Seattle 29/30/31st May 2004

Seattle Double National Races.

I returned to the Pacific Raceways circuit near Seattle, Washington, to continue my efforts to qualify for the 2004 runoffs and compete in the Double national event. With the success and disappointment of the Portland round quickly fading in to memory (see earlier report), it was important that we made headway with the car and improved on last year’s times. Eric Purcell, had worked hard during the intervening 2 weeks to get some of the issues sorted with the car. Namely to design, manufacture and fit a rear diffuser to the car in an attempt to try and balance the aero effects that we were creating at the front of the car.

With this new part fitted, we loaded in Portland after a week of fine sunny weather to arrive at Pacific raceways to heavy rain storms that prevented any Friday free practice. The first run in the car was the Saturday practice. Being the first session on track, the circuit was cold and greasy, and it took me a couple of laps to refresh the memory. The circuit has a good combination of corners from the fast ‘big Indy’ corner at the end of a very long start/finish straight, to the tight and unforgiving turns 5-6 rewarding commitment and precise positioning. I was just beginning to get the car to move and dance when I felt a problem with the rear of the car, my outside rear tyre was deflating ending my session.

Back to the pits to find that the tyre had been rolling in to the diffuser around the high load corners, so with a careful technical adjustment, (jigsaw-cut) we made some more clearance.

First Qualifying was made more exciting by the fact that while we were in pre-grid, the heavens decided to bless us with more of the wet stuff. A dash back to the pits for wheel/setup changes found us trying to enter the track as the session was cut short due to cars exiting the circuit at unofficial places. AAAGGHHHH! I was beginning to think that the weekend was going to be very hard work. We were heading in to final qualifying for race 1 and I had only done 5 laps with a much revised setup.

Final Qualifying for race 1 was again a short affair due to another car venting its oil contents in turn 2-3-4 on lap 5, but only after I had strung together a satisfactory lap that at 1min 27.802 secs was only a 1/10sec off the lap record. That was enough to put me at the head of the S2 contingent. Dave Ferguson, who had made the drive up from California with the view to ‘keeping me honest’, failed due to certain reasons to make a competitive time.

The first race was at 9.30am on Sunday morning, and the weather again was failing to comply. Neither was it raining hard, nor drying up, and the obvious question was wet or dry set-up? There was no obvious answer as the rain eased to a drizzle, but we decided at the last to go on the wet set-up and play it safe. I needed to finish and have a car in one piece for the next race. With my ‘retrospectoscope’ it was definitely the right decision to make, and with Ferg and John Bachoffner both on Slicks, I had a relatively easy run from flag to flag, but four sessions in to the weekend, and we still had no real quality dry running to develop the cars speed.

Finally the sun broke through on the Sunday afternoon to give us a 95% dry track for final qualifying for race 2. With new rubber, and a determination to beat the track record I followed Dave out of the pits, but about 10 secs behind. We both went at the track hard from the first corner, and in another shortened session, we pushed each other to some fairly respectable times. The new diffuser on the car was making usable downforce, and even creating a little push in some of the corners where I would have preferred the opposite effect, but I was happy that we had got a faster car than last year. 1min 27.080secs. was enough to put me again at the head of the S2’s and 7 1/10ths inside the lap record. Dave had driven hard to get at 1min 27.3sec and put the car directly behind me on the grid as we were split by a formula Mazda. Finally we had something to be reasonable happy with and this was made even more rewarding when across the scales we read nearly 90lb’s over weight, (that’s over 40kg’s for us Brits). After a thorough de-brief with Eric and a good look at the data, we could see that there were still areas with the car where we felt that we could make reasonable chunks of time. Our top speeds were getting in to figures that we had never been able to show before, and corner exit speeds were also improving.

The weekend had been building all the time, and as we approached the final race on the Monday the pressure was on to perform well. We had only made a couple of small shocker changes to the car since qualifying, so I was confident that we had a car able to turn good lap times consistently.

From the rolling start, I managed to get the jump on Dave behind me who seemed to ‘bog down’ a bit, so by the end of the first lap there was a gap of about 7 secs. I was fighting for the same piece of track with a couple of formula Mazda's as Dave made the charge after me. I was running comfortably, and only had to increase my pace when the gap between us contracted. The difference yo-yoed a bit as we each fought through traffic and also made way for the inevitable charge by a couple of the formula Atlantic's that were in the race. There was also a section of track that had yellows as John Hill in his Storh had an incident that was fairly severe, apparently flipping the car off the track. John however was OK, but a little shaken. The car was badly beaten up, but had taken the impact very well. Dave and I ran quick times all in the low 27 secs when the track was clear, and we finished the race about 6 secs. apart. John Bachoffner unfortunately had some engine problems that stopped him from running at pace.

The car passed tech, still heavily overweight, and we were happy that a job had been done well. Congratulations to Dave who in the process of trying to hunt me down hit a new track record of 1min 26.520secs. There is still time to come even off that record given a more consistent car, the new developments, and some lighter bodywork.

We now head in to the Rose Cup weekend in Portland in June for another round where hopefully we can race against some more S2’s that have entered he race as it is part of the 4-Flight series. I will report back later in the month with an update.

Nik Johnson