AudiWorld Forums - Report: SCCA Race School - Big big thanks to Convenience Car Care

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This past Friday-Sunday was the SCCA race school at Summit Point. In order to race with the SCCA, you need to compete two of these schools. It's about 2.5 hours of class on Friday evening, followed by 5 driving & 5 class sessions per day on Saturday and Sunday.

The person issuing the Novice Permits left a little early on Friday, so I could not register or get teched on Friday evening. I moved the Porsche 944 out of the trailer, cleaned the floor, and put down a twin size mattress. I paid for electricity and had two space heaters running, so I was plenty warm when sleeping.

Unfortunately, the dish washer broke at home and flooded the house on Friday night. The wife called me around 10pm asking what to do. Well what could I do, but offer to come home and help clean up. Thankfully, she declined my offer.

I find out in class on Friday that when they said to bring a pit crew, they weren't joking. Out of 54 students, only 2 of us did not have pit crews. So I'm trying to be in two places at once. Class starts at 8:30am Saturday, as does tech. I bump into Timmy Tyrrell (owner, manager, chief mechanic, etc. of Convenience Car Care, and Audi Club and SCCA sponsor) and he overhears my quandry and offers to help out as my crew. He takes my car through tech while I'm in the mandatory class. I come out of class and the car has several issues, the biggest one is that the harness is 4 years old, and it is only good for 2 years. The on-track OG Racing store is open, and I quickly buy a harness and Timmy offers to put it on the car. It was a lot harder than anticipated, and it took Timmy with a little help from me about 2 hours to install. There were all sorts of problems including begging some BSR guys for some long bolts. Timmy was the greatest guy and completely saved my weekend. Not only that, he fed me steak and shrimp on Saturday night. Timmy was there to help out Glenn (the guy with the brown 944 who often attends Audi Club DEs) and it was good hanging out with Timmy, Glen, and others for the weekend. Sleeping at the track was fun and no problem at all. The showers at Summit Point were very clean.

As to the SCCA school, take everything you learned at DEs about caution, courtesy, passing, and to a certain extent flags and through it out the door. When a car spins out, during an SCCA race, the race goes on, even if the car is broken on the track, at the Apex, etc. SCCA tows cars with the track hot. That was a new experience. It was really hard for me to do agressive passing after avoiding it for 5 years of DEs. Very interesting was that no prior track experience was required to attend the school. The student who shared my instructor had never driven on any race track before in his life. Just amazing. He was racing on the track, but never had been to a DE.

Since race cars usually don't have a passenger seat, an instructor was placed at each turn, and after your sessions, we went back to the class for critique. We had 5 class sessions per day and 5 track sessions per day.

At the end on Sunday, we had a 5 lap race. There were 16 of us in the "Big Bore" class, and I took 1st place in the race. I show the "trophy" to my daughter and she says "Nice Dad, you got one of those wooden placques that they paint to look like marble." There was a BMW 3 series with the same power as me and I could not pass him for the first 4.9 laps. I was on his back the entire race, and just wore him out. Got him on the last turn of the last lap. Watch the video of the last lap at the link below. He was driving a lot better on his first four laps, and could not keep up his concentration for the last lap. I found out in a good way that your speed at the entry to turn 10 really is based on how things go at turns 5/6.

What did I learn? SCCA road racing inherently includes bumping. I did not have any contact, but out of 54 students, I'd estimate 4 or 5 cars suffered significant damage. Even without significant damage, it is likely that you will have car to car contact when racing with the SCCA. They call Miatas "piniatas". The guys I was talking to who do DC SCCA spec miata racing estimate contact 5+ times per race. I'm not ready for that yet, and I'm sure there are other clubs with less contact.

Overall, what a great learning experience, incredible instruction and lots of seat time. I'm very glad I did it and learned a lot.