RACETRACKS

Abadday at the racetrack is better than a good day in the office.”

I’ve never been able to find the origin of that quote or if it is simply a popular saying that has propagated throughout motorsports. No matter where it came from, I consider that line a fact in my life, not just an amusing quip. I’ve had some great days in business in the ‘office’ or the ‘office’ of one of our customers and some totally disastrous days at the track, but I still fully stand behind the veracity of the statement.

I recently spent the weekend at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park (‘Mosport’) for the IMSA sportscar weekend; a trip back to where the enthusiasm firmly took hold in the early 1970s. I won’t go into my personal connections and experiences with the storied track because I already touched on that in a couple of previous articles, one for the 60th anniversary celebration a couple of years ago ‘Mosport’ (ITMN 25.06, Oct 2021), and another in 2015 simply entitled ‘Memories’ (ITMN 1907, October 2015). But I can’t pass through the front gates and enter the tunnel, both extensively updated in recent (relatively) times, without getting a little twinge of emotion and a rush of fond memories. Saying that, I have to kind of squint to bring the “today” in alignment with my “yesterday.” The general elevations and clusters of trees are familiar but that’s about it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not all emotional about the original control tower being razed (although I would have bought a concrete block if they’d been made available), or the removal of the row of shitty old-school pit buildings and the paddock being completely paved (saying that our two Porsche 963 support trailers were still parked down in the grass this year!), that would make me a Luddite. But there is something missing, I can’t put my finger on it; “Je ne sais quoi” as the French so properly describe the indescribable. But the sand is still blowing off the hill and the spectators continue to be familiar and friendly (it’s Canada, after all), so I embrace it all as I always did.

I took the opportunity to break the Ford GT out for this visit to my home track, which made the trips back and forth from Uxbridge to Clarington even more poignant, my car being painted in the Comstock Racing Team colours of white with green stripes, which happens to be Canada’s national racing livery; actually an alternative to British racing green with twin white stripes. More specifically, my paint mimics the Comstock GT40 colours of Wimbledon white with a triple green stripe (a big center with two adjacent smaller borders). To complete the tribute I have a small Maple Leaf, with Eppie Wietzes’ signature and racing number (94) on the door. Eppie was a hero of mine, and many other Canadian racing fans, having won two Canadian Formula A driving championships, been a perennial frontrunner in six seasons of Formula 5000 against all the greats (Mario Andretti, Brian Redman and the Unsers…Bobby and Al) as well as the 1981 Trans-Am champion driving the famous Swiss Chalet Corvette. Not to mention competing in two Canadian Grands Prix and driving the first ever safety car deployed in a Formula 1 race (in 1973 at Mosport, I won’t relay the story here, it was a disaster, but very specifically not Eppie’s fault as some believe), I personally left the track that day with no clue as to who had won. At that time Eppie and George Eaton where the ‘big names’ of Canadian racing.

When Scott Maxwell took my car to Eppie’s ‘Celebration of Life’ (I was tied up somewhere in a foreign country), it was massively well received by Barbara (his wife) and the host of old cronies that were in attendance (legends like Paul Cook, Comstock’s team manager back in the day). Scott reported that the paint scheme and small remembrance on the door had “grown men tearing up.” That made me happy.

When I rocked-up at Mosport for the IMSA race, I eschewed the reserved spot behind our trailers and parked up on the sandy hill, behind the paddock, amongst all the other very cool stuff that people had driven there, resulting in a sort of ad hoc dynamic car show. It was where we parked 51 years ago for the 1972 Grand Prix of Canada, when my dad had a hospitality “suite” on top of the old pit boxes for his Ferrari customers. And that parking spot felt the same without squinting.

So, as far as racetracks go, Mosport is my favourite, and how could it not be? But the bias of, why? has changed over the years and I now think more in terms of how to race engineer cars for tracks, and my record of success or failure in doing so, which plays a major contribution to my affection for those circuits. Don’t get me wrong, I still love some of the classics where I have had little success in recent times (say Mid-Ohio…agghh), but now my feeling towards them is a composite of the actual place and the result (or my ability to figure out how to get a result). A few for reference…

Mid-Ohio: Yes, we did win there with the Mustang back in the day (1998) with Scott and Jason Priestley, the latter’s first professional race win, but it was in the rain, and simply came down to Scott’s superior driving in treacherous conditions. However, I also vaguely recall a mix-up on tires, at the last stop…I think a big advantage came with wets on the back and slicks on the front. It was an inadvertent set-up advantage that came from a mistake (sort of) of which Sean and I have never really talked about since, even when drinking. That great Ohio result has never been repeated, and in recent years, running the Mazda Dpi prototypes, it was the circuit at which we struggled more than any other due to the spectacularly low grip the place affords, the consequence of the highly polished asphalt coming from years and years of racing without refurbishment. Some engineers seem to have been able to get on top of it but not me, and our results have illustrated the weakness. That said, some of those poor results were self-inflicted by bad strategy calls (also my fault) or just bad luck (Scott getting shoved into the wall by an aggressive AMG GT while he had a fast Mustang underneath him back in 2020). But, on the flip side, I love the place from a pure fan perspective; A great rural location (similar to CTMP or Road America), natural topography and a quirky layout that would never make it out of a modern track designer’s computer-generated development. A massively long straight ending in a complex that goes up and down the side of a hill, a carrousel leading on to the front straight that wears tires out in a few laps (if you’re not careful) and a ‘suck it up’ first corner at the end of that straight. Oh, and the start/finish straight is actually only a finish straight (look it up). Awesome for the spectators, hell for the engineers, fun for the drivers. Fully classic.

Road America: Totally in the same vein as Mid-Ohio, from a classic old school North American road course perspective, but the old girl is not in my top ten from either an engineering or personal favourite place to enjoy watching a race. Too many straights, square corners, harsh curbs, a never ending carousel, the car wrecking kink, coupled with fast changing weather, none of which have been kind to me. Saying that there are connections that I can’t ignore, via my friend, business associate and team owner, the late Carl Haas (he was on the board and a major supporter of the place for most of his life), and I have an equally strong relationship with IMSA President John Doonan (a Chicago boy) who fully loves the place and apparently made his first visit to the Elkhart Lake circuit when he was a six-week-old baby! So, those two guys love for it creates a kind of affinity in me (oh, and naming a corner ‘Canada’ helps…apparently because it is the closest spot on the track to the border), as well as the atmosphere which is indescribable (one of the best in the world on a big race weekend), and the sausages, and Siebkens (for sure the best race track bar in the world). But still a shit place to race (unless you win like we did back in 2001 with the Mazda, one of Harry Tincknell’s great drives). I’ll stop here before I talk myself into really loving the place.

Watkins Glenn: 2019…the first win for the Mazda DPi, after enduring some tough years of hard graft developing the chassis and aero to be finally capable of doing so, and personally one of my greatest races sitting on the box. Another outstanding performance from Harry, but he had a great car underneath him and it ended with a one-two for our toughest ever project. Multimatic Motorsports has had some good runs down there in the Finger Lakes, and it’s truly an iconic circuit famously created by Bill Milliken, Cam Argetsinger and Henry Valent stomping the layout in the snow during the winter of 1955-1956 (after some years risking their lives racing around the local roads and through the town). Bill was another hero of mine, being the father of the vehicle dynamics analysis approach that we all now utilize, building the first laboratory tire tester in the world at Calspan, in Buffalo, NY (we still use it) and writing totally kick-ass books (his biography, Equations of Motion is a must read for anybody in Automotive Engineering…reminds the reader that its not about the process, its about the technical problem solving). He was also the Chief Steward for the USGP for ten years, making close friends with some of the legends: Bruce McLaren, Tony Rudd (of BRM and then Lotus Engineering fame) and John Cooper among others. While he was doing that, I was camping in ‘The Bog,’ with people I should not have been hanging out with (I’m now just old enough for my mother to read this and not lose her shit). I was there the year the bus got burnt. With all that background how could Watkins Glen not be right there below Mosport (CTMP) on my all-time favourites list. Note that it took me two decades of visits to finally find out that Watkins Glen is actually a very impressive geographical feature. I climbed up it once after learning what it was, and then got on with what I’m supposed to be there for…racing! And, finally, ‘The Glen’ boasts the second-best racetrack bar in the world…The Seneca Lodge.

I’m going to have to pick-up the pace a little to fit this article into my word allocation! I’ll cut to the chase with the rest, with reduced rambling, mostly because the associated drinking establishments really aren’t in the same league as Elkhart Lake or The Glen. But let me cover a few more that are close to my heart, or not, and keep the European tracks for another time, I had ambitiously planned to include them. A small preview…I love Spa and am truly indifferent to Silverstone (that last comment will completely extinguish any idea of me being drafted into the BRDC). Silverstone appears to be the

English equivalent to laying out a racetrack symbiotically with the natural terrain like Mid-Ohio, Laguna Seca and Watkins Glen…except they chose an air base as the natural terrain. Some smart ass will undoubtedly point out that Sebring is the same thing…so a quick comment on that.

Sebring: Who wants to go there? Not me. But tens of thousands of revelers show up every single year (even in 1974 when there was no race due to the fuel crisis), and it is a massive party (ask my offspring, who attended this year to catch a little racing in between the reveling). So, the race teams merely show up to provide the partiers with some entertainment beyond the crazy spectator vehicles dangerously blasting around the access roads, spectacular home made viewing platforms (sometimes attached to the crazy vehicles), non-stop music, impromptu custom car shows, loads of drinking and a little destruction. But the venue is only truly cool due to its great history, having survived rumours of demise a dozen or more times. The famous racing movie The Speed Merchants, which followed the 1972 World Championship for Makes, has the Sebring race open with a scene creatively shot across the massive expanse of concrete runway, with a bunch of workers scraping the weeds out of the expansion cracks with lawn edgers. The narrator states that this is rumoured to be the last year for the famous 12-hour endurance classic because the racing surface is becoming too rough for the prototype cars. But there everybody was again back in March of this year, fighting the same old engineering battle with the drivers, coming off the trailers with set-ups dictated by what the simulators and shaker rigs produced, but then chasing the spring rates down in response to driver feedback. “My eyesight gets blurry coming down the front straight” or “the car’s coming completely off the ground in (Turn) 17”. And the changes result in slower and slower lap times until everybody sucks it up and hits the reset button. Back to the starting set-up and a fast car, but with a driver that has now stopped whining, having experienced the slower alternative. The car doesn’t get fully off the ground in Turn 17 but there is a fair bit of air under the right-side tires at ‘the bump’ and yes, drivers have been known to piss a little blood at the end of a race. It’s a horrible place to engineer a car, and I wouldn’t know where to spectate the race from, other than a massive platform on the inside of “One” watching very brave drivers take their cars into that bumpy turn flat chat, not for me that kind of commitment.

So now reduced to a few bullet points per track for the remainder.

Daytona: An amazing place that I love; completely unique, using most of the NASCAR tri-oval with a decently long road course infield section. Not so much about suspension engineering as getting the right aero choice to keep the car stuck in the twisty bits without sacrificing that to drag, because the cars are flat chat for a long while (more to be had from going fast on the banking than giving that up to gain on infield sector time). Even when well attended it doesn’t look so, because of the massive grandstands that are jammed full for the ‘500’ but pretty much empty for the ‘24’ as the sports car crowd prefers the infield. For me, rolling into the paddock for the Roar Before the 24 in January has always marked the beginning of another racing season; what’s not to love about that?

Road Atlanta: Another crazy layout that would never make the cut in the new sanitized world of computer-aided design, cookie cutter racing tracks, with loads of run-off and gentle elevation changes. Turns 12 and 1 are for the brave, and finding a good setup for this Georgia gem is extremely challenging (and full of compromises), which we hit on for the Mazda’s final race, a big win for the end of the program.

Laguna Seca: Takes the natural terrain aspect to the limit with the

‘Corkscrew,’ which, for me is a bit of a party trick corner; basically, a turn at the right time and hope it works out situation. Hate the dust and heat, the former causing no end of grip issues that send an inattentive race engineer in the wrong direction. We have had good results over the years but barely inside my top ten favourites, and that only because of the historics. Oh yeah, we’ve wrecked a lot of cars there over the years.

Lime Rock Park: One of my favourites. Beautiful part of the world, a bullring layout with some good elevation changes and an easy set-up once you nail it. Asymmetric springs (side to side) and ride height. Like what you would run on a stock car at an oval. Have had great success on this wonderful little Connecticut track, including a podium on the debut of our first fully in-house engineered (from scratch) and built race car. Mustang bodied, tube frame GTS car. Scott took it to the factory Oldsmobiles and Nissan that weekend in 1995, a top ten memory.

I’ll keep the rest for a continuation article in the future: Sears Point, Mont Tremblant, COTA, Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, Portland and any other that you readers might be interested in. I can also do a global list…Le Mans, Silverstone, Spa, Nürburgring (both versions), Snetterton, Oulton Park, Brands Hatch, Fuji, Shanghai, Bahrain, Paul Ricard…and a bunch more. I have engineering and strategy notes for all of them!

I’ll finish off with a little story of serendipity that very much played a part in me choosing to write this piece (well at least the Mosport bit). When I was flying in from London just before the IMSA sportscar race I happened to look out the window of the Air Canada 787 just as it started to wind off the altitude heading into Pearson. And there was Mosport (CTMP) in all its glory, the unmistakable shape, the approach roads and familiar infield tracks. It was a really cool coincidence (I don’t spend a lot of time looking out the windows of aircraft) because that was my final destination. And then we made a big loop, my assumption being that it was to waste some time as the air traffic was heavy, but we did it twice and I happened to look out the window a second time, and there was Mosport again, calling me! But then we did another half loop and headed to Ottawa because a fire alarm had gone off in the control tower in Toronto…shit. Spent an hour on the ground in the nation’s capital and then resumed, landing in Toronto a couple of hours late, but pretty cool view, twice, of my home track. IT