The story of an amateur racer, part one

"Will Race For Food" (willraceforfood) 07/29/2015 at 09:35 • Filed to: racing, amateur racing, bmw, oppositelock

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Hello everyone. Since this is my first post, I guess some background information is in order - I’ve been around racing for quite some time (~10 years) in various capacities, from track marshal to chief timekeeper, creating regulations for the events and occasionally as a competitor myself.

Sometime last year, I decided that it was time to turn that “occasionally” to “regularly” and began looking for a car to drive in some standard car races (called auto sprints, which are basically like AutoX, but a bit more awesome in that you actually drive on a track instead of around cones in a parking lot) for a relatively small budget. Having experienced the feeling of being way down in the standings due to driving an noncompetitive car, I quickly determined that I don’t enjoy having this particular excuse - if I’m going to be last, it is going to be because I suck at driving, not because my car is too slow. With that in mind, I understood that a rear wheel drive car is where it’s at - the competition in the RWD classes is tough, but you can get by with a nearly standard car as long as you are a really good driver. All that was left now was finding the actual car.

In a lucky turn of events (which might have not been as lucky as initially hoped, as you’ll probably find out in one of the next articles), the car of the 2014 national champion in minirally (this is pretty much a stage rally on slow, technical stages with cars that don’t have roll cages. Pretty great, right? Thought so.) and it’s actually at a price level that I can afford!

Well, if by “afford” we mean that I use literally all of the money on my bank account and live through the rest of the month as a plant, getting all my energy from the sun (as opposed to actual food which costs money). Nevertheless, a deal was quickly made and I got my new (albeit quite old) car - a 1997 BMW e36 compact with an M52 2.5 liter engine making somewhere around 170 horsepower.

A few of the other goodies that made me buy this exact car is that it had a 3.9 limited slip diff installed already, as well as Koni Sport Yellow suspension all around, and some other upgrades that I have already forgotten about. Overall, the car was in very good shape and there was very little rust, which is always good.

As for how it looked from the outside, well...

My first thought was along the lines of “holy sticker-bombed batman” - I didn’t know that a single car could have this many stickers on it at the same time. Naturally, the first goal was to remove nearly all of them (which involved extensive use of a hairdryer and many swearwords), taking a few hours of my life I’m never getting back.

Now the car was ready to actually be used - after doing a few practice sessions at the local track on asphalt, winter finally came and it was time for my first event in the car. Obviously, every race car driver, regardless of their experience and skill level, has a bunch of excuses ready for whatever happens in the race, and I’m no exception - we had really old winter tires with not much thread left, which is typically not a great thing when an event takes place on snow/ice. Also, and this can’t be stressed enough, I still sucked at driving, since the event was less than a month into owning my first RWD car. As much as racing simulators help (and they actually do a pretty good job of preparing you for what can happen on the road or track), it is no match for the real thing.

Having lined up my excuses, we were ready to head out to the event.

As for the race itself, it was pretty much ordinary in that I didn’t crash, was quite slow due to the tires and being new to RWD and nearly didn’t manage to start my third run due to the battery being flat. Oh, right, about that - turns out that if you have installed an electric fan with a switch, it is generally not a good idea to forget to turn it off after your run when the car just sits there for 30 minutes. We did manage to get to the battery after removing some ballast weight (my car has the battery in the trunk) and got it running at the last moment. The result? 17th of 21 in my class, which is quite terrible, but, as I will learn in one of the following events (and articles), the tires were actually quite a valid excuse, for a change.

Unfortunately I have just one picture from the event, but you can at least see what the track surface was like - ice covered with a very small amount of snow.

Some lessons learned in this event include that I needed to be more aggressive and use the inner and outer limits of the track a bit more when competing in events taking place on such a slippery surface, and that I really need some more practice to prepare for the following races if I don’t want to be at the bottom of the standings.

Well, this concludes my very first entry, hopefully it was at least a bit interesting to read, I’ll try to get some more articles up, as quite a few races have been done since the first one, with varying results.

P.S. While I do think that I did a pretty good job, English is not my first language, so the text is likely not as stylistically perfect as those of native speakers.

Patrick Nichols > Will Race For Food 07/29/2015 at 09:51

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This is good Oppo!

I wouldn’t apologize for your English as I didn’t notice any glaring mistakes and found this very entertaining. Also welcome to Oppo.

What do you think is the best way to get into racing from your experience? Do you plan on doing any wheel to wheel racing or have you in the past?

vondon302 > Will Race For Food 07/29/2015 at 10:06

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Ditto on good oppo and welcome aboard. Looking forward to some more posts on this type of racing. Also your english is great besides most of us Americans can’t talk or write worth a crap me included.

CalzoneGolem > Will Race For Food 07/29/2015 at 10:07

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This person looks like they are about to break out in the Thriller zombie dance

Will Race For Food > Patrick Nichols 07/29/2015 at 10:07

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Thanks for the warm welcome!

As for the best way to get into racing, it really depends on your budget and where you are from. The popular answer everywhere seems to be karting, which is fine and well if you’re not very tall or heavy and just want to get the feel for racing, understand the racing line and other basic things.

Once you decide to actually race, fielding a top level kart is actually at least as expensive (if not more so) than racing in standard car races (in the US, this would be SCCA AutoX or Rallycross), at least where I’m from. So this is probably where I’d start - just get a somewhat competitive car that you can both drive on the street and occasionally race, and do SCCA events whenever possible. In addition to (or before) that, some karting (heck, even just going to some indoor tracks with your friends to have fun) is probably a good idea, as the miserable performance of rental karts will make you think about what lines to take through corners, which will definitely help you once you get started.

When it comes to wheel to wheel - I’d love to try and do some endurance racing, as I feel that my driving style would suit that very well at this point in time, but realistically I’d love to do some rallying or at least rallysprint (a shorter version of stage rally, but with proper roll cages and stages with average speeds of up to, and sometimes over, 60 MPH) in a few years time. My current car would be somewhat competitive, all I need is a rollcage and homologated seats and harnesses, as well as the safety equipment. Unfortunately, all of that costs quite a bit of money and would make my car illegal for street use (even though rally cars can drive on the roads during the events, in my country it would be illegal to daily drive such a car).

Galileo Humpkins (aka MC Clap Yo Handz) > CalzoneGolem 07/29/2015 at 10:12

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Obligatory

FSI - alcohol enthusiast with a car problem > Will Race For Food 07/29/2015 at 10:12

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I love BMW E36 Compacts. And that color. Looks like Montrealblau to me.

Justin Hughes > Will Race For Food 07/29/2015 at 10:26

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Great story! Good Oppo! I look forward to reading more. Your English is better than some native speakers, so don’t worry about it.

You’re off to a great start, and following in my footsteps a bit. I made some of the same decisions as you, and switched from a Saturn (an American front wheel drive economy car) and bought the Miata that won its SCCA autocross class in New England the previous year. I certainly couldn’t blame the car for poor performance. Eventually, I started filling a trophy shelf myself. You’re on the right track!

I also look forward to seeing more European representation here (Latvia, if I read the license plates correctly?) This site seems to be mostly Americans and Canadians, and diversity is good.

Camshaft Chris: Skyline/McLaren/Porsche Fanboy > Will Race For Food 07/29/2015 at 10:26

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Welcome! As everyone else has said, great Oppo! And your English is great! In all honesty, I wouldn’t have even known that you weren’t a native English speaker until you mentioned it (that and that you have Latvian license plates, hahaha). Anways, it was a great read and I really look forward to more posts on your race. I wish we had some sort of mini rally series here. That sounds really cool. Maybe like a LeMons rally race, lol?

Chris_K_F drives an FR-Slow > Will Race For Food 07/29/2015 at 10:32

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I love racing in the winter!

Took my FR-S out this past winter for a rallycross race on a frozen lake, and it was some of the most fun I’ve ever had in a car.

Great story! Looking forward to the rest. :)

BKRM3 > Will Race For Food 07/29/2015 at 10:37

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Welcome! Great post, and nice E36! You’ll find a good number of BMW track rats around here, I myself started out doing track driving schools in an E92 335i and then an E90 M3 but have since gone down the dark path of turning a cheap old E46 330i sedan into a Spec E46 race car. We’re picking the car up from the cage builder this coming Sunday, and reading your post has made me even more excited than I already was! I haven’t been on a race track since May and it’s starting to make me itch =)

SnapUndersteer, Italian Spiderman > Will Race For Food 07/29/2015 at 11:16

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E36 love!

I’ve had 2 of them. My current one is my love!!!

Will Race For Food > Justin Hughes 07/29/2015 at 15:02

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You read correctly, I am, indeed, based in Latvia :)

As for the trophy case, it’s not overflowing yet, but there are a few small items there already from the season, which I’ll tell more about in some upcoming articles.

About the car - the thing with standard cars here, especially RWD ones, is that it really was pretty much a standard car when I bought it, with some minor things taken care of. At the time of purchase, the price of this car was just a bit higher than that of a completely stock car, yet it did have the correct suspension, steering wheel, a lighter flywheel and some other small goodies that made it worth the purchase. That’s not to say that I haven’t spent a fortune on the darn thing already, but I’ll leave that for another story

Will Race For Food > BKRM3 07/29/2015 at 15:04

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The M54 3.0 is quite a nice engine indeed, and is actually something I’ll touch upon in one of my next articles as well. What are your plans for the car? Do you have spec series (similar to spec miata) where you can compete with the E46, or is it just going to be a track day toy?

Will Race For Food > Camshaft Chris: Skyline/McLaren/Porsche Fanboy 07/29/2015 at 15:07

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If there ever is a LeMons rally event, I will have to very seriously consider visiting the US just for that spectacle alone, it should be epic.

Planning to have quite a few more articles with what has already happened up to now, and the season is just halfway done by this point - actually heading out to an event this Sunday (and hoping to get some nice airtime as well, the track we’ll be racing on is a super special stage with a nice jump near the end)

Will Race For Food > Chris_K_F drives an FR-Slow 07/29/2015 at 15:09

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Winter is indeed awesome, and is extremely valuable when you’re trying to learn about car handling - if you have used tires with not much grip, you can learn car control at very safe speeds. The great thing being that correcting a slide at 100 MPH and 30 MPH is actually pretty much the same, with the only difference being that you have to be faster with your hands at the higher speed.

Our winters have been quite terrible for the last few years, however, with just a few true snow days - I do miss the US in this regard, spent a year living near Seattle, and snow was just a 40 minute drive away for more than 6 months of the year

Chris_K_F drives an FR-Slow > Will Race For Food 07/29/2015 at 15:12

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Definitely! I’ve learned a lot about car control since moving from Phoenix, Arizona to the Chicago area. Winters have taught me a lot.

Seattle is a great place, I wish I lived there. haha

Like I said though, very interested to follow your story. I’m hoping that within the next year or so I will purchase a dedicated race car, instead of just using my daily driver, and start my own similar journey.

Will Race For Food > Chris_K_F drives an FR-Slow 07/29/2015 at 15:19

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Well, to be fair, FR-S is probably one of the best cars if you want to have a daily that can also be used on the track.

Heck, with 200 horsepower, you can actually try and do some drifting as well (trust me, 200 is more than enough to begin with - this is also a topic for one of the following articles), if you have an LSD and access to some old tires that you don’t mind destroying.

The thing with having a dedicated race car is expenses - since it will likely be an older car, lots of things will break and need to be replaced before the car becomes somewhat reliable. Naturally, this heavily depends on how much you care about the little things (which, at least mechanically, I care about a lot - my car can be dirty, but it always needs to be as good as possible in the mechanical sense) that occasionally go wrong and don’t really affect performance all that much, but still.

From what I’ve learned now (and what those who read my future articles will, hopefully learn quite soon), it is very simple to calculate how much a racecar will cost you - write down all the planned expenses for the season, leaving quite a lot of margin for unexpected repairs (so, this should probably be a number that is around a few grand), and then multiply it by 5. There you have it - a season’s budget for a race car :D

Chris_K_F drives an FR-Slow > Will Race For Food 07/29/2015 at 15:28

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I completely agree. I’m very happy with the FR-S, and I love to abuse it (it also loves to be abused). However, being my only means of transportation I need to do my best not to stuff it into a wall, which will keep me from ever truly pushing it or doing any wheel-to-wheel racing. And that’s fine. I’d really like to start working my way towards wheel-to-wheel stuff though. Luckily I work for a major German automotive parts manufactuer, and can get a discount on transmission, chassis, and suspension components for many cars, which will be a huge help with a race car. For that reason I will likely get something similar to what you have. Of course these are just plans in my head for now. I need to first move out of my apartment and into a house with a garage, which is going to be another year. In the meantime I will continue to autocross, rallycross, and track day the FR-S! haha

Will Race For Food > Chris_K_F drives an FR-Slow 07/29/2015 at 16:02

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Sounds like a great plan, especially if you can get cheap parts on BMWs

BKRM3 > Will Race For Food 07/29/2015 at 17:48

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We do have a relatively new spec series for the E46 ( http://spece46.com/ ) for sprint races that seems to be getting quite popular. We’re building the car to be within those rules, although my co-owner and I both are interested in endurance racing also. I think the car could be very competitive in the endurance races organized by these folks: http://www.americanenduranceracing.com/ While both options are appealing for different reasons, completing the build to be suitable for either is a pretty expensive proposition. The car will therefore be used as a non-competitive “track day toy” while we take our time completing the build within our budget limitations. I’m enjoying the M54 on track, but obviously miss my S65 at times =)