BFE GP 2023 Race Recap Part 2 (the race)
It's finally race day. Our year long adventure of building a 1981 Datsun 280ZX has come to this. Hundreds of hours of work, late nights, a Cannonball Run-esque race through alpine blizzards, dry ice, and a helluva two day buildup (Part 1) have all led us to this moment! It's hard to describe the sense of accomplishment we all felt as the cars were called to grid.
Saturday
Sometime around 3am the rain started. The rain would be with us for the next 37 hours. Sometimes drizzly, sometimes torrential, frequently pissing, the rain was incessant. A brief 45 minute window Sunday morning was our only real respite from the deluge. It rained through the windows for the driver on track. It drenched us when we fueled the cars during pit stops. It fogged our visors (more on that later). It soddened our socks.
Given the challenges of Thursday and Friday, the race went incredibly well. Dottie the Datsun kept her coolha ha ha and we watched the hours and laps tick by. We had decided to swap drivers every 30 minutes for the Datsun. Anticipating some major mechanical issues with her we wanted to make sure everyone got at least a little time behind the wheel. We were thrilled as we turned lap after lap and our overheating problems from Friday appeared to be solved!
We were less thrilled as we turned lap after lap in more and more rain. Neither car is really setup for wet weather conditions. Our wipers in the ZX2 are fine, but are in no way good. Our wipers on the 280zx are janky af and could barely be considered wipers.
An early incident notwithstanding, the race was without major collisions. There were plenty of offs. We don't track it closely, but suffice to say there were a couple dozen yellow flags. Several times, the Stewards called a full course yellow due to a significant, blinding burst of rain. I'm grateful for this, it got pretty dicey out there.
Driving in wet conditions is hard, but the variability really added to the challenge. In a single lap you might see dry track, damp track, standing puddles, and a new tributary of the Platte river. I was out for my second session Saturday afternoon, when it started dumping as I entered turn 7 (big uphill right hand sweeper), and the track became a river. I hydroplaned for a second before regaining control. Really keeps you on your toes.
We finished Saturday top 10 in class on both cars. No mechanical issues, and only two real off-track adventures. Every driver had several near misses, light fishtails, two wheels off, avoiding other cars going off, and similar adventures. We did have a crisis of another sort: one of our rookie drivers got extremely nauseous on track, and blew chunks down pitlane. Butt. Turrible.
Saturday night of a Lemons race at High Plains is always a paddock potluck, and believe me, it's hella sweet. Extra super hella sweet was that neither car needed any real work. We took the tires off to eyeball brake pad wear. One nice thing about all the rain: we barely touched our pads, or our tires, all day. Saved some effort and some money, but we'd still rather have a dry track!
Sunday
What happens at the Lemons Potluck, stays at the Lemons Potluck, so our story resumes with the break of day Sunday as we gridded up for the second half of the race. Tyler in the ZX2 and Nick in the 280ZX are grinnin on the grid.
I've got a minor rant here, and some genuine advice for Lemons teams: grid up early. It never ceases to amaze me how many cars roll up to grid 10 minutes late. Why self-impose a 5 lap penalty because you didn't set an alarm? I'm not talking about the teams that are legitimately thrashing up until the last second, I honor them. Every race there's 10 or 15 cars that just can't seem to get going in the morning. See you in our mirrors.
There was a brief, beautiful 45 minute window during my stint on Sunday that the clouds parted and the track dried up. It was the first time we had the Datsun really working, and I will say I can't wait for more of that. What a fun car to drive. Then! Just as I was settling in to a line, the rain came back.
Sunday went as smooth as you could ask. Six hours ticked by, and both cars kept cranking out the laps. Then the radio call came in "I can't see anything! The windshield is fogged up completely!"
Remember when we completely stripped the interior of the Datsun to add lightness? We stripped all the ventilation ducts, the blower, a buncha vacuum tubes that were probably unrelated, ultimately leaving the windshield with no defrost function. I mean, we live in Colorado! Humidity is like a story from foreign lands, not a practical concern. Unless it happens to be raining for 40 goddamn hours.
Nick had a little rechargeable fan from his van that we quickly deployed to solve the visibility problem. Quickly is relative: this unplanned pit stop cost us about 13 minutes. Our gap in the Datsun to the ZX2? 4 laps. We were (pinches fingers) this close to a photo finish between our two cars! We coulda had a formation finish on laps!
But we didn't, instead we got the Datsun back on track, and finished out our race in great position. We didn't win any awards, but we learned some things, we made some friends, we drank some Malortseriously, stop, and we accomplished a huge goal: buying, building, and successfully racing our first racecar.
