Lunatick Racing

Ever since I first discovered sports car racing, or more specifically, discovered that you didn’t need to be Bill Gates to own a race car, I’ve been drawn to endurance racing.  Until last month, however, I had only had the pleasure of driving in sprint races, and had limited experience driving the car for longer than 30-45 minutes at a time.  All of that changed when we managed to put together, at about the last possible date, an impromptu team for the 12 hour Devil in the Dark endurance race at NJMP Thunderbolt.

This year’s race was jointly sponsored by both the NNJ and SNJ regions of the SCCA.  Full disclosure: both Brandon and I are on the Board of Trustees of the NNJ region (Brandon’s the Regional Executive), and we were strong supporters of the idea, since our region didn’t get our usual race weekend at Pocono this year, thanks to a scheduling snafu with NASCAR.

For this race, Team NoRags (normally the partnership of team and car owner Marty Raguckas and Steve Noake) was composed of:

• Marty Raguckas, driver
• Brandon Fetch, driver
• Phillip Moore (AKA: the lunatick), driver
• Dan Jensen, driver
• Michael Qiao, driver
• Melissa Fetch, crew
• Mike Hontz, crew
• Kentaro Moore, crew

We were driving Marty’s SSM prepped 1989 Miata, although by the time we were done with it, it was closer to the SM2 spec.  Over a couple of weekends prior to the race, and far more evenings that anyone had planned, we installed my VBox HD2 video/data system, Marty’s AIM Solo2, did a full season prep on the car, upgraded the electrical system, as well as countless other little improvements.

Among the five drivers, we had three with significant enduro experience (Marty, Brandon and Mike), but two who were about to drive in their first (Dan and I).  With the car able to run a bit over two hours on a full tank we figured we had about six stints to run.  The crew members were Melissa (Brandon’s partner in life as well as racing), who acted as the team’s representative with the officials, worked the radios, and like everyone else did about a 100 other little things.  Mike Hontz, a navy veteran and therefore the team’s resident prankster and insult expert, worked as our fueler for most of the pit stops, and also handled some of the Pit Watcher volunteer duties every team was responsible for.  Finally, my son Kentaro also got to work as the fueler and split the Pit Watcher duties with MikeH, while he got his first experience at a road race.

Test Day

I decided to be cheap, and save one night in the hotel by driving down early Friday morning, which meant waking up at 5AM, and I ended up rolling into the paddock at around 7:30.  Brandon was just getting the car unloaded, and we spent the morning setting up the garage and doing some last minute tinkering with the car.  They let us onto pit lane a bit before noon, and we set up our tarp-covered popup tent, which would keep us out of the horrid weather that was headed our way the next day.

Marty took the car out first, and ran some pretty good laps, and then Brandon hopped in.  Unfortunately, he got black flagged for smoke, which was initially thought to be tire rub, and instead was gear oil leaking from the left side axle seal on the diff.  After wasting some time on hold with just about every auto parts store near NJMP, we scored a seal from Nick Leverone of Flatout Motorsports (not the first time they’ve bailed me out with Miata parts, either), and we got to work replacing it.  Mike Hontz crawled under the car and did most of this work, but like everything we did, it was a team effort.

Once we had the car reassembled, Brandon made another run, and then Dan and I got turns getting used to the car.  Slightly down on power from my 1991 SM2, and with the rear sway bar set to full soft, the car was a lot looser than I’m used to, but I got accustomed to it pretty quickly.  One thing I learned was that getting a tail-happy car around the dreaded octopus turn was a lot easier than a neutral car like mine. Dan adapted to it a lot faster, though, and was running almost two seconds faster than I was in the dry.  I had some catching up to do.

Here’s a set of links to all of our practice runs:

• Devil in the Dark 12Hr Enduro 2018 Team NoRags Day Practice Marty
• Devil in the Dark 12Hr Enduro 2018 Team NoRags Day Practice Brandon 01
• Devil in the Dark 12Hr Enduro 2018 Team NoRags Day Practice Brandon 02
• Devil in the Dark 12Hr Enduro 2018 Team NoRags Day Practice Dan
• Devil in the Dark 12Hr Enduro 2018 Team NoRags Day Practice Phil

 

After a break, and a practice session we ended up skipping, Brandon went out in the qualifying session and ran a 1:39.575, putting Team NoRags on the E5 pole.  Here’s the video of Brandon’s qualifying run:

The last sessions of the day were the two 30 minute night practice sessions, and since the planned driver rotation was: Marty, Mike, Brandon, Dan, myself and then Brandon again, the last 3 drivers all got time in the dark.  Dan’s stint was going to start light and end dark, and he went first, then handed the car over to me.  Brandon ran the last session, and then we put the car to bed after a quick oil change.

It was right around the start of the first night practice that the weather started to really turn, as a fairly major rain storm was sweeping through the area, the storm that would make race day wet, cold, and nasty, from start to finish.  This led to some adventures on track for me, as I went out on slicks, only to find out how little grip they had.  Now, I have two 360 spins on video.  After running about half my session sliding all over the place, I came in and got rain tires.  We were also starting to struggle with the radios, as one of the headsets had a shorted button.

Here’s the video of the three night practices:

• Devil in the Dark 12Hr Enduro 2018 Team NoRags Night Practice Dan
• Devil in the Dark 12Hr Enduro 2018 Team NoRags Night Practice Phil
• Devil in the Dark 12Hr Enduro 2018 Team NoRags Night Practice Brandon

As the night wound down, my son Kentaro showed up for what was going to be his first taste of road racing culture.  I hadn’t exactly made it a very big secret, but I was hoping he would catch the bug.  This was his first time at a race track, and he was looking forward to crewing with us, and seeing why his father was blowing his possible inheritance here.  I’ll have more to say on this later…

Race Day

We all got to the track before 8 AM, and started to get ready for the race.  We got the car fully fueled, and the tires all carted out to pit lane, but only after spending a half hour fixing our pit lane tarp.  We had tied everything down pretty well, but the winds over night had just about destroyed a few of the other team’s setups, and ours fared pretty well.  One additional tarp and another 100 zip ties or so (I buy them in 500 count bags), and we were ready to go.

Green flag was at 10:30, and the rain was a steady drizzle, with standing water in places on the track, and the totally saturated ground off course had started to soften and turn to mud.  This would be a major factor in the race through out the day.  We got Marty to the grid on time, and the cars all got staged, only to be told the start was delayed by 15 minutes.  I’m not sure why, because it certainly wasn’t to wait for the weather to clear up.

The whistle finally blew, and one by one, the field rolled out onto the track, and this was the moment when I realized…   we had forgotten (well, I had forgotten, since it was my job) to start the video system recording.  As we saw Marty rolling down pit lane, we considered bringing him in to the bit box, but then we would have had to start at the back.  An effective no-decision meant he kept on rolling, and we wouldn’t get video of Marty’s run until a black flag all brought the entire field onto pit lane for some cleanup, when we had Dan sneak down to presumably give Marty some water, only to reach in and hit record.  Technically, this was cheating, ’cause you’re not supposed to touch or work on the cars during a stoppage like this.  Sue us….

[[ Note: does this tidbit of cheating qualify us for the Spec Miata Man Drama facebook page!?  Probably not… we’re gonna have to cheat harder than that… ]]

Here’s the video clip of the cars rolling off pit lane, and me realizing how badly I screwed up…

I climbed the five flights of stairs to get on top of the timing and scoring tower, which is a fantastic view where you can see the entire course, in all of it’s soaking wet and slippery glory.  Here’s the shot of the start of the race:

From the top of the tower, you could see that in the first few laps, cars were going off track all over the place.  There was standing water in some of the turns, in particular the braking zones, and it wasn’t long before there was too much carnage on track for the workers to safely hot pull everything, and we had the first and only black flag all of the race.  Amazingly, while we had a lot of full course cautions throughout the night, that was the only time they cleared the track.  This was, as noted above, a convenience for us, as we got the video system running, and recorded the rest of Marty’s stint.

Just over a half hour later, Marty came in earlier than expected after some contact on track that resulted in significant damage to the front left corner, and he was experiencing a pretty violent vibration.  We pulled the wheel off, and initially concluded that we’d lost the hub, and we pulled off a swap in less than 10 minutes.

Although it was a bit earlier than planned, we went ahead with the driver swap and put Michael Qiao into the car.  Mike was the last driver we had recruited for this, and he wasn’t able to join us for the entire event, but his experience in AER, and his very recent experience driving Thunderbolt in the rain was a huge advantage.  Mike immediately reported the car still had a significant vibration, and when it didn’t shake out after a few laps, he came in and Brandon found the loose lower ball joint bolt.  Once that was tightened up, the problem was gone, and Mike ran the rest of his stint without any further drama.  Unfortunately, for reasons I have not had time to figure out, the data system failed to record anything on the USB stick we swapped in, so we didn’t get to add to Mike’s extensive collection of videos.

Mike’s stint was pretty uneventful, and when he came in, it was Brandon’s turn for his first stint.  We had originally said we would draw straws to see who got the second stint, but I argued it belonged to Brandon, because no one on the team put more hours, and more of his own money, into prepping the car and getting it ready for the event.  He more than earned the right to drive twice, and besides that, he’s the fastest driver on the team.

This was the first pit stop where I remembered I had a GoPro mounted on a tripod in pit lane, and we got this video of the Mike to Brandon driver change.  We had planned on swapping the rain tires, but Mike convinced Brandon while we were fueling that the replacements were no better, and we bailed on the tire change.  Honestly, the pit stops were the highlight of the event for me, since this was the first time I’d ever experienced this aspect of road racing, and it was a ton of fun.

The battery on the car had died on us, and we were forced to resort to push starting the car.  This was the beginning of the wave of electrical problems that would hound us throughout the rest of the race, and almost turned my stint into a somewhat embarrassing comedy of errors and stupidity on my part (I’ll get to that, I promise).  For reasons I also can’t figure out, the video system didn’t start recording Brandon’s session when he left pit lane, but the data and video started in the middle of a lap.  I have some theories, but until I get my data system out of Marty’s car (which is currently parked in his trailer in Eastern PA), I won’t be able to test any of them.

Brandon ran a great stint, and actually put down the 10th fastest lap of the entire race at 1:49.490.  Rain truly is the great equalizer, because the GT3 Cup Car that led the entire race and won overall only put down a 1:39.816 as the fastest of the entire race.  Here’s the video:

The first of several very well timed (for us) full course cautions fell as Brandon was nearing the end of his first stint, so we brought him in for the driver change to Dan.  This pit stop was our busiest, and our best, as we had to change all four tires to a newer set of rains, check and top off the oil, as well as install the extra lights on the front of the car.  I failed to record this from the pit stop camera, but after the problems we had with the memory stick in the data system during Mike’s run, I decided not to swap it out, since the other USB sticks obviously had some issues.  As a result, we got the entire stop from the internal cameras:

Dan’s stint was the one that spans the sunset, and conditions stayed very wet as he went from daylight to night, and unfortunately, our electrical problems started to get serious.  Dan reported that the car would sputter around 6K rpm, and the lights were flickering as well, but he endured, and ran the single longest uninterrupted stint of the race, at well over two hours.  He had a few adventures on track as well, but brought the car back to pit lane in one piece, where I was waiting to hop in for my stint.  Here’s the full video of Dan’s stint:

Phil’s Stint: the Dipshit in the (near total) Dark

Finally, it was my turn to hop in the car, and from the moment we tried to fire it up, things took a turn for the worse.  We could NOT get the radios to work, and the data system again refused to record with the replacement USB stick, so I had no video (although I could at least track my lap times on the AIM Solo2, which gave me a rough idea of how long I was out there), and I could NOT communicate with my pit crew.

Initially, the lights came on when I left pit lane, but they sure as hell weren’t very bright.  I was also suffering the sputtering at 6K that Dan had reported for the first few laps, but that just suddenly stopped, and that was also the point where I think the lights went out.  Yes, the lights went OUT, but I didn’t realize it because I ran with a few other cars, and was actually driving in THEIR lights, not mine.  As soon as I was alone, I realized that the glow from the front of my car was pathetic, and it was extremely difficult to see where I was going.

This is the point where I thought I should pit to get things working again…. and then I passed the E5 leader, who was himself sputtering along, clearly suffering from a mechanical problem, engine making some very unhealthy noises as a drove by.  OK, so now I had a judgment call to make.  Yes, it was hard to see (I am pretty sure the halogens were *OFF*, and I had nothing more than the running lights to help me see where I was going).  So, my initial decision was: I’m getting laps back, just suffer and keep going.

Now I have to admit I’m kinda glad I don’t have this on video, because everyone on pit lane is watching me drive by WITH NO LIGHTS ON, so they tried to get me to pit.  And, I, um…    er…   didn’t see them.  Marty walked out to the far pit wall and tried to flag me down, but I just didn’t see him.  They even asked race control to meatball me, and they did, but I could NOT see them doing so in the dark.  That’s on me, and not one of my proudest moments as a driver.

Finally, Marty stood there on the wall violently waving our #15 pit board sign, I saw him this time, and came in the next time around.  After we shut the car off and restarted it twice (electrically… we still had to push start it to get the engine turned over), for whatever reason the damn lights came on bright as hell.  One minor victory against the electrical demons (who would have the last laugh).

Frustrated and pissed off (at myself, mostly), I went out there and ran what I can honestly say were the best laps of my life, in conditions that were worse than I could have imagined.  The biggest hazard wasn’t the water, it was all the mud that cars were dragging back on track, with several cars going for an off road ride on every single lap.  You couldn’t see it, and you went from minimal to zero grip when you hit it.

I ran a 2:00 flat the first lap out, and got faster as the stint progressed, running a few 1:54s and staying under 2:00 for a bit over 40 laps.  I got into a groove, focused and ran the most intense, challenging and exhilarating laps of my short racing life so far.  When the caution came out again, I knew it was perfect timing for the final driver change, and in I came.

After the final pit stop, we had our best driver in the car, but Brandon had decided to switch to slicks, since parts of the track were somewhat dry at this point.  That proved to be a mistake, as he never got his times down under 2:00.  It didn’t make much difference at that point as we were way too far behind the leader to catch them, and 3rd place (the only other car in our class still running) was far enough behind us that we were able to stay ahead of them.

Then, with eight minutes left in the race, the electrical demons had their last laugh, and the car died, completely, as Brandon was coming out of T5.  We were the final caution of the race, but still finished 2nd in class, as there wasn’t enough time for 3rd place to make up the difference.

Once Brandon left pit lane, we had gone into pack up mode, clearing everything out of pit lane and back to the garage.  We packed everything up as we watched the podium celebrations, and that was when I learned that Dan was still on his novice license!  This was only his second official race, and I have to admit, I was surprised, because while Dan’s driving experience was brief, he has been on endurance team pit crews for years, and it really showed.  I learned a lot from both Mike and Dan, and for that matter everyone else, and I wouldn’t hesitate to be team mates again.

Team NoRags finished 2nd in class (E5), and 20th overall, with the 10th fastest lap of the race.  But one way in which we won the event overall was in the fun we had.  There’s no doubt in my mind that we had as much or more of it than much better financed, staffed and prepared semi-pro and pro teams that we competed against.

Once we were all packed up, we headed out to one of the few restaurants open that late for what Marty referred to as the “Team NoRags 2019 Devil in the Dark Planning Meeting”.  Everyone wants to do this again, and we all want to do more advance planning, including practicing pit stops, and just overall improving the way we function as a team.

This was easily the highlight of my fledgling racing career thus far, and now that I’ve experienced endurance racing, I will forever view sprint racing as nothing more than practice for enduros.  I absolutely loved driving in the dark, and even in the wet conditions as well, and can’t wait to experience it again.  I’m hoping to talk the team into maybe running an AER race in addition to the Devil in the Dark next year.

In closing, I also have to talk about one other thing that happened this weekend that was really special to me: my son Kentaro (everyone calls him Ken) joined us as pit crew, and got his first taste of road racing culture.  I didn’t make a very big secret of the fact that I was hoping he would catch the bug we all have, and that turned out to be a huge success.  When we got back home, for the next few days, this was all he would talk about.   He wants to practice changing tires on my SM2, maybe even practice fueling, and generally wants to figure out how to make pit stops a lot more efficient.

When we were packing up the garage, Marty and I were talking about all the fun we had, and he asked if Ken was interested in racing, to which I replied: I’m hoping so!  Ken walked into the garage a few minutes later, and when he took off the fire suit Marty had loaned him, Marty told him to keep it.  That suit was his Dad’s, and giving it to Ken was something I’ll never forget, and always appreciate.  Thanks again, Marty.

So yeah — I would LOVE nothing more than to introduce my son to this sport, and share all this fun with him.  Ken and I used to close down go kart places when we were on vacation, and I remember that I didn’t always beat him.  Now, I’m looking forward to 2019, and making this hobby a family affair.  I’ve got a variety of great ideas for Xmas presents this year now….

This brings my 2018 racing season to a close, and I have more incredible memories from this year than any other I have spent on the race track.  I got my full comp license, ran my first enduro, and introduced my son to something I am pretty sure he’ll share my passion for.

We’ll find out in 2019…

#RacingReallyIsLife

#SprintRacingIsJustPracticeForEnduros