DAC - February 7th & 8th, 2009
(Story and photography - Scott Miller)
Ice Race Journal Index
DAC - February 7th & 8th, 2009
(Story and photography - Scott Miller)
Ice Race Journal Index
Read the disclaimer if you are prone to believing everything you read.
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Tuesday Feb 10, 2009
This past weekend was
hosted by my club, Deutscher Automobile Club (DAC). Overall the races went well from an organizational standpoint with the exception
that grid
sheets seemed to occasionally miss car's numbers but the problems were
promptly resolved and everyone seemed to have a good time. Many
thanks to all my fellow club members who volunteered their time this
weekend to make the racing happen. My supportive better half, Judy, was
also at the track this weekend along with my friend Mike who was a great
help (thank you) and witness to probably one of
the wildest races I have ever run in rubber to ice RWD class 1 in 14
years of coming to Mindenhammer. More on this later. Every year the DAC holds our annual awards banquet on the same weekend as we host the ice races and this year we celebrated at the newly renovated Dominion Hotel. Great roast beef dinner was served and the place now looks fantastic.
My wife volunteered to provide the table centre pieces but guess who wound up completing the project? As I got into the idea and started getting creative I realized the cars themselves were pretty lame so I decided the focus would be on each centre piece being a different ice race scene. Drawing on my years of ice race experiences I had no trouble creating eight typical ontrack scenarios that I am sure any ice racer will immediately identify with (more centre piece photos at the bottom of this page).
I am this year's grateful recipient of our club's Ice Race Champion trophy. It is a special honour for me as I have always wanted to have my name on it and I am proud to be listed in the company of many of our club's great racers. The trophy was hand crafted by a now departed good friend and a very much missed and colourful member of the DAC, Raul Backstrom.
Metal:
First the bad news: another disappointment for the Toyota MR2 as the motor over heated and spun another bearing. This after a heroic effort was put in this past week by Jim Feeney who replaced all the bearings from the previous weekend's same type of disaster and had the car running and on my dolly by around 4:45 pm Friday ready to tow up.
I got about 2 1/2 laps into the stud qualifier when the car over heated and the "little guy with big hammer" was back at it inside the motor. I still had the same problem of no poweer until around 6500rpm. When I got back to my pit I started dealing with the overheating issue forgetting about the knocking noise - the rad had a broken off bleed nipple so we replaced it with a good one and refilled and bled the cooling system. With that taken care of I then remembered that the bearing was gone and so parked it, went down to registration and got registered to run the Ovlov in the rubber to ice class 1 races. The good news is I have decided to go the route of the 20 valve swap and so have taken the MR2 and a newly purchased used JDM 20 valve 4AGE Silver Top motor to Biral Automotive in Rexdale. Hopefully I will only miss one weekend and still have at least a couple weekends to sort out the car.
The second red flag event of the weekend happened on Sunday
in the first Metal to Ice race as
Jim Feeney did pretty much the same move I did on the first weekend. I was standing on the snow bank in mock
grid when early in the race Jimmy came out of the last turn onto the
straight (counterclockwise track) and got a little too sideways on exit
kissing the bank with the back corner of his red Corolla which whipped
the front around, catching the snow bank and sucking the car up and into
a rollover and spitting it back out onto the track on it's roof. No
injury was sustained to the driver, the car was flipped over and it
started then was driven off the track by Jimmy. Class 1 (Rubber-to-Ice RWD):
Once again the Tin Man provided relief from my MR2 woes and has now been renamed the "Silver Bullet" after the blistering races turned
in on Saturday and Sunday in Rubber to Ice RWD. My only disparaging
remarks I must make about racing in this class this weekend was the
inconsiderate, out of control crash and bash idiocy displayed by a couple of the AWD cars
one of which wore a rookie triangle the other I believe should know
better and eventually did manage to stay off my car and allow me to run ahead of him later
on. However, the black Quattro #50 was eventually protested by a group
of drivers from Class 1 for
his pinball style lack of control and placed on probation.
The story:
The last race Sunday was indeed probably one of the wackiest "races" I have ever experienced in 14 years of ice racing. It all started in the first corner on the first lap with a pileup of three or four AWD cars on the outside of the corner in the banks at the end of the straight (counterclockwise track) spinning, bouncing off each other and the banks, crashing, darting everywhere ( looked like a dropped handful of ping pong balls on a cement floor) and then when they got sorted they bolted straight across the track for the inside of turn one - right where I was! It seemed that around every turn there was some other melee to deal with. One time, on the apex of the last corner just before the straight, I came across two cars coming towards each other from opposite sides of the track like a giant door closing on my line. I had to thread the needle and swerve around first one and then the other way around the second - never touched them - don't know how I didn't - Keith Dougherty in the passenger seat said he just closed his eyes for that one. Another time and I am at full song hugging the snow bank at the end of the straight when Ed Violette's beautifully prepared black with red stripe 740 stuffs it big time in front of me about a 1/4 of way around turn 1 right on the snow bank line I had been running !!!! I tried to go around but that put me out on the clear ice part of the line where the Hakka's have no grip at all (I don't even think they are even classified as ice tires just mud and snow ) and so I slid, feeling much like a curling stone, sideways for like 300 feet screaming obscenities at the top of my lungs until the right side of the Silver Bullet impacted with the right rear corner of the parked 740. At the last moment I yelled at my passenger: GET AWAY FROM THE DOOR! .
The hit was HUGE! Punched a hole right through the rear quarter of my car just behind the B pillar in front of the rear wheel opening and shifted the passenger side pillar in about 2.5 inches. That 4x4 brace I have in that car spanning between pillars meant the impact pushed the opposite pillar outwards the same amount.
The silver bullet straightened out (no pun intended) and we continued racing. The 740 is almost a rightoff - Ed says it doesn't track quite true anymore. I felt really helpless during the incident and I am very sorry for you Ed. I do hope you can finish the season with it and with much success man! The rest of the race was a constant source of grief because around every snow banked corner there seemed to be yet another cluster-of-cars surprise waiting.
I swear, every lap saw yet another car beached in the banks! In the course of avoiding things I spun the car 360 degrees on two separate occasions without loosing position or banking it. My passenger goes: "Hey, just like Jim Rockford!" On another occasion he yells: "This is like the Dukes Of Hazard"! I yelled back : "No no no this is NOT racing"! That race was won due in most part to attrition - again the Hakka's were not gripping very well as the temps had fallen well below the optimum conditions for those tires. Any time I had to cross the ice line I could spin the steering wheel, brake lockup, punch the accelerator but nothing would happen the car was like a curling stone. I drove anywhere but on the traditional polished race line - the problem became that eventually almost every corner had a car stuffed in the bank and I would have to maneuver around it as that was where my line was.
After the race I stopped on the cool down lap and got out of my car to help out with Richard Piper's Ovlov extraction only to watch it get done before I got to it so I got back in the Ovlov but my door wouldn't latch. I had already started rolling and was looking at why the door wouldn't close instead of where I was going and beached the car in the bank! Couldn't get any grip with the Hakka's to get out - everyone had to stop and get out again now to remove my friggin' car! I'm afraid I've heard rumor of a Bank Manager nomination on that one alone. BTW: The guy in the passenger seat, Keith, had never been in an ice race but now wants to participate. Street Stud:
You know, I was having so much fun in the rubber to ice races I'm not sure I remember much of the street stud activity. I know I kept ahead of Tom Prentice and I think may have beat the MR2 once so that means at least second place finishes. Then there was the one race when my wife came out as passenger and Doug Forbes rolled his 4x4 Subaru at the far end of the track from us thus red flagging the race. So we had to sit for like 20 minutes with Judy going: "Is it over yet? Is it over yet?"
Doug, I seem to remember you've done this a couple times before. Ya' gotta' watch those short wheelbase, high centre of gravity AWD Sub's on the snow banks man! So until next weekend, don't forget to wear your rain coats this week and I hope to have an MR2 back on the track yet again - did you know that car has more highway miles now than track mileage !!! SACEWE!
Results see www.CASC.on.ca web site and click the ice race link Pics:
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