Lessons from endurance racing

In 2018 and 2019, I participated in several grassroots endurance racing events with a group of friends. The events consisted of two days of 8-hour races and were held at different race tracks across Ontario. The races were an incredible experience and looking back, offers some lessons to be learned.

During our races, we had a timing device to track our car’s progress. This provided feedback of the driver’s pace every lap. Sometimes, we had a lap timer which measured the real-time delta of our current lap time against the car’s best lap time. This gave extra motivation for our drivers to keep up the pace.

Seeing the delta creep up into the reds would provide real-time feedback that the way we took the last corner could be better. This was great for the drivers to improve their lap times. But the goal of an endurance race is not to put in the best lap times. It is to cross the finish line first.

Setting the best lap times does not matter if you cannot finish the race. Pushing the car too hard puts additional stress on the tires and the drivetrain, and it increases the risk of incidents. The goal then, is to drive as quickly as possible while managing wear and risk.

When you go as hard as possible without refueling, you will run out of steam quickly (more accurately, combustion). Throughout the race, we brought the car back to the pits several times for fuel and fresh rubber. The pitstop is a crucial element in racing. Seconds gained or lost in the pitstop can decide the race. In order to streamline the process, everyone on the team had to play their part.

Racing is a team sport. There are the engineers that help to set up the car, finance teams that balance cost and reward, and strategists that calculate when to pit and how hard to push. We were lucky to have some talented mechanics on our team that brought some professional knowledge to our enthusiasm. There are too many instances to list them all here but some of them included aligning the car by eye during a post-crash pit stop, diagnosing a smoking dashboard², and using a dead blow mallet as a make-shift trailer spring to get us to the track on time.

During pitstops, there were multiple roles to fill: to fuel up the car, hold the fire extinguisher, jack up the car, change the tires, and help the next driver buckle in. We even had a team mascot to cheer us on.

A single person cannot be an entire race team. Completing our pit stop within the 5-minute minimum window was like having complex parts work together to make a clock tick. Everyone must play their part and be trusted to do so. There is no time for second-guessing during a race. All the preparation is done before the race weekend.

Before races, we would take the car out to lapping days to tune the suspension and find out where the weak links are. This is critical to the success of the race weekends, as we seek to maximize the performance of the car and minimize the risk of failure over long stints.

We check for tire temperature and wear, adjusting camber and toe as necessary. We also adjust the dampers to make the car well-behaved on track. Testing also ensures that drivers are not learning things about the car for the first time on track. The consequences could be catastrophic if the driver was not well-versed in unbuckling themself during a fire. We do the most we can to be ready for the weekend. And then we go racing.

Racing is not just about winning trophies. One of my fondest memories is having had to retire our car due to brake failure, overnight a new brake caliper from Japan (it was actually Toronto), and then experiencing complete brake failure during my stint the next day.

My first reaction after the brake failure was to bring the car back to the pits as quickly as possible so we can try to fix it and get back on track. Perhaps I ought to have felt mortified at my near-death experience instead. Humans are weird.

At the end of the day, we all signed up to have fun. In grassroots racing, there are no giant prize pools or fame. We fight hard on track but are comrades off it. Everyone has some BBQ and beer after the race. The grassroots racing community welcomed us and we had the most fun we could have with our clothes on³.

¹Since I’m not a real writer, I can abuse whatever clichés I want
²Electrical issues are the worst since there are so many points of failure. Not ideal when you have to get back on track as quickly as possible. It turns out dry carbon is conductive.
³I must credit Joe T, the leader and class clown of SPDA for this phrase