As I mentioned in when I told you about my updated season schedule, the new plan includes running the 49th annual 4-hour RDC Illgen Enduro at Thunderhill on October 26th. This race follows a regular SCCA race on Saturday.
This idea really came from Ali Naimi, who drives one of the Mazda3 triplets that I drove in 2005. Ali has kept his car all this time, and is still racing it at the National races. In fact, SportsCar picked him to be on the SSC podium at the 2008 Runoffs!
Anyway, he’s been saying all summer that he’d like to find someone who has a good car for the enduro, and all summer, I’d been thinking “yeah, that’d be fun, but I’m not going to be up there for that race weekend.” Well, now that the schedule has changed … would my car be any good?
The classes at the enduro are a little different than most race weekends. There are 6 classes:
- “U”: for production-based cars under 1.7L
- “O”: for production-based cars over 1.7L
- “SU”: for sports racers under 2.0L
- “SO”: for sports racers over 2.0L
- “SMT”: for Spec Miatas
- “SRF”: for Spec Racer Fords
Well, my car is a street car with a 2.8L engine, otherwise known as “O”. Of course, “O” a pretty wide-open class — a World Challenge Dodge Viper would also be in “O”, or a GT1 car, or … you get the idea. Some pretty quick cars could be in there. But not a lot of those cars are set up to run a 4 hour race. The nice thing about my car is that it’s very easy on tires and brakes, so it’s likely it could go the whole 4 hours with nothing to do at the 2 required pitstops other than change drivers and refill the gas tank.
Still, the goal isn’t necessarily to win this one. I looked up some results from the past couple of years. “O” has been dominated in the past few years by a very fast Porsche driven by the very talented sometimes-autocrosser, sometimes professional race engineer from the Grand-Am Alex Job Racing team, Greg Fordahl. But 2nd-place and down seems to run about the speed of my car or slower. So I’m thinking that we’ll have some decent racing in my car, even if we’re not likely to get the class win. I’ve known Greg for a long time and certainly don’t mind losing to him. I’ve probably lost to him before! Greg, are you coming down this year?
So since Ali put the bug for this in my ear, naturally, he’s on the team. And of course, the next invite goes to Rod McLane because he’s my pit buddy, and he and his dad do more to help me at any race weekend than anyone else. Rod normally drives a Spec Miata, and is another guy I’ve known for 15+ years.
So, that’s the team! I’m REALLY looking forward to this race. The only other endurance race I’ve ever done was the 2007 24 Hours of LeMons at Altamont, which was a pretty different sort of race, kind of a gimmick race. We won it though! This first “real enduro” of mine should be a lot of fun!
If anyone wants to come up and watch, crew, cheer us on, etc, my friend and colleague Kausik will be flying himself up to Willows from San Jose (Reid-Hillview airport) on the day of the race. The flight plan says it’s just barely over an hour in the air. He’d love a passenger or two! If you’d like to come up to Willows for the day, this is the easy way to do it for sure! Let me know if you’re interested and I’ll arrange things for you.
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