Fond Memories...

...of when I understood how Formula 1 cars worked...  mostly...   Not to mention the thing-of-beauty-is-a-joy-to-behold part.  This is a McLaren MP 4/1 (1982).  Gurneyflap has high quality pictures of historic road racing cars. Most were taken in garages when the cars were partially torn down; many focus on corners or sub-assemblies.

http://www.gurneyflap.com/

Flagging Autobahn (2013)

Working my club's event at Autobahn Country Club is how I compensate for not working the vintage sports car races I posted about in June.  My conscience-clearing deal with myself is that working the former allows me to wander the paddock and take snapshots and chat up owner/drivers at the latter. So I worked two solid days this weekend, corner flagging.  A 20-something may be able to spend 9+ hours a day on his feet and feel fine, but my ancien legs are aching as I type this.

Turn 6 on ACC's South Loop was the spectating "find" of the weekend.  The actual corner
station is on the outside of the turn, not the inside as shown here.  Which makes for more
interesting viewing--and a higher likelihood that an errant race car will head your way.
Fortunately for us, most of the drama involving the exit of Turn 5 involved spinouts.

The "find" of this weekend was Corner 6 on ACC's South Loop.  I liked it so much on Saturday that Hotshoe and I requested it again on Sunday.  On the track map, it appears to be a double apex turn.  Until you look closer: the second apex is tighter, so in reality 6 is a medium speed decreasing-radius bend.  Which makes for some fascinating spectating.  On entry, it looks wide enough for two cars if they're heads-up and giving each other room.  It's not: "two-into-one won't go" at the second apex. Slower cars were trying to let faster ones by, sometimes, on the inside or the outside.  But the overtaking rate is a finely-judged thing.  The faster car must be clearly "through" by the second apex.  If it's not, and on the inside, the passee on the outside is inevitably forced into "two wheels off, driver's left."  If the faster car is on the outside, the passee runs out of road, must hit the brakes, blow the turn, and again run wide on driver's left.  Or go straight off, or spin, if he puts late rotation into the car to try to make the corner.

A related learning experience for me was the quicker vs. the slower line, arising from the same mis-reading of Turn 6.  It's illustrated below.  A lot of drivers (including me, in wannabe conga lines, until now) take the pink line--which is slower, even though the illustration suggests a wider, smoother arc. The quick line is shown in black.  Even though it's a tighter arc, your braking is completed sooner, without trail-braking (or the temptation thereof) and you're back on the power sooner.

The two basic options for a line through Turn 6 at ACC.  Competitors use both, but the black one is
quicker than the pink one.  This illustration is "upside down" from the track map above because it is
easier to orient yourself in a direction of travel that's "up."  The "power down" points are closer to each
other than shown here, but the point is that you can get back into the gas sooner using the black line,
without giving up significant cornering velocity.  This is important because Turn 6 feeds onto the
long straight with a dogleg in it.

Well, enough of that: on to the "race report."  ACC is where the rich play with their toys, so I include a picture of their Garage Mahals.  Enlarge it by clicking if you want to see how the other half lives.  I was amused to be told by an ACC employee that most members have Spec Miatas for beater cars.  Beater in the sense that they beat on the Miatas all day long for track fun.  The rare and valuable stuff stays in the garages except on special occasions.

Turn 6 flag station on the South Loop, "Garage Mahals" in background.  Some are three stories.  Some have basements!
The dent in the guardrail shows that an errant car can hit the Armco even at Station 6.  I'd have thought that to be very
unlikely, if not impossible.  Maybe a right front suspension or brake failure...

Both HSAX and W2W entries for this event were rather small.  Holiday weekend?  The "find" of the HSAX entry was the Nissan GT-R.  I had not seen one in the flesh until now.  Its an awesomely fast street car, which I suppose is not news.  The revelation, to me, was that a GT-R can pound a Corvette to dust in HSAX.  Any Corvette: big-block 454 C3, C5, C6, Z-06--doesn't matter.  The GT-R we watched upshifted three times between Turn 6 and and braking for Turn 8.  Lightning fast paddle shifts, of course.  It may have been a modified car, with more turbo boost, because the driver was into the pop-off valve all the time.  (I was unable to find out if it was trick or not.)   But there was another, less well-driven GT-R, that looked to be just as fast as the Corvettes too (as opposed to stomping them).

My favorite wheel-to-wheel entry: a Mustang squareback prepared to vintage (SCCA B Production) specs.  The X on
the hood signifies novice status.  He didn't drive like a novice.  This is the short straight between Turns 5 and 6.

On Sunday morning a Porsche 944 did a "ka-BLAM-o" on the short straight between Turns 5 and 6.  To our astonishment, he managed to limp around the course on three cylinders, thoroughly oiling it from 6 all the way to 11.  This is a no-no, of course.  Drivers' Meetings include a standard reminder to switch off and pull off the racing surface ASAP if your engine blows.  But people forget in the heat of battle, or they want to get back to the pits to see if the day can be salvaged.  So the ACC staff spent 40 minutes laying down buckets and buckets of Oil Dri, and sweeping it up.  There was far too much oil for us to handle, even in our own little corner of the world at Turn 6.  We retrieved the pieces in the second picture before the ACC crew went to work.

The 944 driver would easily have won a Least Popular Driver Of The Weekend Award.  There was much cutting-and-
pasting of Sunday's schedule, including 10 minutes for lunch for corner workers, to get everything in.

Aluminum no longer part of the oil sump on the plywood floor of our corner station.  And a fragment of rod-bearing.
And a small piece (bottom) we couldn't identify.  One corner workers' duty is to police the course after an "event" to
make sure debris like this doesn't wind up in other competitors' tires.

Well-to-do Garage Mahal types are not the only people who beat on Miatas.  "The Miatia race" is a well-worn butt of club racing jokes.  There always seems to be a 30-car field which subscribes to the NASCAR proposition that rubbin' is racin' (some more, some less).  From a worker's viewpoint, and often from the drivers', these races can be predicable mini-disasters.  This time, the race was relatively clean with more "oops" spinouts than avoidable contact.  We saw some two-wheels-off, but the Miata race was surprisingly and gratifyingly boring.

To finish up what seems to have become a Miata-themed post, I followed two Miata racers out of ACC onto the public roads in my street car.  They were obviously street-legal, if a bit loud.  (I suspect some parts are changed-out to pass the Illinois Emission Test.)  They made me smile: throwbacks to that mythical era in the 1950's when you were supposed to be able to drive your sports car to the track, race, and drive home.  It happened rarely, of course.  Even then, most cars were race-prepared and trailered in.  But, if you just want to race for hits and giggles, it's still possible to run a Miata with a license plate in wheel-to-wheel racing.

A good time was had by all.  Except maybe the owners of some bent cars, the ACC track maintenance crew, and the 944 driver who doubtless got a talking-to by the Chief Steward to add insult to the injury of his, for now, door-stop of a race car.

TR-6 Restoration (#10)

The o.e.m. steeting wheel cleaned up pretty well, don't you think?  On the left, the Mota-Lita wood-rim wheel.  Wonder
which one they'll decide to install to go with the new tan leather interior?

The wire wheels have arrived.  Old School: 15 X 6, chromed, cross-laced, tubes for tires required.

Now that the induction side of the engine is ready to go, the block, valve-cover, etc., will be painted next week.

Touring: Ordinary Cemeteries

Above and below A small 200+ year-old cemetery.

When you're out tooling around in your sporty car on a fun run, you might want to stop at a rural cemetery.  It's a nice change of pace from the Dairy Queen (or whatever your standard fun run breaker-upper is).

Cemeteries don't creep me out.  They're local history museums.  There's a small one several miles from my house full of Irishmen and women who died from the 1850's to the 1890's.  It's on a lovely hillside, overlooking the town of Deselm, which no longer exists.  Deselm was a way-station on the Illinois & Michigan Canal.  The I&M was dug mostly by immigrant Irishmen.  With picks and shovels.  The work was hard, the working conditions were awful, and many died from malaria.  Some settled in Deselm to become farmers or storekeepers.  When the I&M Canal dried up metaphorically, Deselm dried up literally.

There are two large cemeteries in Morris, IL.  One on each side of town.  Both are still in use.  One was "the Protestant cemetery" and the other was "the Catholic cemetery."  My detached sense of amusement at this probably wasn't shared by the inhabitants.  Seven Civil War veterans are buried together in the Protestant cemetery, in a wagon-spoke pattern, with their heads near each other and the marker for their unit.  Their feet are equidistant points on a circle maybe 18 feet in diameter, around which a cemetery road turns.  They died at different times in the 1880's and 1890's. Why are they are buried this way?  I haven't found any Morrisites who know, or many who even know they're there.  Other Civil War veterans are buried in the same cemetery in the conventional way, with their family members.

Although he is a veteran, the neighbor mentioned in my previous post about the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery will not be buried there.  Intstead, he'll join four previous generations of extended family buried in Kankakee, IL.  He was the first boy in his family to go college, which got him off the farm (fine with him!) and into a career with Caterpillar.  The first of those four generations bought 40 acres (or more) when Federal land in northern Illinois was opened to homesteading.  They've been here ever since.  His brother still operates the family farm (but the next generation won't).  There are two very small cemeteries near the farms, where some of the first generations were buried.  I've visited both with him, and seen the restored one-room school house where he got his elementary education.  Before automobiles, he says, there used to be small General Stores within a 5-mile walk of your farm where County Roads intersected.  They're been gone for 90 years.  His grandchildren grew up in modern cities, all 200 miles or more away from him.  If any of them return to northeastern Illinois, it will be to a fancy job in Chicago.

My own family reflects a similar diaspora.  In the 1830's, an extended family of farmers moved from New England to Upstate New York, where they remained for two generations.  In the 1870's, many of them acquired a college education and disbursed.  The next three generations disbursed further.  We are now spread out from coast to coast, north to south.  Two people in my kids' generation have dual citizenship (U.S. and Italian).  One of my grandsons has dual citizenship (U.S. and Irish.)  We long ago lost our roots in, and connection to, Upstate New York.  The only time I've been there was to watch sports car races at Watkins Glen.

One reason cemeteries don't creep me out is that I grew up next to one.  Again: it illustrates the history of northeastern Ohio in one acre.  At the end of the Revolutionary War, Connecticut could not afford to pay its veterans in cash.  But it had a questionable western lands claim.  Its price for signing on to the Constitution was free farmland for its vets in "The Connecticut Western Reserve"--northeastern Ohio. Thus the name of the University in Cleveland.  The earliest graves in the cemetery are those of a handful of families who homesteaded the village.  For them, and for succeeding generations of additional families, there was heartbreak we've been spared by modern medicine.  You find headstones with born/died dates of women who died young, probably in or as a result of childbirth, and children who lived for months or a few years.

So it is impressive to me to visit a cemetery where several generations of extended family are buried near each other.  Rural cemeteries tell a tale and are pleasant, peaceful, places to contemplate the past.  I haven't yet exhausted this resource in northern Illinois.  But I've already noticed on Google Map that there are half a dozen similar cemeteries tucked into valleys near the Tail of the Dragon.  I plan to visit them.

Touring: Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery

The Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery is a small part of the redevelopment of the old Joliet Arsenal.  In 1940, 450 farms totaling 40,000 acres were taken over by the Federal government to create the Arsenal.  It produced raw TNT, and all kinds of bullets, shells, and bombs during World War Two.  It remained in operation (off and on) into the late 1970s.  After that, until the early years of this century,  the Arsenal was an abandoned EPA "brownfield site."  Although pollution clean-up was not, in itself, a major undertaking, the "attractive nuisance" aspect (bunkers and deteriorating roads) and the sheer size of the place stalled various redevelopment proposals.  Eventually the Federal government bit the bullet (ahem) and did a joint redevelopment project with State and local governments, and private interests, at very low cost to the non-Federal entities.

About 10% of the Arsenal became two industrial parks, one of which is a huge BNSF intermodal freight facility. About 85% of the site is the Midewin Tall Grass Prairie, which is a Federal Park.  It features grasses and plants that were indigenous to the Great Plains before they were farmed.  Trees and invasive species are being cleared out, biking and hiking trails are going in, and storage bunkers and crumbled pavement are being removed.  The remaining 5% of the site is the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery.

My neighbor and friend, a Korean War Era veteran, and I visited the Cemetery recently because we hadn't seen it since it was under construction.  The contractors are mostly finished, and the Cemetery is a going concern.  I've never visited Arlington, and do not consider myself especially patriotic or sentimental.  But I found Abraham Lincoln dignified and moving.  It reminds me of the American Cemetery at Colleville, France (the "D-Day Cemetery").

The Entrance Gate, off U.S. Route 53, about 6 miles south of Joliet, IL.

The "Welcome Gate" landscape feature.  The stone used in the Cemetery is indigenous limestone and sandstone, and
 many of the plantings are indigenous species, mirroring the efforts at Midewin Tall Grass Prairie.

The Visitors' and Information Center.  Power lines run along the northern border of the site.  But they are not intrusive.
You tend to forget about them.  If that fails, face south and ignore them.

The "central landscape feature" (all roads meet here) with the emblems of the various service branches
attached to a chest-high semi-circular sandstone wall.

This is one of several large plots that are filling up rapidly, but there's plenty of room left.  My neighbor said he'd read
that there are "up to 10" burials per day at Abraham Lincoln.

A smaller plot with a more intimate setting along a creek bed.

One of several "Committal Pavilions."

A Committal Pavilion surrounded by cremated veterans.

Or ashes can be scattered into a creek bed from a deck adjacent to the Memorial Walk, which has both shade and
benches.  The Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery is park-like and encourages a contemplative stay.

Thoughts On A Year's Worth Of Blogging

Like the stand-up comic said of his own jokes, "A lot of these I do just for myself."  (The posts.)  But it's gratifying to have some regular readers.  I'm open to suggestions on how to make the blog better.  And to posts by regular readers.  It needs more voices.  There have been several times when I thought I'd run out of things to post about.  But something always seems to come up.  Sometimes very interesting stuff, like my cousin's current TR-6 restoration.

Maybe it shouldn't surprise me that four of the top five posts are Porsche-related.  (And one of them was a "referral" by the owner of 550-141, so people were sent to the post.)  Marque-centric car buffs seem to have a laser-like focus on their brand, sometimes to the exclusion of anything else.  But, although I'm a Porschephile myself, pains are taken to keep the blog from becoming Porsche-centric.

Lately, with the return of good weather, I've tried some posts about touring (and a couple more are in the pipe).  But I don't have any significant road trips planned, other than another Dragon run in October.  There is only so much local color to go around.

Porsche aside, it's heartening that some of the most-read posts are the "scholarly" ones: the aero evolution of the Ford GT 40 and the Porsche 917, a summary of Formula 1 regulations and their impact, the Mille Miglia Ferraris, and the review of Tony Brooks's autobiography.  A minor goal for the blog has been to post short essays about things I wanted to know myself (or would have) but could find nowhere else.  Or at least not in one place at one time.

The relative popularity of some posts has surprised me: Leonardo's Moretti, my account of a day on the Dragon.  Conversely, some posts that I thought might garner a following, or was proud of, have sunk without a trace.  So you never know...  I'll keep posting about the automobilia I love, and occasionally linking to interesting sites, until it becomes tiresome--even to me.

Speaking of interesting sites, BARCBoys is one that I recently found that will interest readers of, shall we say, a certain age:

http://www.barcboys.com/

Purdy Car, Purdy Picture

Emerson Fittipaldi trail-brakes his Lotus 72 into a surfeit of Oil Dri.