cars.g93.net

12 Hours of Sebring 2005

On my last day at Sebring, after I thought I had seen everything it had to offer, I saw four guys wearing cow suits with anatomically correct bladders. They didn't appear to be promoting anything, unlike Pirelli girls, and they didn't seem to be affiliated with any of the professional race teams that make the trip each March to this otherwise undistinguished patch of central Florida. Just four guys adding their own bit to the spring break atmosphere of what many people call the "Mardi Gras of Motorsports."

Major sports car endurance races are exceptionally strange events. Hundreds of thousands of people travel huge distances to camp out in the mud and watch the same set of cars go by for hours and hours. The sheer length of the contest exposes car racing's dirty secret: the cars might be beautiful; the drivers heroic; the changes in strategy interesting; but minute by minute, the race itself can be exceptionally boring.

So every endurance race develops its own particular culture of distraction to keep everyone content and entertained. At the 24 Hours of Le Mans, it's the ferris wheels and amusement rides for the kids; for the British, the pubs.

At Sebring, it's the biggest Mardi Gras celebration east of the Big Easy. Continuous streams of people in jeeps and pickup trucks wind through a makeshift city of RVs, and used schoolbuses. Girls exchange a short glimpse for one or two plastic bead necklaces tossed from the roofs as they pass by.

But it's the cars everyone comes to see. The 12 Hours is a five day affair. Vintage and open wheel formula races precede the event. A 1965 Saab 96 shared the track with Jaguar E-types and an eighties NASCAR Ford Thunderbird. Vintage Mustangs, Corvettes, MGs, Triumphs and Alfas make for some very great racing.

The main event featured many of the cars that run in the 24 Hours of Le Mans: Maserati, Aston Martin, the new Corvette; and the ubiquitous Audi R8.

Photos below:

Vintage Cars

Alfa GTV

Jaguar XK-E

MGA

Saab Sonnet

Triumph GT-6

Night Shots

ALMS cars

Bonnie CLAC

Over the past few months, I've had the privilege of helping an awesome non-profit out with their website and marketing. Yesterday, we just launched a substantially revamped website.

Why do I mention it on a site about cars?

Nominally, Bonnie CLAC's mission is to help lower-income people buy cars. Typically, when many people with shaky credit need a car, they head straight to their local used car lot. You've heard their ads on the radio: "WE FINANCE EVERYONE!!!"

And they do -- by selling their customers old cars at exorbitant interest rates. The monthly payment is affordable -- barely. But when the car inevitably breaks down or a major repair job is needed, they often can't afford to pay it. Worse, they have no way of getting to work.

So they default on the car loan, and the cycle of a paycheck-to-paycheck existence and bad credit continues.

This is where Bonnie CLAC helps. Their goal is to help their clients buy a new car -- usually, a Honda Civic. To qualify, clients have to take financial fitness courses, and sometimes build a payment history for several months on a "bridge" loaner car.

Once the client has qualified, Bonnie CLAC will guarantee a car loan, and negotiate for a new car on behalf of their client.

So a new car is the carrot, but the end result for the clients is often a completely new, longer term and vastly more informed approach to their personal finances.

Right now, they have four offices in New Hampshire, with plans to expand. They do great work, and I've been lucky to help them out.

Final note: they provide a no-hassle car buying service for everyone, even for those with good credit. If you're around New England, and know someone who needs a new car, but doesn't want to haggle with a dealer, send them to Bonnie CLAC, and support a good cause.

Microcars

Last weekend, a few friends drove up in their recently-acquired 1976 Austin Mini to visit the 2005 Microcar and Minicar Classic at the Museum of Transportation in Brookline.

The show was fantastic -- a nice contrast to the precious, q-tipped cars on display at the MFA's exhibit of Ralph Lauren's cars the previous week. After showing the cars for an hour or so, they started the cars up and gave short rides to those in attendance.

Some highlights:

Fiat Giardinetta -- based on the ubiquitous 500, but with a much cleaner van back design. Future company car for C's architecture practice.

One of several Nash Metropolitans

A beautiful Messerschmitt bubble-top car, sporting a swank snakeskin interior

An early Subaru minitruck. Diahatsu seems to have more recently cornered the market on these.

3-wheeled Reliant Scimitar

One of the first Hondas to make it to these shores

A stunning Glas 1300 roadster

More photos on Flickr

1999 Honda CB750 Nighthawk

Though most of my gas-burning interests have revolved around cars, I've long been curious about motorcycles -- particularly, what it would be like to take longer trips like this one and this one, but was always too focused on other things to actually act on it. In April, I took the Motorcycle Safety Foundation's excellent course for novice riders, and a month later, rode home on my new-to-me bike.

When buying your first motorcycle, you can sum up the conventional wisdom roughly as follows: 1. Don't get a bike that's so fast you're going to kill yourself. 2. Because you *will* drop your bike at some point, get one you can afford to drop.

So after some amount of research, I wound up buying this 1999 Honda CB750 Nighthawk from a retiring mechanic in Lynn.

I bought the Nighthawk because it's fast enough to have fun, big enough to be comfortable on the highway, but not so big that it would be hard to handle. Also, they have the reputation of being exceptionally reliable, and easy to maintain, thanks to modern niceties like self-adjusting valves.

Always goal oriented, I took care of the dropping part the first night I owned it by foolishly putting the kickstand down on soft ground. Of course, it rained during the night the ground softened, and I woke up the next morning to find the bike lying on its side. Fortunately, damage was minimal.

Speed, Style and Beauty

Last weekend, I finally got around to seeing Speed, Style and Beauty: the Museum of Fine Arts' exhibit of some of Ralph Lauren's cars. The cars on display were stunning, both in terms of their design and the absolute perfection of their multi-million dollar restorations. Of the fourteen cars in the show, my favorites were the the early Bugatti racecar for the purity of the shape, the Porsche 550 Spyder for being so simple and elemental -- the car I'd most like to drive on a racetrack; the Mercedes 300SL Gullwing as the car I'd most like to drive through the Alps with C; and the Ferrari 250 GTO simply because I've loved it ever since I was twelve.

One of the themes that emerged very strongly from the show was the idea of how the different national sensibilities had a profound influence on automobile design in an age before wind-tunnel optimization and the rise of international schools of transportation design. The lithe, low, bright red 1929 Alfa Romeo 2900C stood in sharp contrast to the bulldog, almost militaristic shape of the 1925 Blower Bentley, or the tidy shapes and silver finish of the German cars against the Baroque forms of the Bugattis and the extroverdish Ferraris.

It took me a long time to see the show. While I've always loved the shapes of cars, I've never been very enthusiastic about the q-tip branch of car enthusiasm. Ultimately, I'd much rather be driving, or at least see the cars driven.

Related:

More Photos of the Exhibit

If you liked this exhibit, your next stop should be at the Schlumpf Collection in Mulhouse, France. This phemonenal collection once belonged to Fritz Schlumpf, whose passion for old Bugattis and Ferraris caused the ultimate bankruptcy of his entire textile empire.

Watkins Glen

Just returned from four (count 'em) days at Watkins Glen in upstate New York. The first two days, I instructed with the Connecticut Valley chapter of the Porsche club; days three and four, I ran time trials with the COM sports car club.

If you've never been there, Watkins Glen is one of the legendary road courses in the United States. For years, this was the location of the United States Grand Prix, the Formula 1 circus's annual stop in this country. The track also has the distinction of being one of two places to take the cars of the NASCAR series out of their normal habitat of banked ovals, and forces them to turn right as well as left.

Few tracks feel as fundamentally correct as Watkins Glen. The track is a fast, flowing combination of high horsepower straights, blind downhill sweepers through the woods, and the famous fast uphill esses. In my car, the esses are taken flat out, accelerating from 90 to 115 mph, conserving as much precious momentum as possible. A track map:

Both events were well-run and lots of fun, distinguished more by the sheer quantity of Fikse wheels than anything else. I don't think I saw one car towed in with body damage all four days. Or in the case of COM... *new* body damage. COM members tend to bring lots of interesting and diverse machinery, and this event was no exception -- everything from an original Corvette Challenge car, a late-eighties Dodge Daytona, a beautiful Ford GT40 replica, an Ultima GTR, in addition to the usual bevy of Miatas and Imprezas.

Neither event provided me with anyone to play with consistently. With COM, my car was classed with the lower horsepower cars, an obstacle course of Miatas, Sentras and Minis. So I spent my time working on the parts of the course that have frustrated me -- mostly turn 11 and the entry into 1. They're both critical corners for a fast lap time, as they lead onto the fastest parts of the track. After the time trial, I experimented with staying in fourth gear for turn 1, which seemed to result in a slightly higher exit speed. More to learn.

My M3 ran great. Temperatures were in the mid nineties with high humidity, but the car ran very cool thanks to a new radiator from VSR. Only puzzling thing was a humming/harmonic sound coming from the rear brakes when cold. Fred Ferguson thought it sounded like a whale. It always went away after a few laps, so I didn't really worry about it. Maybe I should?

The brake ducts I installed at the beginning of the season are proving their worth. They didn't change braking performance in a noticeable way, but did drastically lower the wear rate of the front brake pads. I started with well under half of my front pads left, and changed them only for the last three time trial laps on the afternoon of the fourth day -- even then, only because a missing brake caliper clip caused one side to wear unevenly.

Side note about the ducts: I typically tape them over for the highway drive home to prevent rocks, bugs or debris from getting sucked in straight to the brake rotor. This time, I forgot to do it until just over halfway home, and was surprised that the car seemed to be a bit more stable and faster at highway speeds with the ducts taped. Placebo effect? Possibly. But the brake ducts do act as a parachute, and in cases where you don't need to optimize for brake cooling over a 40-minute session, it might be worth taping them over to see if a higher top-speed is possible on some of the straights.

In the end, I ran a 2:22.4 in the time trial -- a little bit off my hand-timed (i.e. error-prone) best of the morning, but good enough for second out of six in class (ST2). My time also would have won the next higher class, ST1. Still four seconds behind the class leader, another E30 M3 with a better driver, less weight, Hoosiers and a fresh motor. I think there's probably a couple seconds to gain somewhere with my car the way it is. Next time.

Notes for future reference:
- Free wifi hotspots in Watkins Glen: The Seneca Clipper motel, outside at the Harbor Park, Seneca Lodge and at the entrance to the State Park.
- First time at the bar at the Seneca Lodge. GREAT place.
- Wal-mart mounted and balanced my RA-1s for $11/wheel. The guy who worked on my tires had flagged SCCA events. Nice people.