Finally, the much anticipated book from my good friend and racing legend Tommy Byrne is almost here!  I just pre-ordered my copy today, and at the price it's selling for I'd recommend you do the same.  The easiest way to reserve a copy is to go to the Canadian Amazon website at www.Amazon.ca and simply search for "Crashed and Byrned."  If you would like to know more about this championship winning driver or his stellar career (which included a foray into Formula 1), please visit his website at www.CrashOrByrne.com.  If this book retells Tommy's stories half as well as he can in person it is a must-have for you and all of your racing buddies!

Oftentimes people ask me how I practice and prepare for a race.  Other than the physical preparation, in the racing world practice equals lots of money, so I get very little of it.  If Target suddenly came on board as one of my business partners, perhaps my situation would change drastically, but I will never complain about my current position as I have the support of my family and current sponsors, which is more than many drivers can say.  My “practice” for Portland started as it had for every previous race: with YouTube.  Since every Jetta TDI Cup race (and all of the future ones as well) has been at a venue that I have not previously been to, the internet has proved invaluable.  We have relatively little track time during the weekend so we must often learn the track and be up to speed after a few laps, and at least knowing where it turns left and where it turns right (thanks to YouTube!) is a very helpful asset. 

I met up with my driving coach Tony Kester of Datasport at O’Hare Airport on Friday morning and jumped on a plane bound for the Pacific Northwest; a part of the country I had never been to.  I was actually fortunate enough to get a brief “aerial tour” from a Portland native as we flew over the landscape surrounding the track.  This would be the most I actually got to “experience” of Portland throughout the weekend.  I always find it funny when I get back from a race and my friends or family ask me what the city was like.  For instance, my Portland experience basically consisted of driving between the airport, hotel, and racetrack; often at ungodly hours of the morning or night.  So I never really get to see the full essence of a city that I race in unless I end up being stuck there for an extra day.  Anyways, Tony and I poked around the track for a few hours and stopped in the massive Volkswagen hospitality unit.  I have been calling it a tent, but it is more of a portable, 10,000 square foot building.  After leaving the track we headed out to find the Holiday Inn Express that I was sure we were staying at.  Upon arriving there we found that we didn’t actually have reservations at that hotel, but that there was another Holiday Inn a few miles away.  They were unable to find our reservations there as well so I went back and checked my date-book and found that we were actually staying at a Courtyard by Marriott.  Oops!  I have been travelling so much lately that all the reservations I have been making sort of melted together.  Anyways, problem solved; right?  We headed off to find the Courtyard by Marriott and found that it was quite the hot-spot.  There was apparently a huge Moto-X race this weekend as well and the hotel was packed.  We waited in line at the front desk only to find that they did not have our reservations either.  After she double and triple-checked, she informed us that there was another Courtyard by Marriott about 10 miles away.  In some seemingly cruel joke, the city planners of Portland apparently built two of everything to confuse tourists.  The receptionist phoned over to the other hotel and we were informed that they didn’t have our reservations either and they were all sold out of rooms to boot.  To make a long story short, there were a lot more phone calls made and corporate headquarters involved and eventually we found out that the other Courtyard actually did have our reservations, they had just overlooked them.  The best part was that it was about 10 miles away and directly next to the racetrack.  We had passed it a few hours ago when we left the VW hospitality tent!  Luckily, this was all happening during the early evening and it was not a midnight ordeal so we were able to finally get to our correct hotel at a reasonable hour.  By this point everybody was exhausted and when I got to the hotel I just crashed and slept until the next morning.

Since we were packing the whole weekend into two days, us Cup drivers were lucky enough to be asked to arrive at the track by 6:30am, ready to go.  Days at the racetrack usually start pretty early and this weekend would be no different.  Just the fact that they got 30 guys my age there before 7 was amazing.  We arrived and had a quick bite to eat and then it was time for our track “walk,” which was again done in golf carts to save time.  Let’s just say that when you stuff 30 young racecar drivers into golf carts and send them on track I was definitely wishing for a roll-cage!  It was great to actually get out on track to see and feel the track that I had been watching on my computer.  By 8am we were dressed and ready, but first we had to have our SCCA drivers meeting.  This was the part where they tell us to be safe and not to run into each other, more or less.  Then it was time for our 30 minute practice session, which is all the time you have to learn the track before qualifying!  It is a great track with many fast, sweeping corners and some decently long straights.  Here you could see around most of the corners and you didn’t feel like you were risking life and limb around every corner, like Mosport in the rain, so it naturally made for a much tighter field.  I was running decently, but something felt wrong with my brakes, which is never a settling feeling for a driver.  After the session I asked my lead mechanic Chris to look over the braking system and they noted that the brake pads were pretty much non-existent.  Part of this was due to the way and how hard I was using the pedal, but I was still a little upset that we now had to replace them before qualifying and it wasn’t noticed before practice.  In any case, this changed up my strategy for qualifying a bit.  I wasn’t very high up in the time sheets after practice (18^th I think), but I was less than a second from most of the leaders and I easily saw where this time was in the data.

For qualifying, I now had a compromised session.  I had to spend about the first 10-12 minutes bedding in my new brake pads.  For those not familiar with the term, “bedding” in new brakes is a process of heating and cooling the brake pads in your opening laps so as to bond the different materials and compounds in the braking system together to reduce brake fade.  If this procedure is done incorrectly, you can induce “green-fade” and essentially ruin your brakes.  So not only did I have to think about getting in my qualifying lap, but I had to be sure not to overheat my new brakes or else I would ruin them for the race!  After what felt like an eternity, I finally felt the brakes come in and had less than 20 minutes left in the session.  It took me a while then to find a good spot in the field where I could get some space around me and attempt a flyer.  Unfortunately, on what was my fastest lap, someone flew off track ahead of me in the last turn sliding across the track and covering it in dirt.  This forced me to check up and I paid for it down the following straight away all the way until the timing stripe.  Every racecar driver has a book of excuses as thick as a dictionary and I’m not trying to blame my poor qualifying on this entirely, but looking at the data afterwards it appeared to cost me around 0.5 seconds on that lap which would have moved me up into the top 5.  Instead I would start the race 16^th.  Man, was it a tight field!  If I would have picked up two tenths of a second I would have lined up 10^th.  If I could have found that half of a second I would have qualified 3^rd.  In fact, nearly the entire field of 30 cars was covered by 1.3 seconds!  This was sure to make passing a royal pain during the race.  After qualifying we had a debriefing and then we had to clean up our cars.  Afterwards, my coach Tony and I analyzed the data from the two previous sessions for hours and came up with some really nice information on how to go faster.  We ended up finally leaving around 8:30pm so it was definitely a long day at the track.

We actually got to sleep in a bit on race day and showed up at the track around 9am.  Luckily, our schedule really wasn’t as busy throughout the day as it normally is.  We had a sponsorship/media training session in the morning and a few drivers meetings, but other than that we were left to our own devices.  It gave me a chance to watch some of the other race starts (including MX-5 Cup and Star Mazda) and pick up some tips.  Again, we went over some of the data and focused on a few key points to improve upon during the race.  I knew where the time was that needed to be made up, but passing was sure to be incredibly difficult, as all the cars were so similar in lap times.  Even if you are a few hundredths, or even a few tenths, faster than the car in front you really need them to make a mistake in order to get by.  When race time came around we went out through the pits and lined up in our starting positions.  As I have mentioned before, we do F1-style standing starts which are just so much fun.  It’s all about managing the wheel spin.  We set off on our reconnaissance lap and everyone tried as hard as they could to put heat in their tires (I just know that someone is going to spin out on the pace lap before the seasons end).  Then we came around and lined up for the start.  Portland’s first two corners consist of a large chicane (nicknamed the Festival Curves), but we would bypass them and enter turn 3 in order to (hopefully) avoid some carnage. 

The lights went on … everyone is on the rev limiter … poof, they go out.  Mentally you try to imagine when they turn pink (just start to go out) and you need to get going.  It’s like a drag race to the first corner and reaction time is everything.  I made a pretty good start and was trying to pick my way through the field and definitely made up some spots.  But then the inside line into Turn 3 (on the right) was pretty blocked up so I was forced to stay on the outside and fight the low grip conditions.  I managed to slot in eventually, but I had no idea where I was in the field.  I felt as though I had made up a spot or two and I did indeed slot into 13^th by the end of the first lap.  The next 19 laps consisted of a few very hard fought battles.  I out-braked a few people into the first chicane and picked up a few spots that way.  I was also hit in the rear going into turn 1 and slid wide and lost a spot as well.  Caleb Kenney and I had a long fight for the second half of the race, but we were running very similar lap times and the only place I could catch him was where it was too dangerous to make a safe/smart move.  So I sat there and tried to chip away at the cars in front of me, but making progress was tough.  The field bunched up again toward the end due to some incidents so the top ten cars all passed the finish line within a few seconds of each other, I just didn’t have anything left for the car in front of me even though I finished less than a second behind him.  I managed to finish in 10^th place and although that is my best finish so far, I would be a crappy racecar driver if I said that I was happy with that.  I want to be first in every race and anything else is hard to take.  On the flip side, it makes me focus even harder and realize that there is more that I need to work on.  I am arguably the least experienced guy there on any race weekend.  I calculated that this was my 12^th race weekend of my life (I’m sure some guys have run 12 kart races every month for 5-10 years!) and these front wheel drive sedans are definitely different from what I have driven in the past; but there I go dipping into my racecar driver handbook-of-excuses again.  It is exciting in a way to know that there is more potential in the car and that I need to figure out how to extract it.  No matter what disadvantages I face, they will surely be there throughout my whole career.  I will always have to deal with someone at their home track and I hope this isn’t the last type of racecar I have to figure out (c’mon Target), so this is all making me a much better racecar driver and will definitely pay dividends down the road. 

Somehow I struggle to write this much for a paper at college, but I always have to cut myself short on these entries to keep them somewhere outside the realm of monotony.  Plus, I already catch enough of a hard time from my friends about keeping a blog, but when I’m standing on that podium at Le Mans, Daytona or Indy in a few years I think I’ll have the last laugh.  You will notice that the above description included little to no information on Portland Landmarks or social outings.  As was mentioned above, that’s because my life during a race weekend revolves around the track and the race itself.  So next time you see me after a race feel free to ask me “so how was [insert racetrack] and your very limited exposure to the immediate surrounding area?”

Thanks,

Nick