Track Attack, Sponsored by Sport Compact Car. October 14-17 2004.

The Locations:
Buttonwillow Raceway (road course)
Famoso Raceway (1/4 mile strip)

Image Galleries and Movie Links:
Buttonwillow (Mostly Firebird Burnouts)
Famoso (some drag run videos)

Background:
Sport Compact Car magazine, Infinity Stereo and Mazda basically sponsored this event. Those of us lucky enough to have registered online before they closed it got to run the 1/4 mile track and run at Buttonwillow Raceway for FREE! NADA! ZIP! ZILCH! ZERO! Minus gas and hotel and food of course. But wait, the hotel ended up being overbooked so we got rooms down the street for FREE! Infinity picked up the dinner tab Thursday night, including the bar tab, (Joel, was that one finger or two?) so basically all we paid for was gasoline to get there on Thursday!!

The Ride:

My Track Attack weekend started out like this; Wednesday night, the night before our 8am departure, my starter decides it wants to stay spinning without the key in the car. Flustered, I decide not to go.

Come 7:15am I woke up and had a change of heart. That starter wasn't going to stop me from drag racing Matt's RX-7! At 8am the starter is out and I'm on my way to Kragan's for a free replacement since I had to replace the starter just 3 months ago! Reinstall the starter, shower, pack, eat breakfast and pick up Darren to be on the road at 10:45am Thursday morning, well over 2 hours after the group has already left Santa Barbara.

Sixteen miles past Valencia, my radiator springs a leak. I only know this because I got off the freeway to take a leak myself, and I could see antifreeze spewing out the grille towards the truck ahead of me on the exit ramp. I figured this was a perfect time to use the emergency lane so I drive past about 20 cars waiting at the stop and head to the first gas station I see and proceed to drain my radiator on their concrete. Finding some radiator stop-leak solves the problem and after a car wash to get the antifreeze off my paint and windshield, we arrive at the track at 2pm, just in the knick of time to catch the driver's meeting. Thank goodness they were running an hour behind schedule!

The Running:

There were very few cars at the drag strip but that's ok because you could run as much as you could ever have wanted to.

I made the brackets placing 6th fastest with a 14.2 in qualifying. I ran my first run against a Mitsubishi and won with my first 13 second 1/4 mile pass at a 13.9 seconds and 102 mph. Unfortunately that placed me against a 2004 WRX STI what with its AWD and 300hp runs mid-low 13's off the showroom floor. Damn. Nevertheless, I ran another 13.9 and was .006 sec faster, but over 1 mph slower. I wonder what happened to my MPH? Probably let off too early!!!

Matt (in his full-race 1987 RX-7) and I had our grudge match going, both of us running in the low 14's until I finally came back with my 13.9. Matt was surprised so he decided to cheat. ;-) He is fortunate enough to have this funny looking thing called a Turbocharger, and upped his boost by 5 psi to 20 or so, and came back with a very nice 13.7 at 104 mph. I think you can see where I am losing my ground in the video; on the 1-2 shift. (Recorded on an earlier, 14.0 sec run for both of us).

"I can't figure out why my tires wore out so fast..."

Well, since my tires suck (Kumho 712's by the way) I have been trying to get rid of them for about a year, now. I finally got my chance at Buttonwillow.

The Attacking:

Friday morning we head out to Buttonwillow Raceway. There was a lead/follow session and you know what…. I'm going to let Shawn finish this off since he provided us with such a nice write-up.

I got back from the Track Attack last night and figured I'd provide a
little (edit: okay, really long) write-up while everyone else is off
at Laguna Seca.

I drove down from Mountain View with my girlfriend Cynthia on
Wednesday, spent Thursday mostly playing Katamari Damacy on a friend's
Playstation (it's completely awesome, by the way), and then woke up at
4:30 to drive to Buttonwillow Friday morning. I stopped at the "last
gas for 22 miles" immediately before Lerdo highway, filled the car up
with delicious Premium (15 cents cheaper in the valley, but still 30
cents more than last month), and got to the track right at 8:00am. I
got signed up and went through tech easily enough (must get a more
sturdy battery hold down, but was given a pass). There was a
mercifully short morning briefing, and then the red group I was in
(along with Ian and Steve) was sent out to drive the West loop.

Here's how the event was designed: Buttonwillow was split in half
into a 1.1 mile East Loop (short and technical) and the 1.8 mile West
Loop (the half with the Lost Hill, the Star Mazda turn, and the
Esses). (These are configuration #17 and #27 on Buttonwillow's
website.) They rotated the four groups through the two tracks, a
classroom portion, and rest breaks. Over the day, each group would
get six track sessions: one instructor lead-follow sessions per side,
one "open" session on each track, a timed run on the East loop, and an
extra session on the West loop.

I had never been to a track event before, so I appreciated the
lead-follow session well enough, but was quite ready to be going
faster than the instructor's pace of 50-60mph before we were through.
They had the course thoroughly marked with apex cones, as well as
turn-in and track-out cones, quite the crutch for novices like me. I
tried to identify actual track landmarks and look through the corners
as they would be without cones, but I'm sure it'll be a very different
experience next time I go when they aren't there. They also set up
chicanes to slow everyone down before major turns, two on the West
loop (before Star Mazda and the "Sunset" 90 degree turn) and one on
the East (before the "Cotton Corners" and the hill on that side). The
chicanes tended to get wider and wider as time went on and people
(certainly no one we know!) knocked more and more cones out (never on
purpose, of course! Certainly not while driving an immaculate M3!)

The lead-follow sessions bored others in our group to tears; Matt and
Christine checked out early, Buttonwillow at sub-highway speeds isn't
enough to keep the professionals interested. =)

The classroom session was run by an SCCA instructor who taught well,
though the information he went over was extremely basic. He had nice
slides about friction circles (the slide comparing the friction
circles of Toyota Celicas and Jaguar formula cars was rather
dramatic), oversteer/understeer, good safety advice, and the usual
reminders of our fragile mortality. It was much better than a bad
presentation, but it was still best when it was over.

In our break session, Ian drove over to the skidpad and did some
enormously smokey burnouts with a go-karting kid in the passenger seat
(maybe 8 years old with an enormous helmet, very cute). Leah took
video and there are some photos I'm sure will be posted when everyone
gets back. This destroyed the tread on the Firebird's rear tires
pretty good, and Ian sat out many of the later events.

Next were the open sessions, with no passing allowed. That was
probably for the best, because the track was covered with novices like
me, though I'd end up catching up with Miatas and the sponser-car
Mazda 3's pretty frequently, while I was holding up modded S2000s and
Spec SE-R racers. The protocol was to take a run through the pits if
you were being held up, and they'd give you a new spot with hopefully
more space. If someone had been smart, they would have divided up the
groups a little better, like by car class.

They had SCCA instructors on hand if you wanted someone to ride with
you and give you advice. I figured, hey, free learning, and got a
nice old-timer to ride with me. There's an interesting thing about
trying to communicate with the windows down at 80mph while wearing
thick helmets over your ears: it doesn't work very well. It's also
very difficult for an instructor to come in and give you useful advice
without knowing how much experience you have. Some instructors are
very good at figuring out what advice would be helpful to a driver at
an apparent skill level, but they are rare. After a couple laps with
this guy I pulled into the pits and let him out (I was also being held
up by some slower cars). The sum total of his advice (that I could
hear) was basically "The track has some places where you should go
fast, and others where you should go slow." Thanks for your help,
I'll keep it in mind.

After an open session on each course was the lunch, which wasn't
supplied by the magazine, so the only expense of the day other than
gas. I went to the little market a couple miles east of the track and
got a perfectly acceptable sandwich made by the wonderful women who
run that store.

We did timed runs on the shorter, more technical East course. We were
timed on a flying lap, so we'd enter the track, do a warm up lap,
they'd start and stop timing when we passed the pits, run through a
cooldown lap, and then exit the course. I was the second or third one
out, and it looked to me like they were doing the timing with two guys
and a wristwatch-stopwatch. When I came back in, they had screwed up
the timing for my run, so I got a rerun. I noticed they now had three
people with three stopwatches, which looked much more appropriate.

I was following Steve on my warmup lap, he was running his timed run,
and as I came around to the final corner I noticed a huuuge dustcloud.
I slowed down and saw Steve spun around in the dirt, and I wasn't
sure if I was supposed to keep going or stop (no passing, remember).
The guys at the timing station started waving me on, so I floored it
and started my flying lap, though when I crossed the starting line I'm
sure I was still down at, I dunno, jogging lap speeds. Whatever, I
was hardly in the running for time of day, I was just having a good
time. Steve has video of the spinout, in which you cannot see through
the dust immediately after the spin. It's entertaining, I'm sure
he'll post it after he gets back.

My last session was on the West loop again, and slightly fewer cars
gridded up. With a little experience under my belt, and an attitude
of just having fun (no timers, no stopwatches, no cars I was feeling
competitive with), I felt like I was going much faster than that
morning. I suppose I know I was, since I started grabbing fourth gear
and stopped slowing down for the chicanes. At one point, I caught up
to a group of cars, maybe a Mazda 3 in the lead, a bright chrome
orange Lamborghini Murcielago, a Miata, and then me. I was having a
bit of fun following the Lambo, when suddenly the other two cars
exited into the pits, leaving just me and the Murcielago. So it was
going to be fun to see how fast that orange beast and its driver was.
It braked long and hard for the Sunset corner, so I made up the
distance between us, and then it shot out through the Pacific corner
and was walking away from me. For a little bit. Then, I carried a
whole lot more speed through the back sweeper, and caught up to it at
the hill. He floored it down the back side of the hill, but then I
caught up by the chicane and the Star Mazda. Through the esses I had
no hope of catching up, but then came the chicane and the Sunset
corner again, I was right back behind him, and we'd done a whole lap.

So, the verdict is, me in my car is as fast as a quarter-million
dollar brand-new all-wheel drive 580 horsepower Lamborghini Murcielago
driven by an asshat. I was thrilled, and kept up with said asshat for
five or six more laps until the end of the session. I simply cannot
tell you how thrilling it is to chase a car like that down, losing
distance in the straights, making it up in braking and in the
sweepers, incredibly satisfying. I found out later that the kid
driving it (it's his father's car, he's letting the kids have a bit of
fun with it before he returns it to the dealer for not passing smog
and being illegal to register in Carbifornia, or some story like that)
spun it earlier in the session, so maybe he was taking it easy for the
rest of the day, but really he was just slow. It's things like that
that underscore how much more important good driving is than the car.

At the end of the day, everyone gathered in the wonderously
air-conditioned classroom area and the organizers thanked everybody
and gave out awards. Four people in our group picked up awards, and I
think Steve was robbed for the "Biggest dust cloud" prize (which, of
course, was a small sampling of Mother's cleaning products.) The
first group of awards were for idiosynchratic things like that, and
also "most improved" and "best maintained car" and the like. Mark won
for "most spectacular mechanical failure" when his truck broke down
pretty good on his timed run. He managed to fix it with help from the
group pretty easily afterward, but they had to send out the tow truck
to get him off the track. I was given an award for "Most aggressive
driver", I think for chasing that Lambo so vigorously and getting a
mildly decent time for a car that wasn't exactly competitive with what
other folks had out there. Christine got third fastest time in her
run group, adding on to her wins from Thursday's drag events. And
Matt got best time in his run group, as well as time of day, so he
picks up some fancy speaker thing from Infinity and a set of Toyos.

I had a really fantastic time, I'm already looking forward to my next
track event, which I hope will be a real track school where I'll
really learn a thing or two. Thanks for reading, it was good to see
all of you that made it to the track, and I hope to see all of you who
didn't at the next one!

shawn
1997 Mazda MX-6, I used about 10 gallons of fuel for about 120 miles
on the track, slightly worse than my usual fuel economy