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[Johnny D]

Wives and Miatas, Part 3 (I don't know where 1 and 2 are)

http://www.roadandtr...r-own-race-car/

 

 

"My driver got run off the road in a construction zone north of Cincinnati," Jim Daniels told me, over a phone connection that seemed to be ninety percent static. "I think he's okay, but he said your car came off the trailer and he's not in any condition to tell me anything more than that." I was standing on a street in downtown Columbus, Ohio. It was 9:15 on Thursday night. Qualifying for the AER race at Mid-Ohio was tomorrow morning. Four of our drivers had already flown in; the fifth had driven his RV all the way from Atlanta to Columbus. Four more crew members were driving in overnight from North Carolina and Detroit.

 

Our friend Jim Daniels, the "Godfather of Spec Miata" and the first man to win a Playboy MX-5 Cup professional championship, had been working day and night to prep my wife's 2006 MX-5 Cup car for this race. After a furious bout of last-minute tweaks, including swapping the front calipers twice when the first set of new ones didn't meet his criteria, he'd put the car on the trailer in Memphis with just twenty hours to go before qualifying began. And now the car was done. Totaled, most likely. Between my wife, our drivers, and our crew, we were looking at maybe $35,000 wasted. Then I heard Daniels take a deep breath.

 

"Awww… I'm just messing with you," he laughed. "The car's at Mid-Ohio being loaded into the garages." Jim thought this was very funny, but then again he's known for having a prickly sense of humor. I took a deep breath, as well.

 

"We will head up and meet him there," I said. Most of our drivers and crew had already come out of the restaurant where we were having a late dinner, perplexed by the exaggerated, furious body language they'd seen in the front window. Now they could sense my relief. But if they'd know what was to come in the weekend ahead, they would have remained tense, trust me.

 

It seems impossible to believe that the woman known to all and sundry as "Danger Girl" took her first laps of a racetrack in December of last year. In the ten months since then she's driven nine different tracks, competed in six SCCA autocrosses, won five trophies, bought herself a "track rat" Fiesta ST, earned her SCCA license at Skip Barber, attended their Advanced Competition School, taken stints in two AER races, and acquired her very own ex-pro race car.

 

 

Keep in mind that until February 2016, she had never owned any vehicle besides a GM pickup truck or SUV, and that she was only vaguely aware of how to drive a manual transmission. Now she's licensed to race her own car in two sanctions. I'm not sure the word "motivated" adequately covers it. Some days I'm very proud of her. Other days I'm slightly frightened.

 

Our goal at AER's Mid-Ohio weekend was modest: finish a race, nothing more. We haven't actually taken an AER checkered flag since we took our GM 3800-swapped FC RX-7, yclept "Black Betty", to a fourth overall and second in class at the 2015 Mid-Ohio season-ender. We broke down at Watkins Glen. Then we changed to my Neon for NJMP, and broke both days. Danger Girl wasn't having it. She wanted to finish a race this year.

 

We chose an MX-5 Cup car because Mazda has secured a clear racing future for the NC generation of its little roadsters. It's legal for several classes in SCCA, NASA, and Pirelli World Challenge. It's also legal for AER, as long as it runs street tires. Our particular car had been campaigned by my former Compass360 teammate, John Kuitwaard, for two years before being sold to Mike "Meathead" Collins. From there, it went to a Florida doctor who put in a new powertrain but didn't actually race the thing.

 

Knowing that our MX-5 hadn't taken a start for half a decade, I insisted on sending it to Jim Daniels for a full checkup. Daniels is modest (by his standards) about his success in MX-5 Cup --- "I won the championship because I'd spent a lot of time developing the car in the year running up to the beginning of the series" --- but there is almost nothing that he doesn't know about racing Miatas of any generation.

 

Jim replaced a few thousand dollars' worth of parts, gave it a basic setup, and sent it to us. After receiving the car Thursday night, we worked until Friday around noon getting it to comply with AER's rules for seatbelts, window nets, fire extinguisher, and a few other thing. To my utter and complete joy, we'd managed to come up with two sets of brand-new Dunlop Direzza Star Spec tires. The Star Specs are very good and very predictable in the dry, but they're also surprisingly good in wet and chilly conditions.

 

Which was good, because it was thirty-six degrees when Travis Okulski started the race on Saturday morning. He had a brilliant stint, fighting up to near the front of our class. Our next three drivers, David Culberson, "Mental" Ward, and Matt Farah of "The Smoking Tire", kept us there. And then it was time for Danger Girl to take her stint.

 

 

To say that I was a bit nervous about this would be an understatement. When she'd driven the Neon earlier in the year, we'd already lost a couple of hours in the pits and there was no pressure. But now she had a podium position to hold. Her first ten laps weren't at the pace we needed. But she kept chipping away at her times. Things looked good…

 

...until they didn't. I happened to be in pitlane, watching the track where "Thunder Valley" exits into the Carousel, when I saw our ice-blue MX-5 scything through the grass into the tire wall. My radio beeped.

"I'm in the wall," Danger Girl said, in a mixture of anger and despondence.

 

"I can see that."

 

"I didn't stall it," she said. "I think I can come in." And she did. Our crew chief, Bozi Tatarevic, got under the nose and started looking. In half an hour, he and his brother, Bojan, had the MX-5 ready to go again, bending and taping the nose enough to meet the regulations. And we finished the race. Not first, but also not last in class. It felt like a victory.

 

A review of the video afterwards shows that Mrs. Baruth had moved off-line to let the leaders by in Thunder Valley and she got caught out by fluid or debris on the track. She almost caught the slide, but her hands were a little slow. "I'll be better next time," she says, and I believe her.

 

Our team body man, Josh Howard, stitched up the nose in proper JDM drift style overnight. I took the start the next morning. We began the race ninth in class; when I got out two hours later, we were second. The MX-5 was wicked fast on the Direzzas, recording a 1:45.0 despite both AER's decision to run the chicane and temperatures that hovered near the freezing mark. Travis was next; he got us into the lead almost immediately. And we held a lap-and-a-half lead until the 4.5-hour mark, when the differential called it quits.

 

It was heartbreaking, to put it mildly. It would have been a real Cinderella story for my wife to pick up a class win in her first weekend in her own car. But now we have something to shoot for. We've committed to the entire AER season for 2017. We have a great team: eight drivers, an insanely talented pit crew, and a bunch of friends who are willing to drive or fly cross-country to help us no matter what it takes.

 

 

That Saturday night at dinner, when I looked around and saw the nearly twenty people who had committed to making the race happen, I felt closer to tears than I've been in a long time. In an era where most people struggle to make acquaintances outside their jobs or their online existence, we've built a team. We've made friends. We've got journalists, businessmen, multi-millionaires, guys who are just getting from paycheck to paycheck. There's a guy who won the International Blues Challenge and a guy who plays guitar at a sandwich shop for tips. We have an Air Force officer, two men who grew up in war-torn Serbia, and a woman who underwent a dozen surgeries in a year just to walk.

 

I would go anywhere and do anything with these people. The fact that what we are doing is racing in a great series with a great car just makes it better. And to think that it all started when my girlfriend decided to try driving on a racetrack for the first time ten months ago. Sir Francis Drake had a personal motto: Sic Parvis Magna. From small things, great things. This is a great thing. And I'm grateful.