David Soares on the Festivities of Speed: Grand Am at Laguna Seca
When the Grand American Rolex Sports Car Series visited Mazda Raceway
Laguna Seca last year Editor Morse and I left with the impression that the
series was Hell-bent on delivering “Club Racing Without the Crowds” to a
public who couldn’t afford to waste a hundred dollar fill-up to spend a day at
the races anyway. Then the world changed over the past winter. The nation
exchanged an unpopular president for a rock-star law professor, Wall Street
completed the draining of our savings and tapped directly into the Bureau of
Printing and Engraving, the decade’s top factory sportscar teams announced
that they were striking their tents and decamping from the American Le Mans
Series, and the denizens of Daytona Beach decided to officially take over
promotion of their step-child Grand Am Series. This May Morse delivered the
only TDI to play at the Utah tabernacle, while I stayed close to home to see a
significantly larger field take the green flag at the Verizon Festival of Speed
presented by Speedcom at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca.
If Grand Am delivers a close-fought race in the oak forest and nobody’s there
to hear it, is it a race? Mid-May in Upper California has been a road racing
fixture for me since the L&M Continental 5000 Championship of the early
seventies. The weather is nearly always perfect for professional racing, and
people want to get outside and enjoy it. However, if you’re going to draw
against the naked joggers at the Bay-to-Breakers, the Marilyn impersonators
at the Castroville Artichoke Festival, or the table candle display at the Santa
Cruz River Arts Festival, you’re going to have to do a little drum-beating.
Rumor in the Mazda Raceway press room had it that Grand Am’s new
masters had pulled the West Coast PR budget, and a golden opportunity to
recruit new blood into the fold may have slipped by.
It wasn’t the fault of the show. Jon Fogarty and Alex Gurney won the Rolex
Series main race in classic fashion. Fogarty’s pass of Grand Am’s Perfect
Master, Scott Pruett, at the entry to Laguna’s storied Corkscrew, smack dab
in front of hundreds of shade-seekers at the top of the hill, couldn’t have been
staged any better if it was a Bernie Madoff annual statement. The finish was
under green and uncontrived because Mazda Raceway track management
has finally obliged those of us who tired of drifting FIM sandtraps by adding a
couple of critical paved runoffs and raising apex curbs sufficiently to limit
safety car periods to a reasonable number. Four safety cars in a 2 hour and
45 minute race keeps things interesting without dampening anyone’s
advantage. The surface stayed clean and the leaders could run up the hill
three-abreast without skating into the Empty Quarter. This in and of itself
contributed to a tremendous improvement in the perceived quality of the race.
In talking with some of the combatants I have come to believe that the
difference this season is down to series stewards who have gotten serious
about balancing performance between the various chassis and power-train
combinations rather than simply penalizing certain competitors’ success as
seemed to be the case in the past. Aside from questioning the way
performance issues have been handled in the past, I have been involved in
years of passionate debate with my fellow enthusiasts about the looks of the
prototypes and the fact that ersatz GT’s are allowed to compete in the
series.
Every racing formula these days is down to horses for courses, be it Indy or
La Sarthe. The DP was designed to survive a high-side on the tri-oval at
Daytona and is built around a safety cell better suited to a NASCAR taxicab
than the traditional profile of a sports prototype. The cars will always be
turtle-tops and there’s no two ways around it. Be that as it may, last year’s
updated package has added a little grace to the mutant ninjas and this time
around they gave the impression of pukka race cars. In addition, the entire
field seems to be a little less Junkwaffel this year with teams like Penske
Racing, Chip Ganassi with Felix Sabates, and GAINSCO/Bob Stallings
raising the bar for car preparation and team appearance to a level appropriate
to a national-level series. I saw the original Can-Am and I can assure you
that the quality wasn’t Team McLaren or Captain Nice beyond about the third
row. The Daytona Prototype order at the end was Pontiac-Lexus-Ford and
but for a stop-and-go a Porsche would have been right in there as well. This
year’s Grand Am field looks and sounds fully professional, and while the lap
times were GT1-level the cars were entertaining to watch.
The GT class likewise ended with a diverse Mazda-Pontiac-Porsche freight
train that could have switched-up the order if things had gone a lap or two
more. Beautiful, close, entertaining racing. Grand Am GT is a somewhat
different animal from just about any other championship on the planet but this
class also seems to be settling into something that works. While one
Porsche stalwart complained bitterly about the Mazda Rx-8 during J.J.
O’Malley’s pre-race conference call, Farnbacher-Loles hot-shoe Leh Keen put
a 997 on the front row and with partner Dirk Werner took a well-contested
podium. After the race GT winner Nick Ham of Speedsource Mazda reflected
that in his view the GT cars performance is now very well balanced, the
difference being that one car might be better-suited to one circuit than
another, like the lighter RX-8 at Mazda Raceway (how about that?) or the
stable high-horsepower Porsche at Daytona.
If Grand Am is so well-suited to post-Toxic Asset America, why does it still
have such a second-fiddle chip on its shoulder? I have no idea why the
series settles for a crowd at Laguna less than half the size of the rival ALMS
race in October. With such a solid and diverse field the lack of promotion is
inexcusable. I can only hope that this is down to new management getting
their feet wet in an unfamiliar market and that next year Grand Am’s west
coast swing draws the crowds the competitors deserve. Otherwise, we’ll still
have to classify the series as “Club Racing Without the Crowds.”
David Soares
May 2009
|
