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Perhaps…..no, definitely the biggest disappointment I’ve had on internet forums is that I have yet to be engaged in a conversation with someone who could talk to me about what a racecar felt like in the hands, the back, the heart . I’m not surprised, just disappointed.
No, I haven’t driven as many cars as I liked, and those I did get my hands on wasn’t for long enough. But I did get a feel for it, though a minimal one. Most of my recollections jive with whatever Brian Redman tells me whenever he has the time and patience to endure me. He is particularly good at describing the heart part, though he has little use for the technical descriptions. I guess that’s because he just liked to race and all the engineering mumbo jumbo was just a necessary evil. Then again, if you can get Brian to laugh just once, you are no longer the necessary evil anymore.
Now in the times I’ve talked to Jim Hall, my head would spin for days with equasions involving roll centers and bump steer, none of which I could understand but fascinating just the same. It was only talking about flying R/C airplanes that I could say anything that would hold his interest. He could certainly hold his own in those discussions.
Mark Donohue was far too analytical about his driving. It was plain he enjoyed what he was doing, but he found it difficult to describe what was going on without the use of a scratch pad or graph paper. I imagine he would be beyond nirvana if he ever had the use of today’s telemetry systems. He would probably find a way to analyze those too.
And Chuck Parsons would sit on the fender of the car and furiously thrash his hand around in the breeze and make all kinds of silly noises and grunts while trying to tell the mechanics what the car was doing “errrrr..whackka! Klumpa, klumpa…..zicccck!” I don’t know how anyone ever deciphered any of it, but he ran up front most of the time anyway.
And JR would just laugh and saw his hands, gripping an imaginary wheel, back and forth, and his eyes getting wider and wider with each remembered near miss of the concrete. It never made much sense, nor did I learn much from it, but it was always fun to watch.
And why did I pay any attention to any of this? Well, I was hoping my life would depend on it in my “what do you want to be when you grow up” little world. It saved my life for sure, but I never got to grow up in the world I wanted to. Or maybe I grew up and it wasn’t the world I thought it was.
I remember reading Emerson Fittipaldi’s “Flying On The Ground,” a book which not only was ultimately responsible for saving my life, but for converting me from a hazard to into a competitive force. Probably the most useful thing I got from that was an understanding that there were times nothing you could do would propel you to the front, but scoring points and living to fight another day was much better than wadding up the car and being carried off on your shield. I only got hurt one time after I read that, and even then, I knew I was doing something stupid as it unfolded around me. Red mist, I suppose. Emmo didn’t warn me about that.
Emerson’s book showed me that racing isn’t a testosterone test. It is a thinking man’s game . It wasn’t much use in karts to read how he preserved the tires until the end. Our tires would last half a season unless you cut one banging into someone (something to think about when a tire represented a week’s food).
Now when I got into F-fords, it became something of an art to get the most out of the tire. Oh, you could get more than one race out of them, but if you got the heat cycle wrong, if you got too much heat into them at the wrong time, you were done and would spend the rest of the race fending off those from behind. Of course, they would cool if you were careful, and you might have enough time to get back into the fight. You had to play it just right. It was a game that I saw Kevin Cogan use to absolutely slay everyone. Later, he used it to magnificent effect at Indy 1986 and had everything set up perfectly. It was probably the most brilliant 500 mile race anyone had ever run without winning. They would have never caught him without the yellow.
And you had to think about more than just the tires. Going back to karts, the old Mac engines were tempermental pieces of kit (charitable description) and would blow up like a short fused M-80 in the Cozumel Hilton, errrr, plumbing, if only you got the mixture wrong. And the mixture would never stay the same from lap to lap. You get it too lean and Errrrrrrrrrunkkk! Instant seizure. Too rich and the thing would fall off the pipe, go into a blubbering rich 4 cycle and half the field would blow by. So you would spend half the time with your right hand over the carb, ready to choke the beast if it went lean and stick your finger in the drip tube if it blubbered. You were doing this while you had your wheels interlocked with the dirtiest driver on the circuit as you sped into the banked turn at 100mph. It wasn’t all that bad though. So many of the things ended up in the dumpster after every race that parts were no problem.
Of course, you could eliminate all of these problems if you cut on this and that, officially known as cheating. I could never bring myself to do it.
And if you were really unlucky, the thing would sieze so fast that the centrifigul clutch wouldn’t have time to let go and the back tires would just stop. I illustrated this to great effect at Road Atlanta. Such good effect, in fact, that I was spitting up red Georgia clay for two days. Well, the earth bank was the early, accidental version of the SAFER barrier, so I suppose I was one of the original crash test dummies.
Now the karts were pretty benign little creatures. They had a little understeer engineered into them, but a nice rearward brake bias undid that little margin of comfort. If you stood the thing on it’s nose and yanked it towards the apex early, it would lurch dead sideways, seemingly about to come completely around. Since, at the time, the contact patch of the tire was so small, traveling sideways actually got more of the rubber getting grip in the right direction, which helped slow the thing down. It was really just a matter of steering it where you wanted it to go and nailing the right petal. They were pretty underpowered, so there was no danger it would jump out from under you. But you really had to be careful that you didn’t bog it down. That’s what separated the winners from the other guys. There was no power to waste. The juggling act was to use the oversteer to get the thing slowed enough to turn in, but not to waste the momentum you had coming off the corner. This is why I get a chuckle out of people dissing “momentum racing.” It’s ALL momentum racing, even road racing. Even with 1000 horsepower. The reason drivers always want more power is because there is never enough to waste. Not even in a 917/30.
You could never get away with this in a full sized racecar. They are too heavy for one thing and not forgiving enough for another. The tires would never take it. So, if you were good in karts, you just had the raw basics for when you would first get into a real racecar.
Now, it was more than just hanging it out and seeing who had the biggest, errrrr, ones. Now you had to take care of the car, the tires, and suddenly, a new demension, the gearbox. Great. It was bad enough to be overwhelmed by different handling characteristics, but now you didn’t have that oil clutch monitoring the engine rpm for you. Now you had to think about the engine more than just hoping it didn’t blow up.
And on top of that, you had to baby the thing too or you would find yourself haplessly hearing the gears knash themselves into never-never land.
More if anyone is interested……………………..
No, I haven’t driven as many cars as I liked, and those I did get my hands on wasn’t for long enough. But I did get a feel for it, though a minimal one. Most of my recollections jive with whatever Brian Redman tells me whenever he has the time and patience to endure me. He is particularly good at describing the heart part, though he has little use for the technical descriptions. I guess that’s because he just liked to race and all the engineering mumbo jumbo was just a necessary evil. Then again, if you can get Brian to laugh just once, you are no longer the necessary evil anymore.
Now in the times I’ve talked to Jim Hall, my head would spin for days with equasions involving roll centers and bump steer, none of which I could understand but fascinating just the same. It was only talking about flying R/C airplanes that I could say anything that would hold his interest. He could certainly hold his own in those discussions.
Mark Donohue was far too analytical about his driving. It was plain he enjoyed what he was doing, but he found it difficult to describe what was going on without the use of a scratch pad or graph paper. I imagine he would be beyond nirvana if he ever had the use of today’s telemetry systems. He would probably find a way to analyze those too.
And Chuck Parsons would sit on the fender of the car and furiously thrash his hand around in the breeze and make all kinds of silly noises and grunts while trying to tell the mechanics what the car was doing “errrrr..whackka! Klumpa, klumpa…..zicccck!” I don’t know how anyone ever deciphered any of it, but he ran up front most of the time anyway.
And JR would just laugh and saw his hands, gripping an imaginary wheel, back and forth, and his eyes getting wider and wider with each remembered near miss of the concrete. It never made much sense, nor did I learn much from it, but it was always fun to watch.
And why did I pay any attention to any of this? Well, I was hoping my life would depend on it in my “what do you want to be when you grow up” little world. It saved my life for sure, but I never got to grow up in the world I wanted to. Or maybe I grew up and it wasn’t the world I thought it was.
I remember reading Emerson Fittipaldi’s “Flying On The Ground,” a book which not only was ultimately responsible for saving my life, but for converting me from a hazard to into a competitive force. Probably the most useful thing I got from that was an understanding that there were times nothing you could do would propel you to the front, but scoring points and living to fight another day was much better than wadding up the car and being carried off on your shield. I only got hurt one time after I read that, and even then, I knew I was doing something stupid as it unfolded around me. Red mist, I suppose. Emmo didn’t warn me about that.
Emerson’s book showed me that racing isn’t a testosterone test. It is a thinking man’s game . It wasn’t much use in karts to read how he preserved the tires until the end. Our tires would last half a season unless you cut one banging into someone (something to think about when a tire represented a week’s food).
Now when I got into F-fords, it became something of an art to get the most out of the tire. Oh, you could get more than one race out of them, but if you got the heat cycle wrong, if you got too much heat into them at the wrong time, you were done and would spend the rest of the race fending off those from behind. Of course, they would cool if you were careful, and you might have enough time to get back into the fight. You had to play it just right. It was a game that I saw Kevin Cogan use to absolutely slay everyone. Later, he used it to magnificent effect at Indy 1986 and had everything set up perfectly. It was probably the most brilliant 500 mile race anyone had ever run without winning. They would have never caught him without the yellow.
And you had to think about more than just the tires. Going back to karts, the old Mac engines were tempermental pieces of kit (charitable description) and would blow up like a short fused M-80 in the Cozumel Hilton, errrr, plumbing, if only you got the mixture wrong. And the mixture would never stay the same from lap to lap. You get it too lean and Errrrrrrrrrunkkk! Instant seizure. Too rich and the thing would fall off the pipe, go into a blubbering rich 4 cycle and half the field would blow by. So you would spend half the time with your right hand over the carb, ready to choke the beast if it went lean and stick your finger in the drip tube if it blubbered. You were doing this while you had your wheels interlocked with the dirtiest driver on the circuit as you sped into the banked turn at 100mph. It wasn’t all that bad though. So many of the things ended up in the dumpster after every race that parts were no problem.
Of course, you could eliminate all of these problems if you cut on this and that, officially known as cheating. I could never bring myself to do it.
And if you were really unlucky, the thing would sieze so fast that the centrifigul clutch wouldn’t have time to let go and the back tires would just stop. I illustrated this to great effect at Road Atlanta. Such good effect, in fact, that I was spitting up red Georgia clay for two days. Well, the earth bank was the early, accidental version of the SAFER barrier, so I suppose I was one of the original crash test dummies.
Now the karts were pretty benign little creatures. They had a little understeer engineered into them, but a nice rearward brake bias undid that little margin of comfort. If you stood the thing on it’s nose and yanked it towards the apex early, it would lurch dead sideways, seemingly about to come completely around. Since, at the time, the contact patch of the tire was so small, traveling sideways actually got more of the rubber getting grip in the right direction, which helped slow the thing down. It was really just a matter of steering it where you wanted it to go and nailing the right petal. They were pretty underpowered, so there was no danger it would jump out from under you. But you really had to be careful that you didn’t bog it down. That’s what separated the winners from the other guys. There was no power to waste. The juggling act was to use the oversteer to get the thing slowed enough to turn in, but not to waste the momentum you had coming off the corner. This is why I get a chuckle out of people dissing “momentum racing.” It’s ALL momentum racing, even road racing. Even with 1000 horsepower. The reason drivers always want more power is because there is never enough to waste. Not even in a 917/30.
You could never get away with this in a full sized racecar. They are too heavy for one thing and not forgiving enough for another. The tires would never take it. So, if you were good in karts, you just had the raw basics for when you would first get into a real racecar.
Now, it was more than just hanging it out and seeing who had the biggest, errrrr, ones. Now you had to take care of the car, the tires, and suddenly, a new demension, the gearbox. Great. It was bad enough to be overwhelmed by different handling characteristics, but now you didn’t have that oil clutch monitoring the engine rpm for you. Now you had to think about the engine more than just hoping it didn’t blow up.
And on top of that, you had to baby the thing too or you would find yourself haplessly hearing the gears knash themselves into never-never land.
More if anyone is interested……………………..
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