It’s been a few weeks since we raced at the Ridge Motorsports Park with the Lucky Dog Racing League. The dust has settled. The race trailer is empty. The cars are parked. Normally we’re already thrashing to get both cars ready for the next race, but we’re only taking the escort down to PIR for the Halloween race, and it is almost ready.
The Ridge is hands-down the best road course track in the Pacific Northwest. The owners are constantly upgrading the facilities. The track surface is perfect, there’s a good amount of elevation change, and there’s a good mix of turns and straights to appease everyone. Mix in some amazing weather and the conditions were perfect for a fun weekend of racing.
We had four new drivers come out this race! It was the first time Nathaniel, Justin, Mike, and Tammy had ever been on a road race course before, though Mike and Tammy had raced dirt track previously.
Friday practice went well. Everyone got some good seat time and both cars ran flawlessly. We spent Friday evening getting the cars through tech, going over all the fluids, and even had a nice group talk with professional driver, Randy Pobst!
SATURDAY:
Lucky Dog always runs a 40 minute qualifying session Saturday morning before the race starts. Ed drove #704 mustang and Tammy drove #717 escort for qualifying. I’ll just split this up as a recap for each car individually here:
717: Tammy brought the escort in because it had started smoking really bad during qualifying. We checked the car out; everything seemed fine and we suspected we had spilled some oil on the exhaust. Lance took the car out to run the first stint. As soon as he rolled out behind the pace car, the car started running really rough. He barely managed to get the car back in the pits under its’ own power. After going over the car for way too long….. (I’ll just skip through all the cussing) we found that one of our fuel barrels had gotten water in it and we now had water in the fuel tank. It took us a while to get the contaminated fuel/water out of the tank but once we got good fuel in the car it ran great again. Everyone got some good seat time and, while we didn’t place anywhere near the top of our class, we took the checkered flag. That’s a small victory in itself.
704: Ed ran first stint in the gray mustang. While strapping him in to get him out on the grid, we had a malfunction on our seat harness cam lock. One of the belts just wouldn’t latch. We grabbed a new set of harnesses out of the trailer and swapped it out while all the other cars were out behind the pace car. Unfortunately, Ed was forced to sit at pit out until after the green flag was dropped and EVERY other car made it past the start line. The car was running good and Ed is a great driver. He finished the first stint in second place in class. Nathaniel jumped in for the second stint and did a great job driving. It was his first race but he had ran a lot of laps on our friend’s sim rig and had ran more laps than anyone else during practice. He came out of the car and we were leading B class! Justin ran third stint and had only gotten minimal time on track for the practice day since he traveled in from Spokane Friday morning. He was out there learning as he raced and you could see his lap times dropping drastically as he started feeling more comfortable in the car. Unfortunately, he did get a black flag for passing under yellow…. It happens. It still happens to me and I can’t blame it on inexperience. By the end of his stint he was running right on pace and making positions back! I drove the last stint and when I got in the car I noticed it was running hot and smoking quite a bit on deceleration. I tried keeping the RPM’s low to make sure we finished the race. The temps dropped from 225 to 210 and the car smoked a lot less if I shifted around 5000 rpm. We were able to finish the race in third place, a pretty big feat given the circumstances!
Sunday:
The word of the day was “carnage”. About halfway through the race the front hub broke on the escort. That pretty much took out every driving component on that corner of the car. We looked the damage over. We had “almost” every part necessary to fix the car, but given the time required to fix the car, the race would be over. We made the decision to load it on the trailer. The mustang was starting to run rough (we later found that we had put some of the contaminated fuel in it… whoops) and then completely destroyed one of the rear wheels mid-corner. Nathaniel got to experience his first code brown moment. Again, by the time we would’ve gotten the car fixed, the race would have been over, so we got to start packing up early.
Overall, the weekend was a huge success. New friends were made, and new race drivers were forged.