You never know WHO you might be talking to
I went out for a testing day on Friday at my local track, Willow Springs.
I’ve been working for three winters now to try to get down to a 1:25 lap in my 911. To do it, I’ll need the perfect combination of temperature, winds, track conditions, tire condition, and, well, driving ability. I had some of those pieces in place yesterday, but… not quite. I got down into the 1:28’s pretty early, then with some tire pressure adjustments and a little focus, got into the 1:27’s. All of that is good for me and the car -- but the ambient temperatures, which had started out in the mid 30’s (which is perfect), got up close to 50 by about 11:00 and continued to rise.
There were about half a dozen other cars at this testing day. Right when I got there, someone came up and told me they’d watched my instructional video for the track earlier that morning. Another guy came up later and told me he’d met me for the first time in 1998, and had become a certified track nut in the meantime. People have heard of my car, my garage, and my track videos because I talk about them online. For me, it’s part of the fun of this hobby. But the one complicating factor with it is my prosopagnosia — I don’t recognize faces the way other people do. I use other things to identify people. Their cars are an easy trick. Other people suffer from this to greater or lesser extent. I have it worse than most. But I get by.
I’ve been driving this one track almost exclusively now for nine years, and it’s tricky to try to find areas where I can squeeze more out. There were some new cones set up along one section of the track, and I was using them to experiment with putting off my braking for turn 9, an infamous decreasing-radius turn taken at about 100 mph.
Here's a 1965 clip about turn 9, to give you some perspective:
Early in the day, I put it off that braking point a little bit too long — and went right off the track. My splitter sometimes contacts the pavement under hard braking, which has sharpened the leading edge of the aluminum like a knife. So going through the tumbleweed, it acted like a high=performance lawn mower. At the end of this video, you’ll see what the front of the car looked like when I pulled in.
There was no damage to the car, fortunately. My home-made aero pieces can be sacrificed in an incident like this, but the splitter was fine. The sand and dust I drove through paints a very literal picture on the back of the car of where there is an aerodynamic low-pressure area.
I came in, checked everything out, and went right back and clicked off another 1:27.
All of my aero unbolts and gets packed into the car at the end of the day. As I was packing up, a guy named Randy came over from a group driving old Fords and Shelbys and introduced a friend of his who wanted to ask me some questions about my car.
He noted my lap time. He looked at the contours of the car. He lifted up the wing (which was off the car, now) and felt its weight. He asked about everything, including the profile of the wing, the downforce I thought it generated and how I’d put it together.
Everybody asks questions — that’s what people do at a track day — but his were more focused than most. As the two men left, it was eating away at me that I might have met this guy before, or something like that. I remembered he’d been introduced as ‘Pete.’
I got everything packed away inside the car.
I went to wash my hands and said good-bye to the guy named Randy as I headed back to the car. He smiled and asked if I knew who I’d been talking to. That’s when it finally clicked.
That was Peter Brock.
If you don’t know, he talked his way into the Art Center’s design program when he was 17, then got hired at the age of 19 by GM, where he’s credited with the first defining drawings of what became the Corvette Sting Ray. He drew them when he was 20. And he’s also the guy who went to work for Carroll Shelby to run the Shelby Racing School. After Shelby found out that Brock was more than just a fast driver, Brock designed the Daytona Coupe that raced (and won) at Le Mans, the Nurburgring, Daytona and Sebring. Brock was the one who had to explain to Shelby why turning the Cobra into a coupe with a hard top wasn’t enough — for effective aerodynamics, they’d need to do a ground-up redesign of the car.
I didn’t have any of this in my head while I was clumsily talking up the virtues of my home-made, beer-cooler-foam wing and my high-tech (to me) methods of estimating downforce by measuring ride height with $5 junk-yard sensors pulled from a 1996 Lincoln Continental. But in retrospect, it was one of the great moments you can have at a track — casually talking cars with a guy who just happens to be a living legend.
If I’d had the good sense to realize who it was I was talking to, I’ll bet he could have given me a tip or two about that aero or the car to get me that 1:25 — or if I’d tossed him a helmet, he’d no doubt been able to take the 911 out and drive it to one.
Ah well. It was a complete pleasure speaking to him.
Here's one picture of him from back in the day, and one I found from this week.
