Pantera Club Speed Trials, Spring Mountain Raceway

Through Checkered Flag Racing Association (a driving club) I got the chance to drive with the Pantera Club that some of the other CFRA people are in. The club event and race were to be Friday at Spring Mountain Motorsports Park, with an open test day preceding it.

Thursday

Thursday was an "open test" day at the track, which basically means anyone qualified to do so may test their car on the track.

Fortunately, it was a "mellow" open test day as they say at Thunderhill. Because this was sort of a special day associated with Friday's Pantera Club event, the open test day was a de facto Pantera Club extra day. So the people there were all acquaintances who drove by the same low-key open passing guidelines. There was no one out there with a formula car passing you two-wide in the corners. In fact, the light traffic meant that passing was rare and easy to make happen safely. Because the underground tunnel connecting the facility entrance to the infield paddock area was not finished, cars entering and exiting the facility had to cross the main straight. So the day was run in approximately 30 minute sessions, using a checkered flag to shut the track down for a couple of minutes only if someone needed to get in or out. A gate was kept closed by an attendant to prevent any cars from wandering across the main straight. Essentially, we could be on track as often and as long as we and our cars could handle it. No lack of track time here!

My first task was to try to get used to the track. Spring Mountain was designed and built and is operated by Rupert Bragg-Smith, and it's the home of the Bragg-Smith driving school. It's funded or sponsored in part by Chevrolet, and the school is the official Chevy driving school. A small fleet of stock Corvettes and Camaros is parked in the paddock. The track has a lot of tight turns and is relatively slower than most of the other tracks I've driven. It starts with a pair of 180-plus degree high-speed sweepers, followed an almost autocross-like series of curves and corners, a short straight that curves into a hard braking zone and a long straightaway, then a final sweeper and zig-zag before the short main straight. I would find that the combination of the sweepers and full-throttle corner exits were very very hard on tires.

At first, it seemed impossible to get turns 3 through 6 memorized. They came fast and furious, and at first it felt like 3 and 5 were the same, which made it hard to remember what you were heading into. But, after a couple of sessions this feeling of being lost went away, and I could start working on my line through these corners. After a few laps, I was consistently under 2:10, and I managed to work my way down to 2:05.43 later in the day.

It was extremely hot, around 100 degrees. The extreme heat combined with the extreme track (not enough high-speed sections to cool off the engine, and lots of high-rev 2nd gear stuff) put the temperature gauge higher than normal, but not too much. In normal driving my temperature needle is basically straight up. On hot days or in traffic it tilts into the 0 in "180". This day it was pretty much on the next tick mark at 215. That's the highest it's ever been, but still far from the red mark at 250.

Perhaps the best thing about this day was that I evidently learned the track faster than Michael and Behram. The result: even in my lowly 2.5L Boxster my time of 2:05.43 beat their big badass 3.2L Boxster S's by a couple of seconds. Woo-hoo!

Friday

Friday was the DE and race day. A lot more people were there, and we were placed into slow (C), medium (B), and fast (A) run groups, same as what CFRA uses, in 30 minute sessions running continuously. Since I'm ready to move up to the A group in CFRA, which requires a "check-out" ride to get sort of certified, I grabbed the instructor during a morning session and had him do the check-out. Naturally :), I passed the screening and ran in the A group the rest of the day.

Michael and Behram and I traded drives and rides a couple of times. At some point I got my lap time down to 2:04.85. By now they had both figured the track out and were slightly faster than me.

The last event of the day was the race! A ten-lap exhibition race, to be precise. No, I didn't participate. Michael and Behram, being the crazy guys they are, did participate, along with a dozen or so other cars--several Panteras, a couple of Miatas, a deafeningly loud black Corvette with race slicks, a 944, and a TransAm. I was just not ready to step up to the risk level (mainly of damaging my car) that I figured even this gentleman's racing entails.

We ran qualifying laps (where you are sent out with no traffic, and get one lap under official timing, in case you prefer to be tested this way or don't have a Hot Lap timer) and then a qualifying session (a normal session where you get 30 minutes and take your best Hot Lap reading, but inevitably have to deal with traffic on some laps) to go for grid positions. I did a 2:06.62 on my solo qualifying lap, which would have put me something like 2/3 of the way towards the back of the pack, had I been in the race.

Because the unfinished tunnel goes under the shorter main straightaway near turn 1, it was decided that the green flag would be thrown on the longer back straight. This would mean that if a catastrophe occurred at the start entering the first turn, no one would be launched into the tunnel culvert.

The race started without incident, and the extremely fast Pantera on pole position started to stretch out a lead fairly quickly. Behram was gridded around the middle of the pack, with Michael a couple of spots behind. After a few laps of watching the cars go around in a familiar sequence, I noticed that the last place car, the Trans Am, wasn't going by. I figured it must have had a mechanical breakdown somewhere on the track. Then, I noticed that Behram was no longer going by. I hoped it was a mechanical breakdown rather than a crash!

Well, it was sort of both. A minor fender-bender had occurred in a mis-communicated passing attempt in the very tight Turn 5B. Ed's red Miata had been dogging Behram's red Boxster for a while, and at some point Ed thought Behram was letting him pass. But he wasn't, and when Ed realized this, he couldn't brake in time. The Miata's left front bumper made contact with the Boxster's right rear wheel, causing a minor crunch in the Miata's left front bumper, and a snapped control arm in the Boxster's right rear suspension. Behram limped over to the access road and parked it for the rest of the race, while Ed pitted to inspect the damage. So out of something like 15 cars that started the race, there were two mechanical DNF's (the TransAm and the Corvette), plus the two cars out in the "crash".

My initial reaction was that the race result confirmed my reluctance to drive in the race. On the other hand, after some time has now passed, I'm not as squeamish about the idea, at least among this group of drivers and on the safer tracks. I also figure that Behram's a little more aggressive on the track than I am -- I probably would have just let Ed pass me sooner. And in any event, the damage itself was fairly minor, which reminds me that even as the chances of car-to-car contact are small, the chances of severe ($) damage are even smaller.