David Soares on Hanging a Name
Laguna Seca Raceway is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year by honoring
five Legends of Laguna Seca in a “Walk of Fame” at the top of the Corkscrew. The
first of the Legends is Dan Gurney, who was inducted during Grand Am weekend
this May, also known as the U.S. Sportscar Invitational delivered by Luggage
Express. It is remarkable to me that while we’re honoring 50 years at Laguna, and
over a century of American road racing dating back to the first Vanderbilt Cup races
on Long Island and the Santa Monica Road Races in Southern California, five
races into the 2007 Grand Am and ALMS seasons we’re still having arguments
about what the show ought to look like.
The American Le Mans Series is finally benefiting from a diverse field of strong
factory-backed teams from major manufacturers, realizing the longtime dreams of
its supporters and promoters. However, as we take the mandatory break after the
Utah Grand Prix for the 24 Hours of Le Mans, we’re experiencing more hard
feelings than ever as the series stewards use performance balancing to create
some competition for the fans and the participants. The putatively slower Porsche
P2 cars have now beaten the P1 Audi R10’s in three straight races. If that isn’t
enough cause for consternation, GT1 has been nothing but a testing exercise for
Corvette Racing, who only got someone to race against at Sebring.
I suspect that I’m in the minority, but the competitiveness of the Porsche and Acura
prototypes against the previously dominant Audis doesn’t bother me in the least.
The 24 Hours of Le Mans can draw 45 or 50 cars every June from all over the
world, but the ACO’s four class structure just hasn’t been making sense in North
America. The P2 class seems to exist so that some of the local garagistes can
have their own race in June without getting stomped by the big teams from
Germany that show up every year. The technology and sophistication of the GT
categories has further muddied the waters for carmakers who want to compete –
do you position your $45K Corvette in GT1 while the $100K Porsche, $175K
Ferrari, and $200K Spyker are in GT2? Who should be beating who?
East of Eden
The problem is that in America you’re not going to draw anybody to watch a
vorsprung durch technik demonstration run, no matter how amazing the
technology of the R10 (and believe me, it’s amazing). People want to see a race,
they want some drama. They want to see Alan McNish driving flat-out as only he
can to try and reel in a Penske pit-and-fuel game and finish less than 10 seconds
behind after nearly three hours of racing. They want to see Jorg Bergmeister in a
Porsche and Jaime Melo in a Ferrari fender-to-fender in the last turn after 12 hours
at Sebring. It’s exciting. The use of restrictors, fuel volume, and weight within the
ACO class structure has allowed the series to create a highly-competitive show at
the sharp end of the field.
This year excitement has been more accessible to the public as well, with races
on the street circuits that the open-wheel crowd have become so enamored with
over the past quarter century. The ALMS has been trying to position itself as the ne
plus ultra marketing platform for motor manufacturers with sporting intentions and
as that plan has started to pay off the series has needed a presence in the major
media markets. While logical from the series standpoint, I am less enamored
with the move to these Mickey Mouse concrete chutes. Street circuits have been
less of a safety issue for carbon carrots designed to glance off of speedway walls,
but sportscars were never meant to crash that way. Tomas Enge’s shattered
elbow in St. Petersburg was a lesson in what can happen to an arm flailing about
inside the cockpit of a production-based GT with a bunch of tubes bent to fit inside
when it meets a concrete barrier placed at the edge of the racing surface. What’s
more, the aero on Sarthe streamliners just doesn’t work in these warrens of
hairpins and chicanes. The pathetic performance of the Audis at Long Beach was
a prime example of what happens to a car designed for high speed on a street
course. The tail-heavy cars, weighed-down with their massive diesel V-12’s and
torque-cruncher gearboxes, couldn’t get enough air over the nose to balance out
the inherent understeer of the long-wheelbase package; the defending and
undefeated ALMS and Le Mans champions were having trouble dicing with even
the GT2 cars in the corners. A better solution close to major markets would be a
revival of airport circuits, like Sebring or Cleveland, a la the SAC races Curtis
LeMay organized in the fifties. There are a number of lightly-used or
decommissioned airbases in or near major urban markets. Remember the
promised “Peace Dividend” following the fall of the Berlin Wall?
Partisans stirring in the forest…
I find myself in this mid-season reverie about “performance balancing” because
I’ve just gotten home from the visit to my local race track of the series dedicated to
the triumph of egalite over liberte, the Grand American Road Racing
Championship. I’m an unabashed fan of the Grand Am, although its partisans
have never cared for the fact that my love of the series is tempered by my view that
it is an ideal venue for the gentleman racer which compliments the high-tech
ALMS in the racing universe. This year at Laguna the series took its performance
balancing formula a bridge too far, clogging up the weekend ticket with individual
races for each of the categories, Rolex DP in a Sunday main, Rolex GT in a
Saturday main, and the Koni Challenge classes divided into their own races as
well. The poor promoters could only add the Sirius MX-5 Cup to the bill, and the
loss of title sponsor Road & Track magazine meant that drivers probably
outnumbered spectators for the weekend, not even counting crew and hangers-
on.
Just like the ALMS controversy over street circuits and P2 cars in the P1 henhouse,
the Laguna Grand Am weekend had some controversies of its own over how the
series stewards are controlling the competition in the name of the show. At the
press conference after the DP race the discussion focused on the extensive use
of the full-course caution, with seven safety car parades totaling 30 laps of a 91
lap race and a single-file finish under yellow, and the absence of GT cars from the
main event. Scott Pruett proved himself to be a great ambassador for the series
as well as the perfect blend of pro and gentleman, inviting fans of the series to
weigh in on the controversial finish to the DP race.
Last year’s similar plethora of full-course cautions at Grand Am’s Laguna round
was the source of much derision and likely prompted this year’s banishment of
the GT field to Saturday. Only 19 DP’s took the green flag on Sunday afternoon,
but this much reduced field didn’t turn out to be the answer to last year’s Paris-
Dakar off-road festival. If anything, people were pushing that much harder without
the GT cars to set up passes, and excursions to the FIM sand traps continued
unabated. Things weren’t looking good when thirteen of the first thirty laps of the
race were under FCC, but as I moved about the circuit I noticed that the single-
class field had a tendency to string-out under green like Bernie-Karts.
Let’s play Twister, let’s play Risk….
At the end of the day, I thought that the use of the FCC and six restarts contributed
immeasurably to the entertainment value of the race, allowing strategy to play a
significant factor in how these closely-matched racers stacked up at the finish.
Strategy made the difference in the much-needed win by the Alex Job Racing/Ruby
Tuesday Porsche Crawford, and even more in the excellent performance of fifty-
something gentleman-racer Mark Patterson and early-90’s British F-3 ace
Oswaldo Negri, Jr. in the Michael Shank Racing Lexus Riley. Patterson and
Negri’s terrific showing ahead of young guns like Alex Gurney and Colin Braun is
really what this series is all about.
Pit strategy has become something that’s almost too critical in the evolution of
Grand Am’s balance of performance. As Scott Pruett pointed out after the race,
when the top five cars have qualified within a tenth of a second it becomes almost
impossible to pass. This tendency has been exacerbated by the lemming-like
switch to Riley DP’s. The field featured only a single Doran, a single Fabcar, and
a single Crawford in a sea of Rileys. This has provided a significant economy of
scale in shared development for the Riley teams, but it’s bunched the best teams
up. Interestingly, while Alex Job is having to fund the development of the Crawford
DP, running a unique chassis may give him a small edge over the other spec
racers. Last year he got schooled by the series when his car wound up carrying
125 pounds in penalty weight against the field over where he had started the
season. We’ll see what happens this year, as Job has brought a popular sponsor
aboard the series in Ruby Tuesday Restaurants. His car is also the prettiest of
the turtle-tops.
Prudent Pruett
Winners Patrick Long and Jorg Bergmeister agreed with Pruett at the post-race
press conference that the absence of the GT cars hurt the show and didn’t have
much effect on the yellows. Pruett thinks that the fans enjoy having action on every
lap and Jorg explained that he likes using the GT cars to set up passes in the
closely-matched DP class. I came to Laguna with the idea that the field had been
split to keep cars out of the sand traps, but Pat Long alluded that TV coverage has
been an issue for the GT teams, who would like more coverage. Follow-the-
leader television coverage has always been a serious issue in multi-class racing
and even a dedicated network like Speed can’t seem to find producers and
directors who can put together a broadcast featuring the race-within-a-race action
the cognoscenti turn out to see and that brings sponsors to the lesser class.
Aeon Flux
Things are still in flux in both the ALMS and Grand Am, but I think that the series
are asking the right questions. A century after those Santa Monica Road Races
we may be finally gelling the look of American road racing. One prototype class
makes more sense to me than two, both from the standpoint of the show and from
the standpoint of attracting a critical mass of competitors. It also clearly makes
sense to continue with multi-class racing, especially when series are using
performance balancing throughout the season to keep everyone competitive in
class. Standing in the Alex Job Racing pit during the final laps of the Laguna
Grand Am with Editor Morse, I also decided to stop whining and to embrace the
full-course caution. We realized that we had just seen an entertaining race that
had been interesting both for the fan in the stands and the crew under the pit
awning. Pairs like Sascha Maassen and Ryan Briscoe or Patrick Long and Jorg
Bergmeister are terrific drivers, but just like Penske in Utah it was strategy in the
pits that let Alex Job proclaim at the end, “We’re back, baby, we’re back!”
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