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Alright... Same category, different style.


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Good Morning Everyone, 

I think I have figured this out, I have an idea.

   In the past, this part of the forum was written by one person, who magically had all the needed info to put a story together. I would like to say I know many of you, but do I actually? Where did it start? What racing style catches your attention? How did you get here? Are you sick of being cooped up at home with no racing? All I could give you are my own experiences and opinions about you. That doesn't seem like it would give you what you truly deserve, and I am bound to get something wrong. So let me throw this out there. I think it might be of more interest to hear from YOU, about YOU. I'd love to write your story, but you know it way better than I do. If you are shy, and that's not your thing, I totally understand. Send me a message, you and I will get to talking, at a distance, and we will get you figured out and into the Spotlight. So because every idea needs a Guinea pig, I will start with a subject I know a fair amount about... myself. So here goes. 

   When I was born, the small town newspaper proclaimed me as a driver. The next driver for my Dad's taxi company in Neepawa, Manitoba, November of 1979. My Dad is a car guy. It wasn't long before I had a five gallon pail full of toy cars, and if the stories are true, my parents could dump out that pail and pick out any car, and I could tell you the year and model. Over the years many cars came and went in my yard. Big V8's mostly, Pontiac Parisienne, Buick Electra, Ford Galaxie, a couple Lincoln Continentals, and many more. Fast forward to getting my license, December 1995. Passed first try, but I lost 3 points taking a second attempt at parallel parking. Two weeks later, Dad said I had calmed down enough to take the car to school. It was a 1981 GMC Vandura. The first car I owned was a beat up 1971 Datsun 510 wagon, and my dad hated it. I gave up on it too soon, but lucked into my first sports car, an '88 Chrysler Daytona. Then there was a Toyota pickup, a Sunfire GT, a Corolla GTS, a Camaro, an RX7, a couple of Mitsubishi Lancers, and I have skipped many more. In December of 2010, I bought a 1995 Viper. That was when my world started to change. I needed to learn how to drive this car, people were starting to get very competitive. A few years later I bought an '01 Viper GTS. They were known for being more of an animal, and the coupe gave me full access to the track and its safety precautions.

   My first REAL racing experience was Interlake Dragway, 2012. I was hooked and it wasn't long before I was bored and wanted more excitement. I started track racing innocently enough, going down to Brainerd, MN for Powercruise every summer. I started craving more serious, structured racing, and I drove down to Nebraska in 2016 in a new car for a Race School and some racing. I was one of 52 Vipers at the event. I won a trophy just for being crazy enough to drive down for the weekend and take part in the event. It was crazy. The very next summer, I took the HPDE out in Gimli. I started out rough, and too protective, but that was when I got REALLY hooked. It ended up being an amazing learning experience, and it started the ball rolling for me with the WSCC. I followed the school by getting a Time Attack license, and just getting out to some events. I think it rained for every event I attended for 2 years! But like a good student, I learned how to race in the rain too. Even after all that life experience, last year was still the first year I felt happy with my results, I felt fast! It's hard to explain, and the even harder part is that I know I could be faster. But that's the catch, isn't it? 

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I apologize guys, I just realized I totally missed that part!

   My favorite track toy has been a 2014 Viper GTS. It is completely stock, right down to the Pirelli PZero tires. 295s in the front and big fat 355s in the rear. The StopTech brakes, lightweight wheels,  and carbon fiber aero bits are all exactly the same parts as the TA model which was the most "racey" Viper at the time.... until the ACR came back the next year and really raised the bar. I got it on the scales at the track last summer and it weighed in at 3490 lbs with me in it, and on my last dyno day the huge V10 made 591whp/600tq. On the inside, for fun electronics it has a multi mode traction control system where I can run full on, rain mode, reduced (allows you to be a bit more aggressive before it steps in), and full off, including stability control. It has a dual mode electronic suspension where I can  go from a "soft" street setting to a very firm, tight ride for racing, with just the push of a button. A built in G Force meter maxes out (often) at 1.5g in acceleration, braking and left/right turns. Even with an ape like me driving, this usually equals out to a mid 11 time slip at the dragstrip at just under 130 mph, or a consistent high 1:02 to low 1:03 around the Gimli road course. It is an amazing car. I am still having lots of trouble getting videos up, but I will get there some day.

   The other car you are more likely to see me in at the track these days is my daily driver, a bright red 2019 Veloster Turbo. I have started throwing it around for volunteer laps during the past couple Ice Racing seasons, and it gets some laps in at Gimli once in a while too. But mostly, you will see it parked out at any of the corner stations during our race events, summer or winter. It is a very fun little car, with a 6spd manual, SXTH exhaust and 186whp. It needs a brake upgrade, a limited slip diff and better tires for starters, but this car will very likely become a more dedicated track toy as time goes by.

They are two totally different worlds, but they are proof that any car can be fun at the track!

 

Dason

Stable Mates.jpg

Edited by Rare Snake
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Nice write up, Dason! I have read some of the old contributions before, and I wondered why it was discontinued, and even more so...who will continue it? Kudos to you for doing so, in a very well written way! This is a nice thread to get to know the people racing with you, against you, waving the flags because of you and making the whole weekends happening for you!

Somebody, whose name shall not be mentioned right now, challenged me to write the next story. And with your permission I will kind of follow your outline.

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1 hour ago, donrolandofurioso said:

Nice write up, Dason! I have read some of the old contributions before, and I wondered why it was discontinued, and even more so...who will continue it? Kudos to you for doing so, in a very well written way! This is a nice thread to get to know the people racing with you, against you, waving the flags because of you and making the whole weekends happening for you!

Somebody, whose name shall not be mentioned right now, challenged me to write the next story. And with your permission I will kind of follow your outline.

Heck yes, go for it!

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As many people in this club know, I grew up in Germany. Living about 5km away from the next Hill Climb track, I watched motorsport from an early age on. Nevertheless, I did not get hit by the the racing bug until I was about sixteen years old. Not being able to attain a driver license for another two years, I got involved with one of the three motorsport clubs in our valley and offered my services as a co-pilot during rallies. Not too many people can read notes at full vehicle speed over jumps and through turns without throwing up, so I became a valued -albeit not well paid- commodity very quickly. I may not have been very valuable to the drivers, but in my mind I was da boss!

Once I reached the age of 18, my newly acquired car, a 1976 Opel Ascona 1.6N was quickly forced into duty during local events. I became addicted to racing, and I desperately tried to figure out what type of motorsport suited me best. Within the next five or six years I bought a vast array of cars. They were not all that new or fancy, but they were well suited for what I used them for. I had many BMW, even more Opel, three Fiat, two Autobianchi, a couple of Lada, some Toyota, there was an Alfa Romeo and a Lancia, an Audi, I believe there was a Nissan, there was also a Skoda , an Aro, a Suzuki and a Daihatsu and a DKW - yet surprisingly, I never owned a VW or Mercedes! On my 21st Birthday I bought my 21st car, and only 2 of those had been written off at that time! By the time I moved to Canada in my mid-twenties, I had owned 31 cars and 4x4s.

Where did my motorsport career take me to? After being a rallye co-pilot for two years, I was very comfortable and eager to race on gravel. At that time I quickly learned that my driving style seemed be more suited to a RWD or AWD car versus running a FWD vehicle. Rallye always remained one of my most favourite motorsport disciplines; however, I very soon started to explore other motorsport categories. My 4x4 were used for Off-Road Trials, and I bought a couple of Porsche to race the National Autocross Championship. Note: This is Autocross, not Slalom. Google "Deutsche Autocross Meisterschaft" to understand! Once per year I even competed in a ski-jøring (which does not mean much for the driver, as the skier is making all the difference in the world...)

Nevertheless,  I also raced a lot of Autoslalom. At that time race clubs started to realize that there is no sense competing for participants, as every club was hurting themselves by competing with the next club for participants. So all over sudden clubs in close vicinity decided to join forces: Club A had the stock classes running during the morning, Club B had the same cars in the afternoon. Modified cars were being run the opposite way around. Therefore almost every "non-race" Sunday I was able to race two Slaloms -one in the morning, then drive another 30km or so to the next one in the afternoon. Because of that I was racing somewhere or something almost every weekend.

My affection to road racing developed through rallying. In Europe you will find a fair amount of asphalt-only rallies, and I became very interested in pounding the pavement. At one point of time a friend pointed out to me that there was a intro event at Hockenheim, sort of a HPDE with a full blown race afterwards. Signed up, I thoroughly enjoyed the event, and I felt proud of having done not too bad in it. A second one four weeks later got me hooked, and I engaged a lot more into road-racing. After that, I raced quite a few times in Hockenheim and at the Nürburgring, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

Overall I have competed in a large variety of motorsport events, and while that seems to sound like a great advantage, it actually also brought with it some negative consequences...

Fast forward some twenty years...I lived in Brandon, and there was very little motorsport to be had. I did a bit of Motocross, but I started too old for this young man's sport. I also raced the odd stock car race in Souris with a neighbour's Malibu in the mechanic's race, but that felt too orchestrated to me. Any attempts to get into Ice Racing were thwarted by my wife after her seeing the grader broken through the ice. I therefore did not get back into motorsport until 2019.

Last year somehow the urge to race became extreme, and I decided to get involved with WSCC. The HPDE confirmed that I found what I was missing, and I have been driving around GMP the entire 2019 long. My car is a 2004 Mazda RX-8, bone-stock so far, but I slowly will get to to the limits of the car....its great brakes and forgiving nature seem to compliment my driving style.

I have learned a lot of lessons throughout those years. The most important ones are that car control is a perishable skill requiring constant honing. The other one is that there will always be somebody faster coming along - therefore outright speed will not always make you the winner of a race. I was fortunate to have rubbed elbows with some very successful racers, and what they all had in common was the absolute, unwavering desire to succeed in one particular racing series. Every time I put another lap in at GMP, I try to remember what other people have taught me, and hopefully I make the best out of every lap...

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thank you @Rare Snake for reviving the "WSCC Driver and Car Spotlights".  This has some history to it going back several years when Alston Penlock (Tristen) set this up.  It's too bad the links to the interviews and pictures don't work anymore because there were some very positive comments on how well these articles were received.

I think it's a great idea to learn a little more about some of the people you bump into at the track (figuratively, not literally), but are unaware of their colourful background.  I enjoyed reading your story and the background on the Viper(s).

@donrolandofurioso that was an awesome write-up you provided. Fell out of my chair when I read your comment about having 21 cars by the time you were 21 years old.  I Googled the German version of "autocross".  Wow, that's some pretty serious stuff.

And, yes, I was the one who challenged you to write the story (and darn glad I did), so I guess that means I'm on the hook for providing a story.  I've gone through the family album and high school yearbooks several times,  but still haven't found anything interesting that I've done in my life.  A boring story, coming your way soon ...

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14 hours ago, Weebly said:

Thank you @Rare Snake for reviving the "WSCC Driver and Car Spotlights".  This has some history to it going back several years when Alston Penlock (Tristen) set this up.  It's too bad the links to the interviews and pictures don't work anymore because there were some very positive comments on how well these articles were received.

I think it's a great idea to learn a little more about some of the people you bump into at the track (figuratively, not literally), but are unaware of their colourful background.  I enjoyed reading your story and the background on the Viper(s).

@donrolandofurioso that was an awesome write-up you provided. Fell out of my chair when I read your comment about having 21 cars by the time you were 21 years old.  I Googled the German version of "autocross".  Wow, that's some pretty serious stuff.

And, yes, I was the one who challenged you to write the story (and darn glad I did), so I guess that means I'm on the hook for providing a story.  I've gone through the family album and high school yearbooks several times,  but still haven't found anything interesting that I've done in my life.  A boring story, coming your way soon ...

Thanks! I also love reading everyone's history. So many different types of people and experiences!

And hey... I know your story is going to have at least 1 car in it, so there is no way it will be boring.

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