You probably can’t learn to run a race team in four days, but we don’t know how to build a race car either so let’s not get caught up in the details. Using our Ready, Fire, Aim approach to this pro racing thing - since we had purchased and stripped a car, I figured it might be a good idea to actually see how a Grand-Am event runs. I had been to this same race last year when the BimmerWorld crew were doing their due diligence on the series (before they made a decision, announcement, and bought / stripped a donor) as a spectator but that doesn’t always give you the subtle details working behind the scenes allows.

I made my gracious offer to Clay, that in return for credentials, food, and lodging I’d serve as his apprentice team owner. For my mental model I used a combination of Roger Penske and James when he fell off the team transporter, basically a guy looking grumpy wearing some type of hat, sunglasses, and radio earphones. We started negotiating on specific duties based on my diverse skill set - eventually settling on Car Helper / Tool Fetcher as my official title, which I modified to “Chief” Car Helper / Tool Fetcher due to the fact that I was the only one with that job description. I still maintain I could have served as Dave White’s security detail, but will reluctantly acknowledge that he wasn’t swarmed by female groupies like Patrick Dempsey and his four police officers so in hindsight probably not the best use of my time, that is the call an experienced team owner makes. He also made me promise to bring Craig.


DTOM Security Detail

When we got there we were asked to reprise our roles from the famous car stripping video i.e. Craig Geiger as President of the Film Club, and Jim Robinson caterer. Then at the end of each day James or Jason Marks would ask “Did you learn anything today?” I certainly did! I know where all the fast food spots in Leeds, AL are. Now how that connects exactly to managing a professional racing team I’m still a little foggy on, but I’m sure it will come into focus down the road. Thankfully we also were able to sneak in Ted, Jason, and Brendan and they got a chance to look over the cars, ask intelligent questions, and receive intelligent answers from Marks, Ryan Kuhn, Dave Simpkins, et al.


Craig's handy work.

In addition to getting lunch I also tried to generally stay out of the way, the BW crew does an amazing amount of work getting the cars prepped and ready, setup changes, not to mention some of the obiligatory work required like packing & unpacking the rig, Grand-Am inspections, etc. This just reinforced my opinion that driving the car is somewhat the easy part in all of this, having the right support people are crucial to success. Wayne Yawn the team's engineer also dazzled us with his 911 engine trivia and successfully answered Craig's one tough question - "Why are manhole covers round?". His friend Amy showed some awesome jump rope skills too, the most attention I think the team got all weekend was when she was jumping rope - see a small taste here.

Since we’re talking about Barber it wouldn’t be right if I didn’t complain about the track a bit. First of all it is a coin toss between which is more miserable; standing outside in the paddock when it is 100+ degrees, or standing in the paddock with huge clouds of pollen floating around. By the end of four days I was ready to pluck my eyes out of my head. Unfortunately every time I had a run in with the legendary paddock police of Barber, Clay was sitting right alongside tsk tsk-ing me into not running over cones or people, and not destroying property. I took some satisfaction in seeing the huge grassy fields that they use for parking absolutely destroyed by the heavy rain that came through on Thursday. It was a total mess.


"Ha Ha" - Nelson from the Simpsons


Superstar racer Randy Pobst was making his own parking space all weekend to keep his baller ride clean, I had to one up him.

Another thing I ‘learned’ while standing on the pit lane was more about the Indy Racing League than Grand-Am. There is always a higher level. Grand-Am has some nice stuff, there are pro teams that have huge semi’s, big dollar stuff. IRL takes that and turns it to 11. There wasn’t a guy on pit lane that looked like he’d ever changed his own oil. They looked more like engineers and computer geeks. They had massive ‘war wagon’s’ with seats and awnings, and carbon fiber bits. They had huge antennas for telemetry and weather gizmos. In short probably about as close to Formula One cr@p that you’ll ever see in Alabama. Also all the drivers are like Shetland people. Danica Patrick is a tiny tiny grumpy girl, Helio Castoroneesess (The dancing with the star tax cheat guy), Tony Kannan? All borderline midgets.


How much does the umbrella holder guy make a year?

So after 3 days of car helping and fetching lunch, Clay introduced me to my race time duty – “Deadman”. The picture will help explain; basically the GA fuel rig has a valve that someone has to hold open while the car pits and fuels. I’d like to think they call it the “Deadman” because it so easy a dead man could do it, but in fact its called that because when it blows up and the dude holding the valve open falls to the ground as a pile of ash the fuel shuts off and saves everyone else that isn’t standing next to a firework. I didn’t give this a second thought, and with Clay’s encouragement of “Don’t screw this up” I figured no problem.


Pull the yellow handle and don't blow up - Mini in background pre-blaze.

Since it was very easy I didn’t screw it up, I only mention this because it has forced a review of my well documented safety first policy. Here I am in jeans and a golf shirt surrounded by dudes in nomex fire gear next to 60+ gallons of fuel when towards the end of the race a Mini goes up in flames. Not – ohh a leaf got caught on the exhaust and started smoking, a “WHOOSH” and oh sh!t they’re pulling that dude out of the car on fire, type fire. No one was hurt, and we had earlier noticed that one of the Mini’s were leaking fuel into a puddle but assumed it had dried up. Well whatever problem it had didn’t fix itself, unless you count burning to a crisp a ‘fix’. The pit crews put the fire out three times, before the big fire truck dudes rolled up and foamed it down. Unfortunately we’re not building a Mini otherwise I would have seen if the wheels were for sale since that is about all that wasn’t a melting pile of cr@p afterwards.


Mini - post blaze.

In summary what did my apprenticeship teach me? Well that if you need a guy to feed between 10 and 16 people with fast food, I may be your man. Craig is really good at sticking a bunch of cameras on a car and pressing a button. You wear fire proof snowsuits for a reason. Grand-Am looks like a lot of work. The End.


Congrats to Dave White for sitting on the Pole! Pictured here in his second big time interview - remember hands down.


Here Dave celebrates sitting on the Pole, who says racers aren't athletes.

Labels: Big Announcement, BimmerWorld, Coni build, Craig, Pics

Well here is the BIG Announcement, which probably isn’t that big unless you are Craig or I, or apparently Evan who won a used clutch for being able to use Google. Without prolonging the suspense here it is –

DTOM Racing is building a car for the 2011 Continental Tire Challenge Series in the ST class.

There it is. Take a second to absorb it, let it marinate. There will be an entire FAQ devoted to various aspects of the plan, the people involved, to come shortly with the redesign of the site.

This little post will do nothing more than give the background to that bold statement.

Roughly towards the end of last year as I changed brake pads on my car for roughly the 4000th time, I started to get sick of E30’s. Since I’m not 17 and I’m not fascinated with smoked taillights (sorry Jason) the BMW was more of a means to an end (racing), than a real love affair with the car anyway. Around this same period of time Craig had toyed with a notion of selling his car and buying a 911 to club race. We’d talk back and forth about what to do ‘next’ and never come up with good solutions.

Roundel, which is the BMW Car Clubs monthly magazine generally sucks, but there is one dude that is pretty sharp (Sam Smith) and about the only thing worth reading in that rag. He wrote an article on the lifecycle of club racers. I think his conclusion was that the life expectancy was around 3 years. I started doing Driver Schools back in 2005 (maybe 04?), I’ve gone through my motivations before; however I like to make progress and feel like I’m learning something. Not that I am, by any stretch, an E30, SE30, Racing, or BMW expert but you get to the point where there are diminishing returns. His premise was basically this ‘hobby’ requires so much commitment in time and money that people get burnt out. There is also very little future in it so unless your are independently wealthy the chances of you moving up the ladder to any significant ‘pro’ series is between slim and none. Since most people involved in racing are competitive by nature this lack of forward progression will burn you out if the cost and time thing don’t do it first.

I recognized this as I started to get within striking distance of Clay’s, Seth’s, and etc lap times. The Traqmate that had served me so well in getting to this point was not showing the easy “1 second here” gains. So I ‘invested” in a fancier data rig hoping that additional sensors and doodads would further illuminate those little differences I needed to work on. Well it certainly did, unfortunately I didn’t like the answer. There are no more easy gains. It is a .1 of second here, or .05 in this corner. , as anyone that has met me for more than 10 min. can attest I’m hopelessly impatient. The thought of grinding out lap after lap trying to whittle away at .1 is depressing. Consider how miniscule .05 of a second is. The thought of whittling away for years while continuing to work on a 20 year old car started to feel more like a job than fun.

That realization, combined with Dave White going off to pro race land really started to depress me. (Not because Dave isn’t qualified just because he was my enduro partner last year.) I had witnessed the BeerTech team disappear as JP sold his car, Brian Jones fell ‘in love’, and Scott McMinime worked more and more. Rev. Al was also a less frequent character in the DTOM stories, Sasha had brain damage from the fun run, and Travis also had a baby and sold his car. In short I felt like the kid in highschool that is a junior and all his senior friends are going off to college and he is left behind. I had usually crutched on Club Racing to provide entertainment when the SE30 stuff was thin on the ground but now with Brendan’s car in various pieces this was less of an option. So what to do, what to do?

For some reason one day I read the Grand Am rules and it slowly dawned on me. This wasn’t a World Challenge $500million car with bespoke invented pieces from the Space Shuttle parts bin that needed a Doctorate in engineering to understand. This was more like Spec E30 writ large. In the meantime Craig had settled on the 911 path, he was looking at cars and close to buying one. I pitched him my idea of building a ST car. He wasn’t particularly interested. BMW’s as race cars just aren’t as sexy as 911’s that is pretty much a fact. I told him to mull it over, and I continued to do my due diligence. I pitched my idea to Clay. This was the watershed moment. I’ve pitched hundreds of ideas to Clay of various levels of absurdity; most of them have him investing a certain amount of time or money into my racing career. To date he has politely declined these awesome opportunities with a terse “not interested”. This time he said “Might Work”. Those words were like the red cape to the bull.

Suffice to say here are a few DTOM guiding principles that make this possible:

1) Lots of sympathy and guidance from Clay and BimmerWorld

2) Free help from awesome mechanics Brendan, Jason and Ted.

3) If we don’t make the field some of this is about the journey not the destination. We’re pretty optimistic but sometimes a change of scenery is just as important. And besides train wrecks are interesting too. An add on to this is our competitive desires. We don’t really plan for this car to run up front at least initially and with Craig or me driving. We’re sort of doing this for fun?

4) Provide lots of DTOM fodder for public consumption, different then the typical SE30 race reports and blogs that now seem to be all the rage. Hopefully everyone will enjoy following along with our trials and tribulations regardless.

Actually accomplishing this was going to be a lot lower percentage without Craig. Having a partner makes my economic hardship much less, he has a pretty sweet garage which isn’t a race shop but can play one on TV if needed. Unfortunately he still wasn’t convinced. That was until he mentioned it to his wife, and although I have no proof of this, she must have found out that Patrick Dempsey is involved in Grand Am at some point. The rest, as they say, is history. With his family support secured all of a sudden being a ‘pro racer’ looked a lot more appealing then just another 911 douche bag club guy. My family discussion went like this:
Me: “Hey I think I’m going to go pro racing.”
Wife: “What is that going to cost?”
Me: “About the same? (voice cracking)”
Once lighting didn’t strike me dead, I quickly added “Dave White races in this series”. That drew a blank stare, so I tried again, “Patrick Dempsey races in this series.” Done and done.

So stay tuned. Since we’re going to make this a little more pro-fess-ional, we’ll get better about pictures and videos, etc instead of just my fancy written BS. Strap in and come along for the ride, even if we put it in the wall I can promise it will be fun and worth the time.

If you’re reading this I also assume that you have some interest in racing so if you have questions hit us up at dtomracing at gmail.com . We don’t have lots of answers but we do have lots of opinions!

Donor car arrives in Atlanta on Tuesday, probably picked up Friday. Giddy up!

Next Episode – working title “So You Say You Boys Want to Buy a Racecar”

Labels: Big Announcement, Contest