Grassroots Motorsports
Issue link: http://grassrootsmotorsports.epubxp.com/i/397024
Grassroots Motorsports 28 DRIVERS MEETING Low-buck endurance racing is a fractured thing these days. The 24 Hours of LeMons and the ChumpCar World Series once seemed quite similar, with many teams running in both venues interchangeably. Today, LeMons is the home for truly cheap cars with funny themes and a jovial crowd. ChumpCar has a more serious air about it. A new series, dubbed the World Racing League, seems to be shov- ing itself straight in between LeMons and Chump- Car, with a touch of NASA racing woven in. Here's the basic recipe: Buy a not-terrible car, put a cage in it, keep it mostly stock, make it look good, and then race it in 8- to 12-hour endurance races. Power-to-weight ratios deter- mine classing, while entry fees are similar to those of LeMons and ChumpCar. The entire rulebook is 16 pages, and the series makes it clear that almost any race car is welcome, from your SCCA- prepped Mustang to your LeMons- prepped Cadillac Catera. There's no budget limit, but the rules are written so it's diffcult to spend a ton of money. Novice driv- ers are required to go through the series' NOOB (Novice Obviously On Board) program before compet- ing, though almost any sort of racing license counts as a license to race in the World Racing League. Contact is frowned upon, and the series promises clean racing. This is the World Racing League's inaugural year, and the venues are mostly in the Midwest. So far, though, the drivers who have competed love it. We know we're itch- ing to try out this new style of racing.–Tom Suddard World Racing League: Another Low-Buck Endurance Venue grand opening the key- stone of its 20th-anniver- sary celebration on Labor Day weekend in 2014. That's a bit more than a year away. DDS Engineering of Bowling Green, a long- time NCM contractor, manages construction. President Dennis Smith intends this project to be an environmental and technological tour de force. Using satellite technol- ogy, every bit of almost a million square feet of undulating pavement is laid to within 1 /8 inch of specifcation. The 45-foot- wide ribbon of pavement consists of a specially formulated asphalt mix, creating a grippy surface 10 times more horizon- tally elastic than a typical road. Circuit of the Ameri- cas, the plush new track in Austin, Texas, is believed to be the only other U.S. road course like it. Two of the 21 turns on the park's long course are clones of the Porsche and Mulsanne corners at Le Mans in France. Fehan's engineers do not rely on maps or surveyor mea- surements to produce these perfect copies. They capture mountains of data from their in-car com- puters during the actual running of the 24-hour. One very tiny tidbit: As a car passes over a sur- face, its attitude reveals the degree of banking, among other things. "And now you know why this new track is so impor- tant to Corvette Racing," Fehan says. Those two corners are brutal, and opportunities to learn them and to practice the quickest routes through them just don't exist. "Until now."–Ralph Kamer alex bellus photo dan schrader photo