with the VW crankshaft at 7000RPMs, I knew the race weekend would be an uphill battle. I spent a lot of time preparing the team and mechanics for this likelihood–you never want to sour the mood of your team before an event, so tempering the news that we needed to expect to have unexpected problems to solve with the belief that we’d overcome those challenges no matter what they were, was vital. Every official WCTC session was cut short for us due to fuel-related maladies, and the fuel tank was opened between every session. Every mechanic had at least one arm completely immersed in a . I’m proud to say that the entire team kept their heads down, worked feverishly, and refused to quit when the reasons for pressing onwards were becoming hard to invent.

Knowing the race would be rather arduous, and that our late night fuel cell mods would have to go untested as the last session of the weekend was the race itself, Chris and I decided to take every opportunity possible to practice his standing starts on his way to grid, and on the parade laps for the race. The car was plenty fast when is wasn’t hampered by problems, so maximizing the start would be our best chance to make up for the unrepresentative 28th starting place we’d earned. We also knew that for as long as the car ran (and we’d hoped it would run the entire race with fuel being adequately delivered to the engine…), Chris would be marching forward.

I chose to call the race from the 4th floor of the Laguna Seca observation tower to give Chris an “eye in the sky” to help him with the multiple passing maneuvers expected. Chris nailed the best start in the field (hard to do with a FWD turbo-motor, BTW), and by lap 7, had passed 12 cars on his march up the field. On lap 7, and while in 16th, he locked his brakes at the corkscrew and was hit from behind by Memo Gidley. It wasn’t Memo’s fault–he had nowhere to go to avoid Chris. With his bumper cover dragging behind the car, Chris was called in and the boys ripped it free.

As if the race had to be run all over again, Chris returned to the track in the same spot he’d started in, 28th, and began the fight all over again. Minus his rear bumper, and with fuel starvation problems making an unwelcome return, Chris fought on for 8 more laps and picked up 5 more spots, retiring on lap 16 (of 20) while in 23rd place. We were ultimately classified in 32nd place.

Despite the numerous obstacles throughout the weekend, and what on paper looks to be a story of failure (started 28th, finished 32nd), there were actually some great positives to emerge. I’ve mentioned the impressive display of attitude and work ethic by the crew, but the pace of Christian Miller in his WCTC debut was also a revelation (not to those that know of him, but to the rest of the Pro Racing community that hadn’t seen him race before.)

Adding up the cars he had to pass and re-pass in the race, Chris made up 17 places! With nothing but limited track time in every session prior to the race, he overcame many trials that normally derail a driver from performing at his or her best. The Jetta has tons of potential, and Chris has the talent to make use of all of it. I’d expect Chris and the Jetta to make a strong push for rookie of the year in 2006, and wish them the best.

World Challenge GT: Managing and Engineering a Dodge Viper

As time allowed during 2004 and 2005, I managed and engineered the Dodge Viper of privateer Michael Hartley in the SPEED GT series, enjoying a modicum of success for his part-time program.

On a highly restricted budget, Hartley had limited resources and even more restricted seat time to challenge for the top 12. With sparse testing and the late addition of a Motec data system, Mike’s fortunes did vastly improve from his form before I came into help, but as always happens, his tight budget eventually forced him out of the series.

I’ve always enjoyed helping the smaller teams, the “underdog’s,” I guess, so helping Mike fit in nicely to my other more serious efforts in ‘04 and ‘05. Guys like Mike are needed in SPEED GT to keep the flow of local talent in balance with the factory teams.

Keeping my hand in helping club racers, amateurs, and semi-pro drivers or teams is something I’ll always make time for.