Sigh. The veterans have heard this story a hundred times, but just in case there’s someone that hasn’t…
Roebling is my home track so I did prob 50 track days there before going to comp school. Several orgs brief, when talking about turn 9, that there’s tons of run off room all the way to the tower. In fact, go behind the tower if you need to. Prob 30x I heard this briefed with RR management right there nodding their heads. Sure, it was kind of a joke, but no one ever spoke up with a contrary word.
So there I was at one of my early races and I skid off the track at the exit of 9 in an early morning qual. As I skittered across the wet grass my first thought was to be goddamned sure that the car didn’t try to hook back across the track. Once I got that battle pretty much won, I had the next issue of the rapidly approaching barrier which is between tower and track. I didn’t yet have much control of the car so I was disinclined to brake harder or get the car moving right towards the track so I’d miss that wall. It looked to me like the safest course was to keep going straight which would put me behind the tower, but also give me tons of more room to get the car slowed in the wet grass. If I slowed more aggressively and tried to turn right, I was afraid I might lose control on the wet grass and spin on to the track. So as I got closer to the tower I slowed way down and put-putted behind it. Once I got to the other side and could see down the track, I re-entered.
Then I got blacked flagged. I came into the pits but no one would explain what I’d done wrong. My perception was that I’d successfully avoided hooking across the track, I’d taken the safest course of action to keep the car under control in the wet grass, I’d passed behind the tower at safe speed, and carefully re-entered the track, right? Heck, I’d done what had been explicitly authorized many times.
Well, maybe not.
Apparently some flagger, I was never able to find out who, radioed to control with surprise and alarm that I’d gone behind the tower “at speed” which, of course, would have been crazy dangerous because that’s an admin area. So track management was furious at me, and they made that clear to Jim Pantas and (then race director) Tom Hennig. I was told that I’d find out what I did wrong after the Racer’s Meeting.
I was pretty new to NASA. I didn’t figure I’d ever impress anyone with my amazing skills, but I did hope, over time, to establish a reputation for being safe and considerate.
At the end of the Racer’s Meeting, Jim asked this group of ~150 folks that I’d hoped to be a respected member of some day, “who was that asshole that went flying behind the tower at full speed?”
My hair stood straight up in horror.
“Holy Shit”, I thought, “they think I went behind the tower at full blast. WTF? I slowed way down.” But I knew I was screwed…what was I going to do, hide? Even tho there was clearly some confusion, I had to suck it up, and raise my hand in this crowd of 150.
Jim said “you come talk to me after the meeting!”
Now remember, Jim was told that I’d gone thru an admin area at full speed. Imagine if someone drove thru a section of the paddock at 115mph. And not only was I a newby, but I was a SpecE30 newby and those guys are capable of anything.
Jim and Tom yelled at me for a while. It was kind of a 30min tag team sort of thing. One would yell for 5min while the other caught his breath. I just kept saying “yes sir” and “no sir” in the appropriate places w/o attempting any kind of defense or clarification. They were so angry at me that I thought if I said anything else, I might be banned from NASA. I figured the safest course was to just keep my mouth shut and not offering a single thing that could be construed as a whining excuse.
I got DQ’d from the Sat race and also the IFU race at the end of the day. Back in those days, the IFU race was the highlight of the whole year. I spent the day assigned to flag at turn 4. I was just happy that I hadn’t got banned from NASA.
That night I pulled out my data and video and created a screenshot of the instant I was behind the tower, and then I created a zoomed image of the gps speed of 9mph. I showed it around the paddock on Sunday full of righteous vindication. To my surprise, no one really seemed to care. I seemed to be far more freaked out by the whole thing then anyone else. I was kinda left with the impression that when SpecE30 is involved, no hi-jinks are all that alarming as long as no one is killed.
I carry that pic in my logbook to this day. Every once-and-now I still hear the story of a SpecE30 lunatic that went behind the RR tower “at speed” so I have to pull out the pic and exclaim “MFer, that was me. 9mph. Kiss my ass.”
https://vimeo.com/18201279
