[1795]

I had a good discussion with a fellow racer that was driving a C4 Corvette. He is an older person and a fairly good racer. We were both discussing how we had each reduced our lap times during the race weekend and we both are similar in that we are predominantly one man shows. We tow our cars to the races, perform all of the maintenance, get our own fuel and cover all of the expenses out of our own pockets. We spend more time repairing and prepping our cars than we do on the track and are scrambling to get to the grid on time. We have limited race budgets.

We then compared ourselves to the big teams that show up to the track in which the driver never touches a wrench and has one or more mechanics whose job it is to prep the car, make adjustments and have it ready for each race. All the driver has to do is be ready on time. Many of these race drivers have much larger resources than us and can afford to build engines with significantly more horsepower, as they can afford to have the engines replaced or rebuilt after a weekend or two. Some people own the cars and have professional drivers race their cars for them.

This lead to another discussion that went something like this, it is easier to drive a car to its limits when you have unlimited resources and can afford to replace it, or if you are a professional driver and it is not your car, than if you have limited resources and if you crash your season, or possibly several seasons may be over.

On this weekend at least five cars were totaled in the first day, probably over 20 for the weekend. There were 5 vintage racers that I know locally who went to Mid Ohio, one car was rolled and had to have significant work done to get it on the trailer and another one hit the wall the first day and had to have some body work done to get it back on the track and then it blew the engine on the last day.

I think that those thoughts sit in the back of my mind as I am on the course and pushing the car. I certainly am not doing parade laps, and have a competitive nature, but find myself not aggressively taking someone in a corner if it looks like there is a substantial risk of contact. I could have passed a Porsche in a corner, I was gaining on him and he over braked for the corner, but it was going to be tight and I would have had to get up high on the curbing to take him and would have carried possibly a little too much speed, so I broke hard and and that threw off my momentum going into the corner.

We both came to the conclusion that while we can be competitive and will seek to become faster, we will never be able to compete against race teams that can afford to build engines that are grenades and replace/repair cars that are damaged in short order.

As an aside, was talking with Jim Inglese today about changing my jetting and he asked me for a better picture of my car than what I had sent him as he is revamping his website and wants a picture of the car on it.

Jim