| Road Atlanta |
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| Road Atlanta |
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We caravanned to Road Atlanta with Anthony and Misty Henderson for the first big road race of the 2005 season. When we arrived at Camp Soddy Daisy Friday evening, the racing festivities were already in full swing. The Perrymobile was in place in the lower paddock, with Bill, Gail, Will, Jamie Hamilton and Dave Brooks already moved in. Efran Ormaza and family were there for his first regional race, and Michael Hartberger was settled into the upper paddock. Dave Brooks swears that he heard chirping sounds around camp early Saturday morning. We’re sure he’s a little tweety in the head, but that might be attributed to the full day of crewing he’d had helping Will sort out his “new” #36 Formula Ford. Will spent most of Friday’s test day hating the cute little yellow bugger, but by Saturday’s qualifying session, he had the Ford’s squirrelly handling about figured out. By Sunday’s SARRC race, Will was doing a glorified Solo I with the rest of the 7-car formula field left in the red Georgia dust. Anthony might have given the Formula Vee crowd a better
run for their money had he not been running on a spare parts engine and
taking a gamble that the rain gods would pelt the track. No rain equaled a
babysitting session with soft rain tires on hard asphalt. |
2005 Races November |
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All the Chattanooga folks had their share of shaking-the-winter-cobwebs-out blues. While Will and Anthony formulated toe-ins and track-outs on Friday, Efran lost fifth gear on his Suzuki Swift and, on Saturday, tried to figure out how to run on 13” wheels without his engine taking off for a flight to Orlando. Vesa Silegren and his intrepid crew goddess, Teresa, had the Civic all ready to go, but in a race group of 65 cars, out of which 54 were crazed Spec Miatas, he was lucky to get off the track in one piece. He signed ITC competitor Scott Giles’ petition to have SEDiv move the ITC and ITB classes to the small production and GT lite race group ASAP. From Art’s and my perspective as flaggers at turn #5, Vesa and Scott had every reason to be nervous. We only had one Miata plow into the tire wall at the top of the turn, but Art noticed that not a single SM looked unscathed by the end of the race. Assistant Chief Steward Bill Perry spent most of Saturday chasing errant drivers around, levying the requisite penalties for metal-to-metals and blowing flags. Unfortunately, one of the busted Miata drivers was our own Michael Hartberger. He passed under a yellow flag during his qualifying session, so his time got erased and he had to start at the back of that 65-car pack. Michael sure picked up some racing skills last year, however, because he managed to move up 20 spots over the course of the race. Yeeha! We learned a lot from our corner worker stint. We had to rely on hand signals to work the flagging “hole” at the driver’s left side of turn #5. Both of us got to work the communications net, which was a real ear-opening experience, especially when Ruthie was on the headphones during a hard impact incident at turn #3. We both gained huge respect for the professionalism of the folks who handled a dangerous situation. On a lighter note, Ruthie had a terrible time with the Flagging & Communication hand signals for colors and car numbers all weekend, and when she finally got the hang of it, control had the gall to switch communications to Roman numerals. O.K., so it was a slow race. Art got to rescue a GT-1 Porsche driver after he smacked the wall at the entrance of the turn, and we had the usual number of spins, but overall, the weekend was relatively incident-free. As usual, Gail sprung a really good supper on us Saturday and Jamie led us in a quick and questionable rendition of “Happy Birthday” for Will before we gorged on chocolate cake. Yum. Chuck Fullgraf dropped by on Sunday, just in time to see Will run his first Formula Ford race, and most everybody got packed up and gone by the time the rains really settled in. We huddled in the blowing rain and watched wingie-thingies and ground-pounders slip and slide through turn #5 until the final checker came down at about 4:00 p.m. We ran by the paddock and joined Bill and Gail for a caravan home, with a required stop in Canton, Georgia for pulled pork at Williams BBQ. All-in-all, it was a fun start for what we hope is a terrific racing season for everyone. -- Art Thompson |
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March 3, 2005
