Kakashi Racing at Lime Rock Park's Memorial Day Weekend, 2004

31 May 2004

This weekend Jeff Frederick and I entered the Pro Miata event at Lime Rock. This event was an SCCA Regional event as a support race for the American LeMans Series. Jeff entered in his Kessler-prepped Miata, and I rented a '90 from my buddies at Flatout Motorsports.

This event promised to be quite the challenge to begin with; it was a Monday-only event, with two qualifying sessions and a 24-lap race sandwiched in between ALMS and Formula Ford 2000 sessions, all in the span of about 4 hours total. To top it off, SCCA accepted 44 entries for the 1.53-mile track. If nothing else, we were assured to be busy.

For all of the first qualifying session (which, BTW, was the first time I had raced a Spec Miata and it was only Jeff's second race ever) I spent some of the session trying to figure out that jelly bean, and much of the session trying to either stay out of faster guys' ways or keep from getting hip-checked by the slower ones. The second session was even worse, as "drivers" were now getting brave and pretending it was a race. Just a few laps into the session someone managed to punt another driver in the left-hander, and who was there to administer the coupe-de-grace but "Good Ole Greg". Out of space, out of time, and soon-to-be out of money, I was quickly looking at the graphics of a buckled Miata hood. Fortunately, no mechanical damage was done so I cruised back to the pits, quite unhappy at my then-current situation.

Knocked down but not out, we had about 25 minutes to the green flag for the race. Using his consummate mechanical skills and a good shot of "tow truck engineering", my crew chief Matt Kessler did a bang-up job (pun intended) of pulling the front end out to the point where the hood would close and latch, and verifying that the car was mechanically sound and safe. I made it to the end of the pit lane as the field was streaming down the hill taking the green flag, and from a dead stop I began the chase.

It took me about half a lap to catch the tail end of the field, and I worked my way through a few of the backmarkers fairly quickly (who were doing an awesome job driving clean.) As I worked up through about 40th place I came rolling up on a group of three or four cars dicing. As I rolled up on the group, I had increasing difficulty getting past the trailing cars and they worked to keep me back (despite the fact that I had rolled up on them like I was beamed down there from the Starship Enterprise.) After three laps of this, I had a guy rolling up on me so I let him by to deal with the one in front of me. As I'm setting these guys up for a pass down the front straight (hoping that I don't get blocked again), the guy two up from me spins in West Bend, perpendicular to and in the middle of the track, leaving me nowhere to go. Once again out of time and space (but probably not out any more money that I was before), I managed to slow it down quite a bit but I couldn't avoid him; I stove in the guy's passenger door and came to a stop. He continued on, I took a slow lap in the car and pretty much didn't like what that car felt like, and I pulled it in and called it day after about 6 laps total.

This was a milestone event for me, being the first DNF I've experienced in competition, pro and amateur, since *1987*. Ah, well. Jeff, for his part, ran an AWESOME clean race and got his Novice Permit signed off (who's the ace team driver now, huh?) Now he's a licensed driver!

While Jeff continues to drive clean...

...and the results of Matt's hard work, which lasted all of four laps before it happened again...oh, well.