A good friend of mine offered to help me out with the car through Comp School, so we arrived at Carolina Motorsports Park just after the gates opened Thursday afternoon. I found some prime real estate parking and unloaded the car. There wasn't much to do after that, so we got the car covered and got ready to hit the road. Before leaving the paddock, there was quite a bit of discussion about the temperature dropping into the lower 20's that night. Since race cars are not allowed to have any antifreeze in their cooling systems, cold temperatures can present quite a problem. I had never had to deal with this before and began to freak out a little. We decided to try to find something we could use to keep the car's engine bay above freezing during the night. The "typical" thing that folks do is to leave a halogen work light on and wedged between the engine and radiator. With this technique in mind, we set off for Kershaw, SC.
Unfortunately, almost every retail store in Kershaw closes at 6:00pm. This meant all the hardware stores, auto parts stores, and the like had been dark for over an hour. It looked bleak until we decided to swing into the RiteAid drug store (the only thing open besides the Dollar Store). There on the same aisle as the light bulbs and extension cords was a plug-in cook top. It was basically a single electric stove eye. It was either going to be cheap insurance that I would have a functional car in the morning, or a $19 method of burning my car to the ground. We headed back to the paddock and plugged it in. We set it on the "low" setting and put it on top of the splitter in between the sway bar and the bottom front edge of the oil pan. It glowed orange but wasn't near anything obviously flammable. Without a whole lot of confidence, we covered the car back up and headed to the hotel. It was a long night just waiting on the phone to ring to tell me I had burnt up my own car. Thankfully, that call never came.
Our all-hands meeting was at 7:30 Friday morning. This was my second NASA event ever and my first in 6 years, so this was really my chance to start getting the feel of the crowd that I'm going to be a part of now. A good bit of that meeting was spent giving us a little rookie hazing so I could immediately tell it was going to be my kind of crowd.
Our schedule for the school was simple and grueling...track/class/track/class/track/lunch/class/track/graduation. Literally as soon as class ended we had to run jump in the cars and get on track. Then, as soon as we pulled off track we had to jump out of the cars and hustle to class. Hence the extreme importance of having someone there to help out. My buddy agreed to check over the car (tires, oil, lug nuts, etc) every time I came off track to make sure it was staying together. Without him there to do that, I would not have been able to devote my full attention to the classes and track exercises.
The first thing we did was to get on track to warm up the cars and our minds in hopes to knock the winter rust off of both. I realized as I left the pits behind a slower car that I had passed another car without permission from its driver. That was all about to change. Drastically. The first lap was under full course yellow, but by the exit of turn 3 on the first hot lap it was time to let the passing begin. I fired by several cars during that practice session and got my first tastes of how much fun this was going to be.
The classroom sessions were open and informative with 5 veteran racers as our instructors. We covered lots of procedural things like grid, starts, flags and so on. We also discussed bits of race strategy and how to mentally approach what we were doing out there. These classroom sessions were then expanded upon with on-track exercises such as side-by-side drills and off-line driving drills. All of the driving sessions were fairly tepid, except for the fact that we were also out there with several cars driving in the "test and tune". This meant they weren't in our school and were instead out there working on making their cars faster. This also meant they were ready and willing mess with us students when they had the chance, something a few of them did quite well. Once all the drills were done and we all passed the "written exam", it was time for our mock race.
The mock race is made up of all the students in comp school as well as 6 or so instructors who are out there just to give you a hard time. My goal for the mock race was to drive hard but to be extremely conservative and to keep my nose clean as I had no plans to risk passing comp school for a race that doesn't count. I drew a 3rd place starting position and headed out for our formation lap. That was the first time I had the "wow...this is actually happening" emotions. We rounded turn 14 and pulled onto the front straight. The green flag finally flew and we were off for turn 1. After 6 or 7 laps (which felt like no more than 3 minutes since I was so fired up), we got the white and then the checkered flag. As I pulled into the pits I knew a Rookie Provisional License was in my near future.
12 other rookies successfully graduated as well. I was now eligible to race, for real, on Saturday and Sunday. This is why I came. A couple celebratory beers, some delicious Mexican food (San Jose Restaurant in Lugoff, SC), and a good nights sleep later, I'd be back at the track ready to become a "racer".
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