When it comes to any form of motorsport, I have always felt the need and importance of a home course. This is where you feel the most comfortable, a place where you can test different parts and techniques and actually feel the difference, and a place where you can always push a little harder. It’s home, so when I read the Spec-D Pro Series schedule and saw that Stratotech Park was the location of the opening round, I was feeling pretty good for both Rick and the RA crew. This is Rick’s happy place, so surely he would do well…right?

Before we get into that, let’s start off with how our day started. Like any challenge that you are about to undertake, preparation is key. Sure, you might be able to wing it, but after watching some of our competitors at the first round of the Grassroots Series, I knew that we would have our work cut out for us. In addition to the car and driver being prepared, there’s a lot more behind the scenes that the team takes care of as well. I won’t bore you with every little thing that we did, but rather I will focus on one topic in particular: heat. On this particular day there wasn’t a cloud in sight, and with the sun getting up bright and early, temperatures were expected to hover around +30°C for most of the day. Yee-haw.

Because of the blazing heat, there were three main subjects that we had to take care from overheating: the car, the driver, and lastly the crew themselves. Let’s start off with the car itself. Rick’s car is a 1992 Nissan 240SX with a Toyota 1JZ motor swap, put together for the pole purpose of destroy tires, making cool noises, and looking cool. Now if you look at the front bumper opening of any normal car, you’ll see a nice big radiator and AC condenser there which helps keep the engine (and occupants) nice and cool. Rick’s car doesn’t have AC, and if you look at the front bumper opening on his car, there is a radiator there. Hurray! Now if you look into the front bumper opening and then upwards where the bumper cover completely blocks everything, you’ll also find an intercooler and two oil coolers. Not hurray. These heat exchanges require air flow to cool down the air and fluids passing through them, so when you put a big piece of fiberglass in front of them, they tend to not do their jobs very well. This is something that the RA crew will be addressing before the next round at Mission, but for now we are spraying down everything with cool water each time the car came back into the pits. It’s a rather simple yet effective method, and we’ll probably continue to do this even after do some work to the cooling system.

Next up on the menu to keep cool: the driver. For those of you who haven’t met Rick before, he is already a pretty cool dude. He’s a great driver, does a lot of his own work, and also understands the importance of style. All of this however wouldn’t be enough to combat +30°C, especially when he’s in a full racing suit while wearing a helmet and gloves. To help aid with that we brought plenty of water in a cooler full of ice, which really isn’t a trade secret . What was a secret however was the giant portable freezer that Matt brought along that day, filled to the brim with more water, Red Bull, Freezies, and ice cream. Yes, ice cream. Not only would this keep our driver chilled for the day, but also help raise his moral (probably), because who doesn’t like ice cream on a hot day?

Lastly, there are the rest of us. There’s quite a bit of running around to do when you’re on a team, and that can get exhausting fast when it feels like the seventh layer of hell outside. Besides the water and ice cream already mentioned above, we also brought out the giant RA tent to help shade everything for the day which proved to be crucial. A lot of time is spent under here as we address issues, discuss strategies and what needs to be done, or to simply just take a nap and recover for a bit. Dressing appropriately for the weather should be pretty obvious, but one thing that is new to me recently has been the use of UV sleeves. I personally hate getting tanned, so I am often reapplying sunscreen throughout the day. That’s easy enough to do, but when you’re out on track and forgot your sunscreen all the way back in the pits, then you can kiss that method goodbye. Thankfully however, I have started to wear UV sleeves which is something a lot of athletes use in various sports. Made of a special lightweight and breathable material, these sleeves not only help block out UV rays so you don’t get tanned/burned, but they also help compress and improve circulation. It’s easy to get hyped on cars and driving, but that excitement can easily be flushed down the drain if your body can’t keep up. Remember to take care of yourselves out there!

So how did we do in the end? Well, not the best if I’m honest. Practice was from 8:30AM-12:00PM, so we had plenty of time to get things dialed in (or so we thought). Rick was having troubles getting into the grove of things, and during his practice runs he was struggling to nail down a solid run. He got each section of the course down at different points in time, but couldn’t quite string it all together. “But Brandon, you said that this was his home course and that he would do well!” One thing that doesn’t really apply directly to track days but does for drifting competitions are zones: inner zones, outer zones, clipping points, and touch-and-goes. For the unfamiliar, these are all areas on the specified track layout that the drivers are required to place their car into in order to score the highest possible run. If you just go out there and drift all over the place like DK but miss every designated zone, you’ll be scored rather poorly. This is essentially a curveball, so even if you are familiar and comfortable with the track, you are now suddenly being asked to approach it differently. This would be like me asking you to eat your cereal with chopsticks one day instead of a spoon (please don’t bother trying this unless you have 30+ minutes to spare; don’t ask me how I know). Even for grip driving we have to adapt to various weather conditions, and thus the ideal line can vary depending on the situation. Being able to adapt on the fly is a crucial skill of any racing driver in my opinion, and with enough time I sure it wouldn’t have been an issue, except this was a competition where we are up against both the clock and other drivers. The pressure is real, and quite different from just an open drift day or lapping event. During practice is when all the testing is done, and thus it’s pretty normal to have cars go off track and stuck into the gravel trap. This results in lost practice time as the car has to be recovered and the course has to be cleaned, which can really hamper things if a driver is struggling and getting less runs in, but in the end that’s just the name of the game. Towards the end of practice we were certainly doing better, but still not quite where we wanted to be yet. No matter, it was time to move forwards into the next section of the competition: qualifying.

For qualifying each driver gets a total of two runs, with the higher scoring run of the two being counted as their final score. On Rick’s first run, he had quite the bobble on initiation and had to make a major correction. He was able to keep the car on course thankfully and still complete the run, but the correction netted him a rather low score of 49. Not good, but we still had a second run coming up to redeem ourselves, and a surprizngly large number of drivers scored a zero on their first runs which was good news for us. On his second run, Rick seemingly had learned from all his mistakes during the day and was driving strong. The initiation was good, the speed was there, and so was the angle, except he ended up getting a little bit too much of that. On the very last hairpin, Rick god a little too hot and sadly spun the car which resulted him in scoring a zero. Not good X2, as now our qualifying score was a measly 49. All qualifying cars get cut down to 16, so if we didn’t qualify then that would be the end of our day. At this point we couldn’t do anything but wait, so we sat back and ate some watermelon while waiting for the final results to be announced.

Amazingly we somehow pulled it off and managed to qualify in tenth place! Not so amazingly, we were paired up against Jessie-Joe Curtis and his LS powered BRZ. I already had a hunch at the beginning of the season that the LS boys would be our main competition, and we were already paired up with one of them for our first tandem run of the season. I personally didn’t feel great about this match up, but we were at least in the show. After all, part of operating a race team is to overcome each obstacle one by one as they come up, and our next one just happen to be bright yellow and screaming freedom and bald eagles left and right. We already knew we had to be done and it was just up to Rick and his trusty S13 to do it now. As the higher qualifying driver, Jessie- Joe Curtis would be leading on the first run. While chasing from behind, Rick made a bit of a mistake which allowed the yellow BRZ in front of him to pull a bit of distance between them. Not good X3, but we still had a lead run to potentially make up for it. On the second run, Rick ran a solid qualifying run out front but Jessie-Joe Curtis was able to mimic all of Rick’s movements, thus maintaining his advantage from the first run and effectively ending our day there.

As much as we would have liked to place higher, all in all it was still a successful day for us. Despite all our collective years of experience in motorsport, this was the first time we’ve all come together as a team to try and compete, so there is still much to learn for all of us. We did also discover towards the end of the event that a bent suspension arm in the rear was actually throwing out the alignment on Rick’s car, so I’m sure that that was hampering his performance throughout the day as well. There will be a few improvements made to the car as well to help give us more of a competitive edge, but for now we can reflect on what we’ve learned from this round and move on. The next competition is on July 7th-8th at Mission Raceway in BC, so I’ll see you all there!

-brandon.