Rhino Brothers Racing
At Speed - Waterford Hills
Much of
the racing that I do is run through the Waterford
Hills Road Racing sanctioning body, abbreviated WHRRI. All WHRRI races
are run at Waterford Hills Road Course, in Clarkston, Michigan. This is
certainly my "home track", being only about 45 minutes from my
home. I have logged literally thousands of laps here during schools,
lapping days, and races.
WHRRI races are open to anyone with a full SCCA competition license, and they also run their own licensing program with a school at the beginning of the year - you can find me working as an instructor there.
This particular
photo was taken in July of 2001, during a race weekend. Our race weekends
start on Friday evening with registration, and by the time you pack up on Sunday
night, you have run 1 qualifying session and 3 races.
This is also
Waterford Hills, during a WHRRI race weekend early in July, 2001. Here I
am chasing the Corvette of Kip Wasenko - a beautifully prepared and very fast
IT-E car. For those of you who are wondering, his tires are 335s in the
back of that car, compared to my 275s in back. Is there any question who
can get on the power harder coming out of a corner?
You can also see quite a bit of roll in this picture. We had softened the car up quite a bit to see how it responded, and we made the bars just a little TOO soft. The car was destroying the outside corner of the front tires and generally making a real mess of the geometry. You can see the result of a stiffer sway bar set-up in the above picture, which shows significantly less body roll.
Waterford is a fairly tight track, and you spend a lot of time at
Waterford balancing the car with the throttle in slow tight corners like this
one.
At Speed - Grattan Raceway
Here's me coming
through a corner at Grattan Raceway in Grattan, Michigan. Many of
the tracks that I run on are in beautiful out-of-the-way places.
But when you are in the car, the view is the last thing you are thinking
about!
This particular event was put on by the Alfa Romeo club, but I regularly
attend open track events put on by the Shelby American Automobile Club
(SAAC), the Porsche Club of America (PCA), and many other organizations.
Every event is run differently, but generally an open track event is organized
into run groups of approximately equal speed. Passing is only allowed
on certain sections of the track, and usually only when the driver in front
of you waves you by. This may sound "wimpy", but if you think that,
then you've obviously never been out there. The thrill of running
a professional road course, even without fender-to-fender competition,
is not one you will soon forget. And besides, very few of us who
run open track events actually LIKE doing body work that is a result of
car to car contact.
This is Grattan,
later the same day. Yes, the track is wet. In fact, it poured
quite hard for a little while there. But that's okay. Other
than a wet interior (I run with the windows down and the sunroof off),
there's no harm. In fact, the wet is an excellent place to learn
car control and smoothness. Good thing today I was running on street
tires anyway. More recently I have been running much wider road race
tires -- had I been doing that on this day, I may have reconsidered my
rain driving, since slicks don't do too well over standing water.
Funny thing about pictures, is that a lot of the ones that come out are of me alone on the track, but often other vehicles interfere with getting in a clean lap. It's just the nature of the game: not everyone out there is running at the same speed.