Yahoo Autos Race to the Bottom
THE NO QUESTION, hands-down worst part about breaking a race car is the bit where you sit there, strapped into the thing, waiting to be towed back to your trailer.
You think about a lot of things, stuck there on the side of a racetrack.
Mostly, you think about how you are an idiot.
Conventional wisdom holds that sometimes, machines just break. This truth lives in an entirely separate reality from the bubble around your average racetrack, where everyone knows that broken race cars are always the driver's fault. It doesn't matter if the guy behind the wheel actually did anything wrong; everyone in the paddock will see that busted or crashed-up heap and choose the simplest answer:
You dorked it.
But that's the sport. Racing is a responsibility sponge; it does nothing so well as produce cause for blame. Like any sport, the pastime also lends itself to examined choices-smart ones, dumb ones, and the space between, like that time your driver sat outside the trailer until well after midnight, singing Paul Simon's Graceland LP start to finish with a crew guy and a bottle of rye, when each of those individuals had a 6:00 wake-up call the next morning, for an early qualifying session. (For the record, this is not a hypothetical situation; I was there. I was also there when the driver in question woke up for said session with a blinding headache, then proceeded to set fasttest lap of the weekend for the whole class. Which, in turn, prompted obvious questions: Was it the Simon? The inherently mind-clearing nature of pain? The tone-deaf murder of "You Can Call Me Al"?)
Naturally, there are trends. In race cars, as in life, most people don't hyperanalyze good choices. It's the train wrecks that take root. Even if a given mess wasn't your fault, you will wait for that tow truck feeling like God's own moron. Wondering where it all went wrong.
There are so many ways for it to go wrong.
Sometimes, of course, you do something stupid.
Sometimes you do nothing stupid, but, say, the shift linkage comes apart in Turn 4 at Laguna Seca. What are you supposed to do-punch a hole into the steel transmission tunnel and move the gears with your bare hands? (Predictably, you still sit there, waiting for the tow, thinking, Should have punched a hole and moved the damn gears with my bare hands.)
And engines! Engines eat themselves for a hundred reasons. Sometimes they die of old age. Sometimes your engine guy gets you a new aluminum oil pan-No more pressure drop in Turn 9 at Willow Springs!–and the oil pump is millimeters too close to the bottom of the sump, and the whole mess runs dry under extreme stress. Probably in Turn 9 at Willow Springs. Probably with such force that a connecting rod punches its way out of the cast-iron engine block, throwing bits of metal at the hood hard enough to dent it.
The engine guy will say this is not your fault. Of course he will! The engine guy thinks you are a talented and good-looking dude! But he is still going to have to build you another engine. Which he didn't have to do before you drove the car.
Which means that it's kind of maybe possibly almost definitely your fault.
Maybe I know what that dented hood looks like. Maybe the disasters I just listed actually happened, to me, in 2016. Maybe that's far from the full list. Maybe, from January to December, I started eight amateur road races around the country and only finished two, because Things Kept Going Wrong.
Maybe I spent this winter wondering if I should find a more financially rewarding hobby, like competitive spaceflight or teaching math to cats.
For one reason or another, I can't mull these things without going down rabbit holes. When the engine guy told me about the oil pump, I spent days imagining the sound of that pump playing tonsil hockey with an aluminum sump. Just chewing away, merrily inhaling metal.
I eventually decided that this noise was something like whoogawhee-whoogawhee. In a fun sort of non-coincidence, this is exactly what my dog, Elly, sounds like after fishing a used paper towel from the trash. Elly is a spaniel. Elly would lose an IQ test to a bag of hammers. She gets so excited at the prospect of eating garbage that she becomes unable to breathe and eat at the same time, then literally chokes her way through mastication. Elly is also frightened of innocuous objects, like the mailman. The terror of morning delivery almost always makes her run off to a corner of the garage and poop.
But trade-offs run the world. Brainless dogs are good company. Racing makes you feel uniquely alive. Go figure that both of these things are also unpredictable, long on emotional fulfillment, and short on moments where nothing is exploded all over your garage floor.
Go figure that I can't seem to quit either one.
As for racing, 2017 is going well. Wait, no, that's a lie. Road Atlanta, two weeks ago, the end of a nine-hour endurance race: I rode back to the paddock on a flatbed truck, strapped into a dead car. Again. My friend Charley Baruth's NC-chassis Mazda MX-5 Cup. Our team screwed up the math on fuel stops, and we ran out of gas while I was driving-and running up front. Astonishingly, this was the second time that day that we ran out of gas. Same race.
It wasn't my fault.
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