Five months ago, I had the less-than-enjoyable experience of getting hit by a driver who was operating way beyond his talent level then sitting unprotected for two minutes while cars fought for position in front of my driver’s door.
Today, I saw this video. This is a God-damned disgrace and it should lead to MULTIPLE people leaving the sport for a very long time.
In order of fault:
The Miata driver is a fucking idiot who should be banned from all forms of racing until my son retires. What kind of moron drives at 10mph (5? 15? something like that) on the racing line over a blind hill? That’s how people get killed. If you have a mechanical — which, face it, is standard procedure in LeMons — get off the surface if you can and get off the line otherwise. When there are multiple cars swerving around you you are in the wrong.
The flagger raises the white flag, and he raises it late. Did he not know his station well enough to know that it was a blind hill? Did he not see the chaos going on? That’s a waving-yellow situation every day of the week and twice on whatever day this race was happening on. Send this guy home or have him work the grid.
The driver of the 911 is looking so close to his or her own front bumper that he doesn’t even bother to hit the brakes until the cars ahead of him have all made successful evasive maneuvers. The problem is CLEARLY VISIBLE at 0:17. The brakes don’t go on until 0:18.7 or thereabouts. That’s either the world’s longest reaction time or it’s an untrained driver. And he target-fixates on the Miata and simply rams it. It’s not like it would be impossible to go around the Miata. Everybody else did.
My initial impulse was “ban the 911 driver from racing permanently” but let’s face it, LeMons is a series where you learn how to race. It’s not F1 or IMSA or NASA or even AER. It’s a place where people learn racecraft, and they learn to drive, and they learn to look ahead.
So if you ban everybody who does something that stupid from LeMons, you’ll have an empty field and no new entrants either. But watching that video makes me want to swear a blood oath to never run in LeMons again. And it makes me think that LeMons should go back to the quarter-mile ovals and heavily-chicaned courses that it used for the first few years. There is no reason for novice racers to be operating at speeds like that in conditions like that. No wonder bad things happen.
It makes me wonder what the long-term future for LeMons and ChumpCar is. Had that accident been fatal, I shudder to think about the liability involved for everyone. If some attorney put me on the stand and asked me to testify about the incident, I’d tell the jury what I’m telling you: there were three incompetent people in that incident, and that’s at least two too many.
This further validates the SCCA and NASA racing-school procedures and it makes me want to go back in time and retroactively not encourage everyone whom I’ve encouraged to run LeMons or Chump. Well, consider that encouragement removed. At least until everybody involved gets their act together a little better.
check the youtube comments. there are some statements being presented over there that you might want to read if not correct.
There’s a note that he’s “off the racing line”… The next turn is a left-hander which would seem to uphold that but the exit from the previous turn puts cars where the Miata was. I think he’d have been better off hugging the wall on the right side.
Where did the fun go?Your gonna stroke man- no shortage of fools in this world.
Commented about this over at TTAC under your article. Won’t repost here, though you can feel free if you want to.
I would be curious to see your thoughts about my thoughts of need for improved training and validation of the educational goals of that training actually being assimilated. And also my thoughts about the analysis that he should have figured cars ahead were evading (not clear to me that they weren’t just setting up for more turns), and more relevant, that he not only had to apply the brakes in that short interval, but that he needed to achieve a situational analysis at least before fully committing to braking, and needed to burn off speed, needing distance, to overcome the speed differential. Simply getting on the brakes as quick as humanly possible might not have been enough to pull the speed down to 5kph fast enough.
Your thoughts?
I’d say the driver is completely untrained; if someone told me it was his first day on track I wouldn’t be totally surprised.
The SCCA and NASA handle this by doing a “comp school” for new drivers that gives them a sense of what to do and when. LeMons has no such thing. I’m wondering if they will have to adopt one.
Pretty shocking. Me, I’ll stick with SCCA.
Well, that’s nice, but I was pretty happy to have an opportunity to race for less than a 5-figure investment.
My armchair opinions on what could have been done are moot. What happened sucks and it’s more than fair to let this be the straw that breaks the crapcan camel’s back for anyone concerned. But I’ll probably still do it when I can, though I’ll try to go for AER or WRL. Unless you want to sponsor a not-very-young, not-very-fit, not-very-fast stranger through an SCCA comp license and racing season.
At WGI last year in Chump, there was one car that was entering the little “inner loop” chicane on the far right side of the road, and more than once I had to slow down to avoid basically T-boning it as it clumsily tried to straight-line onto the first curb before missing the second and meandering into the outer loop on the inside of the track. As far as I could tell the car wasn’t disabled, or trying to stay off the racing line, that person just didn’t know that you shouldn’t do that, and the cars all entering the corner tens of miles per hour faster on the opposite side of the track never seemed to click. I was honestly afraid to pass at one point, because I couldn’t pass on power and he was wandering all over the road to the point where I was not willing to be side-by-side. Eventually he started pointing people by. I might be remembering wrong, but in that race I missed the first day and I believe I heard there was some carnage. In that race I did also have the experience of nursing a car with a bad ECU around the track without getting in the way, but no one hit me or had bad things to say.
I don’t know what you can do beyond implementing some basic standards like WRL/AER. Open-entry racing has been good to me so far in my extremely-limited experience but I might be lucky. It was that taste though that will probably compel me to get more serious when I can; otherwise I would probably never have made the leap to try. Whether that’s all that important I guess is the question.
Per the comment to Volando above, they might have to implement a one-day “comp school” for new racers.
Setright would agree: only more than enough is enough.
Oh sorry, my browser aggregated is playing up, Setright comment was for the prior post and I can’t see a delete. Apologies!
No harm done, I figured which post you meant 🙂
I don’t race, but have open tracked before I had kids. In my 40’s, this scares the poop out of me. Maybe I’ll stick to video game racing…
Team captain of Hella Shitty Racing here, the team behind Ferkel the Nein-11, the turbodiesel 911 and camera car of the video.
I read your R&T article (even commented on it, though my comment mysteriously disappeared) and now this rant. No one from our team was contacted ever, which clearly means you’re not after serious journalism here but just venting or something. That’s fine, you go do that, but turning this into some sort of witch hunt is low, even for you. (Curious that Eyesore gets away with it clean. Shouldn’t THEY have seen the flag, too? Or spotted the accident from afar? While you’re at it, let’s blame them too!)
If you don’t want to come back to LeMons because of this crash, that’s great. Honestly, after you’ve shown us how you’d deal with a tricky situation without even being involved yourself, I think staying away from LeMons is exactly the right choice. But you get no right to call for bans or drag our drivers through the mud.
Fact of the matter is this: everybody involved had to deal with an incredibly shitty situation — you can’t blame this on anyone, *especially* not until you’ve heard the whole story. Either way, anything you claim from your armchair is irrelevant. You weren’t there and you were in the fortunate situation of not having to make tough calls in split seconds. Everybody walked away from the incident without so much as a bruise. Thanks to the increasingly stringent safety requirements in LeMons that are on par or even sometimes beyond what club racing organizations require. You entirely fail to mention that. Not to mention the fact that stupid and dumb accidents happen all the time in club racing and pro racing.
Thanks for staying away from LeMons. I’d never want to share a track with somebody as immature and idiotic as yourself.
YOUR driver knocked the Trump car into the path of Eyesore. They weren’t at risk until YOUR driver punted the car. That is one hundred percent your driver’s fault.
You clearly have no idea what “club racing organizations” require. Do you even know what a halo seat is? What a fire system is? What belt expiration is?
I may be immature and idiotic, but I have wins in four sanctions and you’re stuck defending a guy who stood on the brakes for two hundred feet. The fact is that I’ll probably be around a LeMons race in the future and I encourage you to introduce yourself to me so we can have this conversation in greater detail. Thanks for at least having a slow enough car that you didn’t kill anybody this weekend when your guy drove directly into them.
> You clearly have no idea what “club racing organizations” require. Do you even know what a halo seat is? What a fire system is? What belt expiration is?
Yes. We have halo seats and a fire suppression system in all our cars. You can see all of that in the picture-in-picture video, FWIW. Or, you know, if you had bothered to talk to us. Or perused our FB page. You know, journalism. And yes, LeMons checks belt expiration very anally.
I’ll be happy to discuss this in person in detail. And I’ll be happy to walk you through how difficult it is to threshold brake the Porsche, even for somebody as experienced as our driver, or heck, somebody as decorated as you. Easy to talk about it. Just like the alternatives that were apparently to open to our driver. Honestly, I could see how last minute swerving may have been just as dangerous — IMHO the GTI got lucky with the maneuver it pulled off. But that’s beside the point.
I get that you’re really concerned about safety here, but the way you’re presenting it is not very good. To insinuate that our driver would be to bear the responsibility of potentially killing people is blowing this way out of proportion. This is by far not the worst wreck at LeMons and so far nobody has ever died or gotten seriously injured.
Let’s be constructive about this, man. Use this incident if you want and let’s talk about better flagging and perhaps some better advice for how to stay off the racing line — fine. Let’s take the tragic death of an instructor at Buttonwillow this past week and promote the idea of HANS devices — great. I’m even happy to talk about situation awareness, target fixation, threshold braking, all that stuff. It’s important stuff, and it’s what often stands between the amateurs and the well-seasoned racer such as yourself. Again, let’s do it. But don’t dish out blame here, call for bans there, and invoke Death the Almighty. It’s sensationalist and unprofessional.
If you’re not competent to threshold brake your car, then stay out of the car.
If the car is too tough to drive, then don’t race it.
The original intent of my article was to call for oversight on the part of the sanctioning body. Slow the speeds, chicane the straights, return things to a level that makes sense for novice drivers.
However, you and Zandr (via email to R&T) want to build the case for your driver being blameless. Which is far from the situation.
Nobody on your team has yet to tell me anything that explains the incident any better other than “I’ll be happy to walk you through how difficult it is to threshold brake the Porsche, even for somebody as experienced as our driver.” All that tells me is that you were knowingly running a car that your teammates couldn’t drive to proper standards.
I’ll also say that it’s not easy to swing a 911 around a situation like this — no matter what engine is in the back. But at no point does your driver even try. I’m also not trying to pin primary blame on your driver. It rests with the Miata. That’s why I said that I’d ban the Miata guy and sit your guy down. But I object to the whitewashing of the incident as some sort of hunky-dory vindication of LeMons.
Let’s first address this remarkable fallacy: “Instead of taking evasive action himself, the driver waits about 1.5 seconds before locking his brakes and driving directly into the Miata,” I’m not sure we’re watching the same video. The Trump Miata is sitting over the crest of a hill, then obscured by two cars: the orange GTI and the blue Focus. IMMEDIATELY upon the hazard being seen, the 911 is all the way on the brakes. The 911 driver is essentially pinned in terms of going left as a result of the GTI on the grass. The 911 attempted to, but could not, steer right as a result of the brakes being locked. Look at the full-screen in-car video from the 911 and consider your statements again. There’s no such thing as 1.5 seconds of inaction in the face of the hazard. For reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pUDwX6p00M
Let’s address the second fallacy: that Lemons racing is unsafe as-is. Could the flagging have been better there? Possibly. Should the Trump Miata driver be lambasted for not getting off the track? Yes. But notwithstanding any of that: there were zero injuries out of that incident. Not even an oil slick. The 911 was repaired and back on the track. Trump and Eyesore, not so much. But regardless: zero injuries. What some of your readers might not know is that while the Lemons cars are “$500 crapcans,” there is a stringent tech requirement for them, which includes mandatory properly fabricated and welded-in safety cages, strict regulations regarding fuel systems, a fire suppression method, racing seat and harness, master cut-off, etc. etc. And stringent requirements for personal safety gear in terms of fire suit, helmet, etc. It’s precisely this reason that Lemons is safe, fun, and as affordable as racing can be. Period.
This article has it backwards. It should be lauding the series for its safety requirements and stringent enforcement of them. It should be heralding to those interested in amateur racing that there’s a safe, affordable way to do it because — look! an impact as severe as any there’s ever been in Lemons and not a single injury to speak of. Instead, the article took a sensationalized scare approach to the detriment of the author, and the amateur racing community.
Thanks for contributing.
You’re wrong on all counts. It was sheer luck that the Eyesore Miata didn’t kill the driver of the Trump Miata. Had he been turned the other way by the 911, it would have been a certainty that someone was at least going to the hospital.
I’m also going to say this in all caps because apparently LeMons racers don’t understand it:
WHEN YOUR BRAKES ARE LOCKED ITS YOUR OWN FUCKING FAULT ITS NOT THE MIGHTY HAND OF ALLAH MAKING THE TIRES STOP MOVING
Get off the brakes and take evasive action. That’s what racers do.
I know all about LeMons safety regulations because I’ve been there for their conception and implementation. If you think they’re strict, you’ve obviously never raced anywhere else.
There’s nothing sensationalized about what I wrote. Sensationalizing it would have been writing MORON DRIVER RAMS STOPPED CAR AND NEARLY CAUSES BETWEEN TWO AND TEN FATALITIES WHILE FLAGGER HOLDS THE WRONG FLAG.
Oh jumpin’ jeesus in a birchbark canoe…
“I’VE ANALYZED THIS CLIP EXTENSIVELY FROM WITHIN THE COMFY CHAIR ON THE IVORY TOWER IN WHICH I RESIDE. I’VE MEASURED REACTION TIMES AND IDENTIFIED FAILURES OF THE VARIOUS PARTIES, AND I SHALL NOW LAY MY JUDGEMENT FORTH FOR ALL TO SEE!”
I’ve raced alongside Zandr. And Philipp. And Blake. And the driver of this car, Aaron. And a hundred or so others. I’d jump into any car that passes Lemons tech, throw on any safety gear that is Lemons approved and share the road with these fine people ANY day of the week. It’s the *character* of (most) of these people that dictate my trust in them, not the conclusions I might come to while armchair racing through 5 seconds of a camera lens.
You are certainly entitled to mouth off about things of which you know little. We Lemons “racers” will just be over here doin’ our thing… dressing up in costumes, putting dumb car/engine swap ideas out on the track, stapling plaid fabric onto BMW’s, crafting the perfect skeleton orgies for our ghetto-ass Corvettes…
… and having the times of our lives with people we love and trust on and off the track.
Peace.
J
And yet I was putting bags of nickels in a truck before you knew what Lemons was. And Judge Phil attended his first Lemons race as my teammate. But by all means, feel free to lecture me about lemons.
So in that case, good sir, why is your “judgement” on the matter so far outta whack with the drivers that (currently) drive in Lemons, whose cumulative experience in this series is in the “hundreds of races” category?
Are they *ALL* wrong, or is it possible that there’s something about your approach to Lemons racing that correlates to your significant absence since it’s early days?
PS - I first picked up a guitar 25 years ago… but that doesn’t mean I’m any good, nor do I know what the fuck I’m talking about when it comes to mixolydian scales. Being around something a long time ago doesn’t equate to valuable knowledge or relevant experience with the subject matter when a discussion comes up today.
I’ve run at least one LeMons race nearly every year since 2008, most recently a 944 Turbo at MSR: http://jackbaruth.com/?p=2186
The problem with the vast majority of LeMons racers is that they have no experience outside LeMons and they don’t truly know whether what they are doing is safe or correct or even reasonable. To take your guitar analogy further, it would be like if I formed a “guitar club” and had all my friends who had never played guitar join and every week for years we taught each other how to play guitar despite not really knowing how.
If that flag station at 5 was truly empty, that’s a disgrace. 170 cars at $1500 or more EACH and not all of the flag stations are covered? You have to agree with me that it’s a problem.
Furthermore, I’m not trying to shit on you guys. I want you to be SAFE. I want you to LIVE long enough to “graduate” from LeMons and come race somewhere else. I’m not trying to ruin your life. I’m trying to save it. And if the price of raising safety awareness is to have a bunch of people call me names, I can live with that.
I can’t speak to the status of the flag stand. Methinks your standards for the track corner workers may be a touch too high. They *aren’t* perfect, they *can’t* be perfect, and any good Lemons driver will tell you that
“To take your guitar analogy further, it would be like if I formed a “guitar club” and had all my friends who had never played guitar join and every week for years we taught each other how to play guitar despite not really knowing how.”
That sounds pretty damn awesome… as long as the ‘real’ guitar players wouldn’t snap-judge from the sidelines after watching 15 seconds of a youtube video where the dude, trying his best, messed up the intro to “Stairway To Heaven”. That would suck if the more serious players went after the casual players who were having fun and enjoying it all with their friends .
“Furthermore, I’m not trying to shit on you guys. I want you to be SAFE. I want you to LIVE long enough to “graduate” from LeMons and come race somewhere else. I’m not trying to ruin your life. I’m trying to save it. And if the price of raising safety awareness is to have a bunch of people call me names, I can live with that.”
C’mon, now, man. I think your case for “safety martyrdom” is falling on deaf ears, in large part due to your aggressiveness in going after a truly genuine unfortunate, and mostly faultless, situation that *amateur* drivers find themselves in. Everyone walked away unhurt.
Look - you should know that, *by design*, there is a mixed level of experience on the track out there in Lemons. That’s not a drawback of Lemons. Jay has worked hard to built a culture of safety and responsibility that transcends any potential “weakness” of mixed experience drivers. In doing so, it opens up the world of amateur racing to everyone. And the safety record in Lemons speaks for itself. In this single race, there was nearly 2,500 driver hours of racing, and this incident (in which no one was hurt) is the worst one could find.
I’d put the safety record of amateurs in Lemons up against the best drivers in motorsports series any day. I feel as safe, if not *safer* in Lemons than any other grassroots motorsports series.
When you pay the SCCA $480 for a double race weekend, they have TWO flaggers in EVERY stand.
What’s LeMons cost per team? (I know the answer)
Ah: you’re an expert in Lemons safety regulations. This representation is accepted and added to the list under “caps lock presser.”
These safety regulations clearly worked in this case — yet you fail to mention that there were zero injuries whatsoever. This is indubitably because you took zero steps to investigate, either because you lacked the time to so or because you simply didn’t care. As an expert in Lemons safety rules and as one who “isn’t trying to shit on [Lemons],” it’s assumed to be the former. Rather than put down the comp licenses you’re swaddling and send an email, check the forum, or call up your best buddy Judge Phil to report on the drivers’ conditions, your busy schedule left you no other choice than to turn to complete speculation. And in this speculation, despite being an expert in Lemons safety, you’re willing to say that were it not for mere happenstance, there would be a driver fatality in this incident.
It’s remarkably disingenuous to claim not to be sensationalizing a zero-injury wreck as a foundation to tell the world that Lemons is unsafe. Even more so when one is an expert in the safety regulations, as we now know. Put up a crash video, never mention that all the drivers are completely fine, but go on and on about how it’s unsafe. Golly, now that we’re thinking about it, you must have intentionally omitted that the drivers are safe. Because obviously that would go to negative your fallacious argument. Well done.
But you’re trying to help us. Trying make sure we’re safe. Don’t shit in my mouth and call it dinner, Jack.
Stop to think for a minute about whose interests you are protecting at the expense of your own.
This is completely unacceptable on a circuit track…. Seriously even highway driving I helpva fellow motorist with a flat tire. But before I do anything I convince them to drive the next 1/4 mile or whatever to at least get off the road so we don’t all get run over. The best time I ever had was with a civic which had to have 20″ wheels and a flat in a curvy stretch of highway. The kid said nope I’m not moving do you know what these wheels are worth? My answer was along the lines of are they worth more than your life? He moved along and got it fixed. Seriously I expect people to be stupid on PUBLIC roads but not that bad on a track
Seriously, though: Is racing in LeMons and Chump more dangerous than riding a motorcycle on the street? My gut feeling is no, but it would be interesting to hear another perspective.
I’d say it’s considerably safer than riding a motorcycle on the street.
Just an opinion, but I would think that if I choose to drive defensively on a motorcycle, rather than to try to hang it out at every turn, I have a much better chance of evading an accident on the streets.
OTOH, the auto/racer safety equipment would do a much better job of minimizing the price of contact.
So from the perspective of merely avoiding an accident, I would say racing is not safer. But from the perspective of avoiding becoming a casualty, there I would agree with you that racing, even in an amateur environment like LeMons, has a much better chance of avoiding catastrophes.
I’m too old to be flogging anything around a track, even though I at least would like to pretend that I might still be able to compete.
But my point is that I would hope that the focus would be on (a) root cause analysis (not just proximate cause(s)); and (b) procedure development that would result in verifiable and quantifiable improvements in both driver and flagger skills and performance.
I have done things like that as a significant component of my long career, and would be willing to volunteer to work as a team member if there were to be a serious attempt at trying to develop significant improvements across all the LeMons, or even other, racing venues.
If anyone with any authority is interested in trying to do something like that, they can contact me, and we can talk about how I might be able to help, and what might be done, provided only that the goal is for real and not just cosmetic improvements.
I first set foot in a pit area at fifteen, and that was long enough ago that I can say that I have developed a lifelong love for motorsports, and a willingness to contribute to their success, if there was anything I could do.
I am a bit surprised that, other than your call for improvements, there has been remarkably little feedback in the way of talk about what might get done as a result of this situation, even if the scope was limited to flagger training and driver training regarding conduct when your ride is impaired.
And I realize that this is not a venue with F1 type or NASCAR type budgets to invest in programs. But I would think that even a small group of part time volunteers should be able to tackle and succeed with improvements in those two limited areas, in a relatively short period of time.
If I am not alone, and if someone who could actually make it happen is interested, I would do what I could to contribute to this cause. And about the only thing I would ask in return might be a couple of free pit passes, and/or maybe a chance to crew. (I can bend the occasional wrench and trace out the occasional faulty circuit, among other things, and wouldn’t object to just swapping tires or pumping fuel).
They say that if you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, the one that yelps is the one that got hit. I can’t imagine what made me think of that.
Regardless of how strident some may think your position is, it seems to clearly identify two areas where improvement is clearly needed and reasonably achievable: flagging and what to do if your ride falls out of the pack.
If Richard Feynman could figure out what happened with the Challenger disaster and what needed to be done to prevent another, I would certainly think that there are enough engineering and project people involved in amateur racing, that tackling those two areas successfully shouldn’t turn into a multi-year project involving a cast of hundreds and a budget that would like like a FIFA world soccer league budget.
Or maybe not…but how will any of us know, unless it is tried?