Copied from my website blog-
This past weekend we lost one of our RX-8 racecars. The yellow/blue/silver #98 car was entered in NASA's PTD class and running with the Blitz group at Pueblo Motorsports Park.
For those that not familiar, this is a pretty decent club track in Pueblo Colorado and was recently repaved. Track layout and other info can be found here- Pueblo Motorsports, CO - Official Website , While its has always been a fun track, turn 10, which leads onto the drag strip has always been an issue. In the past cars would spin to the inside and tap the wall. The track was repaved earlier this year, and the surface is still somewhat green and slick. Turn 10 was widened and this should have helped with the past issues in that corener, but the bleach box, or "burnout box", is right where the cars tend to be mid-corner, and is very very slick and treacherous. In three consecutive club races with three different organizations- SCCA, NASA, and RMVR, there have been cars into the wall at turn 10, one of which was the GRID-1 RX-8.
Our weekend started with us arriving at the track at 6:30 AM. While we were unloading the rain came pouring down. Fortunately it only lasted about 45 minutes. The sun broke and the track surface dried out, but it was still a bit slippery and of course off-track the surface was nice slick mud. This was what would prove to be our demise...
The driver elected to go ahead and run qualifying even though the track was still slick and cars going off in the previous sessions had brought mud onto the track. Our session was no better, with several cars off in the first couple of laps. Our friend Bruce went off in Turn 9 in his C5 Corvette, gathered up the car and continued. The next lap the driver of our RX8 also went off in turn 9, and this is where the errors started. One of the first tenets a driver is taught is that when you go off track, you get control of the car, evaluate what went wrong- overheated tires, oil on track, broken car, etc.- then get back under way. Unfortunately, this is not what happened. The driver stayed in the throttle while he was off course and came back on track with muddy, cold tires. In the short straight between 9 and 10 he did not lower his speed or change his normal line to account for the muddy, wet, and cold tires.On corner exit the car was slipping to the outside, the driver corrected and the car snapped into the wall, taking the front end of the car off. The driver is ok except for bruises to himself and his pride, but the car is a write-off.
We loaded the car into the trailer and headed home.
There are lots of lessons to be learned from this weekend, but cheif among them is that no matter how good you are or experienced you think you are, the basics cannot be forgotten. They exist and are the basics for a reason. When you ignore them or forget them or otherwise pretend they dont exist things will happen- thats why they are the basics! Cars can be rebuilt or scrapped and new ones built, but it sucks when the whole thing could have been avoided, and should have been. This is an incident which should not have happened. The driver told me later that he was not settled in the car and was wound up and felt rushed. He admitted he had been off track several times in the session prior to the accident. These things to me mean the driver should have come in sooner. It also means the corner workers and race control was sorely lacking. When a car goes 4 off in practice of qualifying in a club race weekend it should be black flagged and brought in, especially in poor track conditions. If it goes off several times in just a few laps, the driver should be brought in and lectured by the stewards.
At any rate, a fresh RX-8 has been acquired-
and will be delivered in a few days to be transformed into the "new" RX-8. Fortunately, many of the parts we need survived, and the rest can be had fairly quickly. We hope to have the car ready in time for Mid-Ohio, which is just a few weeks away.
Cheers!
Don Walker
original link- Yeah, this is as bad as it looks… « Grid-1 Motorsports
