Crewing for TRG at the Daytona 24

I posted this in Silver, but realized not everyone has access so I'm posting it here too.

Winning the Rolex 24hr at Daytona

Wow, it’s been a whirlwind week since last Wednesday. I am exhausted, hurting, sick, and feel great all at the same time. Before I start, I just want to say thank you to Kevin Buckler and all the guys at TRG, it was a please working with them and it’s the finest racing team I’ve been with. Everything was top notch. Now to the story.

I headed down Wednesday afternoon with my friend Dave Smith of SmithMotorworks and a couple other people. We were picking up the BlueCoral 935 for the Historic Race before the Rolex started. It is his customer’s car, and we had to do some work to it before it was ready to show and run. We arrived around 9pm and picked up the car from the other guys that were doing some turbo work to it, put it in the hauler, and then found some chow. We also had that customer’s custom bodied 850hp 996TT, but it has no rear seats, so we ran errands in the semi-truck, haha. The BlueCoral needed some touch-up paint work, belts swapped, brakes bled, and a few other little things, all of which we did on Thursday. The temperature was fantastic, and I was hoping it would stay that way the rest of the weekend. I went down to the pits to watch qualifying and TRG got the 1-2 in the series with the #67 car (affectionately known as the “queen” car) driven by Andy Lally taking the pole and the #66 Driven by Dominik Farnbacher taking the second spot. Unfortunately the rear wing of the #67 was 1mm too far back, so the time was DQ’d and it would have to start in the back, in 44th place.

Friday morning at 7am I showed up in the garage to meet Steve, the guy who asked me to help crew the race. TRG had 5 entries in the GT class, so they needed as much manpower as possible. The first stop was the hospitality room, right next to pit 44, where I picked up some food, team shirts, fleeces, heavy jacket, and anything else clothing-wise they wanted us to wear. Some we got to keep, some we had to return. My job was to be one of the four people handling the fuel for the cars. Doing the math, five cars and four people made for an interestingly hectic day. All day was spent working with the engineers fueling the cars up and then after the run, emptying them back out and telling them how much came out. It was amazing how accurate the engineers were telling me how much was going to come out. I spent all day filling, emptying, and then running the 95gal fuel cart over to the Sonoco station for a fill-up of 98 octane at $6.60/gal. I was definitely glad it wasn’t my fuel bill.

It was interesting meeting all the drivers of the five cars. The first one I met was Kenny Wallace, driving the 4 car for children’s cancer research. He was the nicest, funniest guy, and yes he’s even louder in person that on TV. Andy Lally was another great guy, the poster child for TRG racing. Very soft spoken, but determined and at the same time enjoyed himself all weekend. Brendan Gaughan, of Craftsman Truck fame, was an animal. He stayed in the pit box almost the whole 24hr race with the crew, talking, joking, etc., but not leaving. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

More to come in the next installment, I have to get back to work for a bit. Oh, and around 100 pics will go up tonight too. Hope you are enjoying my ramblings.

 

Great stuff; sounds like a heck of an experience. Congrats!

 

Winning the Rolex 24 cont.

So to continue, before leaving, we had to roll the cars down to the fuel pumps and empty them completely. Then the officials filled them up to check capacity. We were .5 gal over on one car, so we drained it and put some more foam baffling in and were spot on the second time. We left around 7pm Friday night, after transmissions had been changed, everything checked, and rechecked, alignment tested, and then the cars put back in the haulers for the night.

I woke up around 6am on race-day. Never enough sleep, but I was pretty amped up about the race. I got to the garage area around 7am, however no one had told me that it didn’t open until 730, so I went to breakfast at the white tents. All during the race weekend, there was food being served at these tents. Gourmet feats for all three meals. Unfortunately I only ate there twice, due to time. So around 8am we started rolling the cars out of the hauler, back into the garages, and started prepping them. I grabbed a bottle of glass cleaner and got most of the gunk off of the car, and then got the spray wax and went to work. Nothing too exciting happened that morning, thank goodness, as everyone had busted their tail the days before. Around 11, we rolled all five cars out and lined them up in front of the garage for the team picture. We had over 80 crew members, plus drivers, hospitality staff, etc., so it was a crowded shot. Regis Lefebure (one of my racing photography idols, who I take most of my inspiration from) was the team photog, and I think he was using around a 17mm lens to try to fit us all in.

The historic cars had a 25min lapping session, so I watched a bit of that as we set up the pit stalls. It was nice to watch the BlueCoral 935 out on track, since I had worked on it earlier. A short story about the car, and I know some have already read this, but it's owned by a chiropractor in Panama City Beach. He somehow got hooked up with Ganassi Racing to work on the drivers before races, and since then they keep winning, so he's become their good luck charm. He brought a mobile clinic to the 24hrs and worked on drivers all weekend. So Ganassi asked him to take Carlos Slim (yes, that one, the billionaire) in the passengers seat for the historic race. Carlos backed out at the last minute, so he ended up taking Ganassi's dad, who if you can believe it had never been on track in a racecar before.

Anyway, we spent the rest of the morning getting pit road set up, tools checked and rechecked, tv monitors, timing and scoring monitors, etc., set up. I even helped set up the food and beverage area we had, which was the best section of the whole pit box.

We rolled the cars out to the starting grid and stood around taking pics and talking to the fans. I have to say I really love that aspect of both Grand AM and ALMS, having that fan interaction. As soon as the fans cleared pit lane, we started to work filling up the metal gravity feed fuel tanks, one for each of the five cars. The tanks held around 30 gallons of fuel, and we had 200 gallons of fuel between two carts, so as you can imagine we stayed busy the whole race keeping them full. Each car held 22 gallons of gas and we refueled on average every 50 min or so.

The race started a 3:31pm and the weather was beautiful. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure exactly what I needed to do during down time at the beginning, so I started finding out who needed help and working with them. From coiling air gun lines to checking tire pressures, I tried to learn as much as possible. I ended up being assigned to work the stops on the #67 car, and the first pit stop went off perfectly. There were three of us, Paul on the hoses putting in the gas and then John and I switching duties between “dead man” and fire bottle. It was a rush going over the wall, especially at night. There was so much activity, hearts racing, wondering if someone is going to hit you accidentally, all while watching the fuel go in preparing for a fire. For those that don’t know what “dead man” is, the gravity feed fuel rigs have a spring loaded switch between the hoses and the tank. A person has to physically hold the switch open to allow fuel to flow. In the case of a fire, you let go of the switch and the fuel flow is cut off, hopefully limiting the flame.

Sometime around 4 hours into the race I smashed my thumb to the point I think I broke it, but I just got some 200mph tape and wrapped it. Somewhere around the 8hr mark the clutch went out in the #67 car. It was pretty tense as Kevin was about a heartbeat away from calling it in to the garage to fix, which would have put it 20 or so laps down. They decided to keep it out on track until it broke, which ultimately would be the best decision ever for the team. It really is amazing to think about, because besides the fact we had to push start it every time it pitted, if they had spun somewhere on track in those 16+ hrs, it would have gone multiple laps down waiting for a wrecker to either drag it back to the pits or bumps start it. It really is a testament to the amazing drive these guys had, as well as the strength of the gearbox in the Porsche. In fact, the Porsche engineers in our pits said it would make it no problem, not even flinching at the idea.

Then around 2am I was pressurizing the fuel rig, getting ready to refill the pit tanks when a hose blew off and covered me in 98 octane. Some got in my eye, so the paramedics came over and flushed it with saline rinse and all was good, though the skin around it was pretty tender for the next few hours. Some Tylenol and I was back in action.

At approx 3am, we changed brakes on it and Wolf Henzler got in to drive. He immediately reported a very soft pedal, so we had to bring him back in to bleed the brakes, which put us back down a couple of laps. But that’s how the race kept going for us, down a couple and then make the back, yo-yoing the whole 24hrs. The stress let up some when the caution hit for all of the fog on the track. It really was almost impossible to see the cars, and it was a major safety issue, but it was too bad for some of the drivers who were in their only stint in the car. How boring, to just sit there in a parade lap after lap.

Once the fog lifted and we went green, we were in the last third of the race, and for me the most exciting. It’s during this time, after getting maybe 10 minutes of sleep total that mistakes can happen that can cost you the race. Luckily with NOS Energy Drinks sponsoring us, I kept my caffeine intake up. The closer we got to the checkered flag, the more nervous everyone became. Especially after the sister car lost its diff with only a couple of hours remaining, people were very tense.

As you know now, the car made it and the #67 car won the GT class. Andy Lally, the star driver that started the race was the one who fittingly finished it. Emotions were high, especially for Steve Bertheau, the owner of the #67 car. His wife was in tears the last ten minutes of the race.

We all helped push the car to victory lane, and after waiting for 30 min while the DP podium did the “hat dance”, it was our turn. It was an awesome feeling standing there, though honestly I was so tired that I wasn’t completely aware of everything.

I didn’t get a lot of time to keep up with the other cars, other than the #66 car pitting next to it, which ran fine most of the race until having rear diff trouble with 2hrs to go. I know 3 of the 5 cars lead the class at one point, the 67, 66 and 54. The 54 had a shock break with 4 hrs remaining.

All in all, the cars finished as follows:

67 – 1st
4 – 8th
66 – 13th
54 – 16th
53 – 21st


In conclusion, I had the time of my life. It was an amazing experience from start to finish. Kevin Buckler and TRG are a first rate team, and I hope I’ll be lucky enough to work with them again in the future. Thanks for reading, I hope I didn’t bore you too much.

 

Here's some pics from the weekend. They are not my usual race quality because I was using a little point-n-shoot that would fit in my firesuit.

Love the CF intake.


My job all day Friday.


The BlueCoral 935 we brought.


The FlyingLizard intake at gas tech.


Me and Kenny Wallace.


Night time in the garage area.


Empty pit box on race day. My home for the next 24+ hours.


Me and Boris. The one pic I rally wanted to get over the weekend.


Filling up the 95 gallon fuel cart.


Me and Andy Lally.


Pushing the car on the grid before the race.


Dominik Farnbacher getting ready for the race.


Pit stop and driver change for the 4 car.


Trying to stay warm and catch some sleep in the middle of the night.


Spare set of headers.


Spare caliper and pads.


Spare half-shafts.


About 18hrs into the race, doing a pit and driver change.


Me and Brendan Gaughan around 11am Sunday morning.


Horst, the lead engineer.


Last nap before the checkered flag.


Steve, owner of the 67 car, and his family right before the end of the race.


Justin Bell's socks. (The pit reporter for Speed).


Kevin on the radio during the final caution.


Elation taking the checkered flag.


All 5 drivers of the 67 car doing the psot-race interview.


JPM looking crazy telling a story in victory lane.


The DP podium.


From the podium looking back at the press.

 

Awesome awesome awesome!

 

Fantastic report and photos, congratulations!!!!!!!. I watched the race on Speed and followed it throughout on the website. They should have had streaming!

Dave Smith is an excellent guy, big +++ on Smith Motorworks .

 

Awesome report.! Love that 935!
I spent a whole day with Kenny Wallace a while ago - what a charachter he is!
Kevin

 

The best view of the 935.

http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/hs257.snc6/180548_10100461166385713_5210224_66811847_8256385_n.jpg

 

Great Report! I very much enjoyed the weekend and Parading 0846 in the Historic Section.
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Yeah I tried to get over there and meet you, but I was working in the pits at the time. I would have loved to have been out there.