That was a Wild Ride
The home race for BimmerWorld and I was this past weekend at VIR. VIR is mainly BimmerWorld’s home track since it is 2 hours away form them and 6 hours away from me. Even with the difference in distance to the track this is one that I have been to a lot over the years with BimmerWorld. So this is the closest to my home track. The last time we raced there professionally was 2008 in Speed World Challenge Touring car. There James and I finished 2nd and 3rd setting the fast lap of the race. In the fall we have raced there in the 13 Hours of VIR, winning this endurance race 3 times. VIR is a track that we know really well and we came into the weekend with high expectations.
The weekend was more of a test for us all. It all started on our Thursday test day. Our first session was at 1:40, the second at 3:10, and the 3rd session was at 4:40. So with little time between session we knew we all would have to be very quick with finding the changes to make to the cars in between the sessions to make them faster. To help speed up the process we made some changes to the cars in the last couple of weeks since our last race at Barber. These changes were basically a rebuild of the wear and tear items of the suspension. In the first session we knew these changes we made before the weekend were not in the right direction. The cars had a weird problem were they would move around as if being blown around by a 150 MPH wind. They were almost scary to drive. In the first session we narrowed down what might be the cause but to correct it the whole suspension would have to be taken out of the car and changed. With our tight schedule we didn’t have the time to make these changes. 
We did continue to try to tune around our issues so our time on track was maximized. Unfortunately test number 2 for us came in the last session of the day. James had a big run in with a Porsche entering the uphill esses. The GS Porsche pulled a move that in years of experience at VIR would never stick and in a test day should never have been made. He tried to get in front of James while entering the esses after James had already turned in. Contact was made sending both cars spinning to the inside wall. James hit the tire wall facing backwards was sent flying in the air and came back down on the rear of the car. His car was damaged very bad. Lets just say that it now looks like a hatchback instead of the sedan it once was. What was really amazing was that after a hard hit like this James’ thought process was very clear. He announced over the radio the car was totalled followed by some expletives immediately followed by some people for David White to call about finding another car for the weekend. Wow! That was amazing! Read James’ version of what happened here.
After all the dust and adrenaline started to settle down it was time figure out how to make the #81 car be faster on track. We were off the pace at this point and needed to make some drastic measures to get it faster out there. In the 3rd session Wayne and Chas put a couple of our GoPro Cameras to video what our suspension was doing. Well these videos confirmed what we were having problems with. It appears the rear toe of the car was changing dramatically on the car. This caused the feeling of being out of control in the car while driving in a straight line. We have been having issues with
rear toe all year along but this was the biggest it had been. Stiffening the rear sway bar would help to reduce this a little bit but not much. So off with the rear subframe and every suspension point to try to remedy the solution. I don’t know exactly what the guys did but they worked some magic in the rear suspension of our car as the first session out on Friday morning our problems seemed to be fixed. Although the theme of the weekend seemed to get the best of us as the session was cut short due to a big crash. Our 40 minute session was turned into a 15 minute session from the time spent cleaning up the crash. We didn’t go that fast in the session but we had a newly transformed car. It was handling more like the BimmerWorld E90 from Barber. Awesome! 3 hours later we had a couple of small changes to try on the car and start our last practice session before qualifying. It seems everything we did made the car a lot better as I put the car in P4 during the session. I get out and Bill gets in. Since every session had been cut short to this point Bill kept his head down to maximize his practice times. He maximized his time, getting himself in a good spot mentally for qualifying.
Next up qualifying and race day excitement continued in “That Was a Wild Ride Part 2.” Stay tuned tomorrow.
