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LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: A Day At The Races Preparations In The Pits / Qualification Hail Broke Loose The Show Must Go On Side Lines Give Us Some Feedback
A Day at the Races A different kind of speed
(Review by MS, July 14, 2004)

Summary

I saw this race car standing in front of the local liquor store and all of a sudden, I found myself sucked into the racing circles again. This one has nothing to do with computer hardware but speed is speed and finally, it ended up in a Lost Circuit anyway...

A Day at the Races

This is probably not the kind of story most of our readers are used to read on LostCircuits, nonetheless it is probably one worth telling. I have always been a car nut, and the desire for car racing only subsided with the move to a regular family live and the associated daily struggle for survival. Needless to say that overclocking computers has become some sort of substitute, but, in reality, it never completely quenched the need for speed. Suffice it to say also that within the more or less illustrious clique of those writing hardware reviews, I am not the only one who has succumbed to this spawn of my right brain hemisphere since I know that at least Alex “Sharky” Ross and Chris Angelini are not far off.

On the other hand, it is inherent that car racing is insanely expensive, at least the kind that I am interested in and, thus, I have to content myself with a more passive role, like, for example, setting up or getting involved in sponsorship activities. The first attempt in this direction was helping out at the Daytona 500 in 2000. We had a great car, a great team of drivers around Art Pilla and even the weather played along since most other teams were not overly experienced in rain races. Acting sponsor in this case was Mushkin and Kathy (Mushkin, Inc.) and I were just getting ready to embark on the flight to Daytona Beach for the race weekend when the phone rang to let us know that the right rear Mahle wheel on the Porsche had disintegrated at a speed of about 150 mph and the car had slammed into a concrete wall. Nobody got seriously hurt.

It took two years to rebuild the car but, as they say …. they never come back….

Pikes Peak International Raceway (PPIR), July 4th 2004

I ran into Dave at a little roadside liquor store where the car was showcased in the hope to attract some local sponsors for the Pikes Peak International Raceway (PPIR) 4th of July race. One thing led to the other and the next thing was a “What the Hell.. I never sponsored a race car out of my own pocket and it seemed like a good opportunity to give something back to the community”. The rest was a matter of talking to Ryan at OCZ for some extra money, which was a done deal after five minutes.

As it turned out, Dave is from a family of race car drivers with his dad running the legendary “56” for more than one decade and Dave himself had been racing more or less successfully what is often considered Outlaws. Technically, though, outlaws are only those with the big metal wings. In any case, most of the USAC cars look like they were taken from the MadMax movies and there are a number of different classes, from Midgets over Silver Crowns to the Sprint class. Full technical details of the different prerequisites for each class can be found at the PPIR/USAC website

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