This weekend started out on a good note, but ended one a disasterous note. I headed out on Thursday afternoon. After a quick chat with my sponsor, Induktion, it was off to Connecticut. I headed out on the 6 hour journey alone with music, radar detector and gps. Good enough. After several hours of cruising and getting stuck in horrible Philly traffic, I encountered even worse traffic and torrential downpouring rain going from New Jersey to New York. Wow I hate the George Washington bridge. After the ridiculous traffic through Manhattan (and not to mention about $20 in tolls), I arrived in White Plains, NY. Earlier in the week, I had arranged to meet up with my buddy, Bobby Del Bello, from college. We decided to have some fun karting and headed to Grand Prix New York in Mount Kiscko. GPNY was such a stunning facility and by far, the best indoor karting center I’ve ever been to. You can easily tell a lot of investment was poured into the facility and it truly is top notch. We raced the ‘Downtown’ track and it really is a workout with how much G forces these karts can put out and how demanding the track is. I actually bruised my back from the hopping and bumping. After doing 2 rounds with Bobby and his friend, Ant, we grabbed some food then I had to head out. My hotel was another 2 hours away and it was already approaching 10pm. As I came back to my car, I noticed the rear right tire was completely flat. Great. I now realized what that ‘popping’ sound was when I was crossing the GW bridge. I tried filling it up with an air pump, but the car would constantly give me ‘low tire pressure’ warnings. As I was about 30 minutes from the hotel, I was getting dead tired and it was becoming dangerous. I stopped at a gas station, picked up some fix-a-flat and a Red Bull and headed on my way. I got to Torrington, CT around 1 a.m. and had to get to the track by 6:30. It was a historic hotel that I was staying in, built in 1891 and windows not properly sealed so I could hear all of main street’s traffic. I finally got some shut-eye.

Friday
Friday morning started good. I headed out on the 20 mile trek to the track, but since there were all single lane roads as well has heavy speed limits, it took around 35 minutes to get there. Through the rolling hills and mountainside of Connecticut, I arrived at the legendary Lime Rock Park. After just completing the repave a month or two before, we would not be running the terrible chicanes that the American Le Mans race had. I was excited to go and glad to see all my other teammates. We all popped into the golf carts and headed out to do the track walk. Lime Rock is a very fast track and we all used only 4th, 5th & 6th gear. We analyzed the track and came back in. We went over the cars with our techs and told them what we wanted for tires and pressures. Since Lime Rock is a right hand turn track (with only 1 left hander), I knew the rear left tire would be the most loaded, just like Portland. I opted to run the practice session first with the default pressures, then get the pressures checked. The default for these Michelins are 26psi F/35psi R and we can go +/-3psi. After an SCCA driver’s meeting, we hopped in the cars and headed out for practice sessions. Although the forecast said there would be rain, it was nice and dry in the morning. We headed out on free practice and I ran with scrubs up front and fresh slicks in the rear. My goal was to take it easy to save the slicks, as well as learning the track and just getting consistent times. I definitely kept it easy and got consistent times as I was hovering around 1:01 to 1:00’s. Apparently the repave makes the track around 2 seconds quicker, but around 1:00 is the time Grand-Am Koni Challenge GS cars used to run! I came back to see that I was about 14th fastest in free practice. It seemed that, the Michelin tires were chunking and they were chunking bad. A lot of drivers had issues with their tires. Although I was pushing the car hard, I didn’t experience any chunking and neither did some other drivers. What they would find out later was that the drivers who experienced it were the ones who were being overaggressive with the wheel. Just like we had seen at Portland, since Lime Rock was 1.54 miles, everyone was within a second or two of each other’s time. It definitely would make qualifying exciting, as well as challenging.

After eating lunch and going over with the techs about tire changes, we got into the cars. SCCA/VW told us beforehand they would run us for about 10-15 minutes, call a black flag so we could all come in, cool off our tires and not chunk them. Well, we all went out for the qualifying sessions and many of us waiting to push it hard in the 2nd part of the session. After I put in a decent lap, I came in to check tire pressures. After I went back out, they called the black flag, we all came in and sat around. After taking forever in the pits, I had a feeling they would just call the session quits. Yup, my suspicion was confirmed. Their (scca/vw) reasoning was that it was for the safety of the drivers that they didn’t want all the tires chunking and being put in a dangerous situation. The interesting part was that it was because of a few drivers who were overdriving and being overly aggressive with the steering that the tires were ripping apart. Nonetheless, many of us drivers were furious at the decision as we didn’t even get a chance to put in a true qualifying effort. Somehow, Michael DeNino popped out a 59.9 in the final lap before the black flag and got pole position! Many of us came into the debrief and were pissed off. I ended up with a qualifying effort of 11th, with a 1:00.434. Although I was 5th fastest at MoSport, the penalty made me qualify 13th, so my 11th spot at Lime Rock was technically my best qualifying effort yet. Full results from qualifying here.

Later that night, I went to dinner with David Richert. We have been developing a cool friendship race by race and at the dinner we really connected on a lot of things. We discussed funding issues, sponsorship, our backgrounds, the driving personalities, etc. He had some very interesting and smart points. While we were finishing up, we saw Kyle Novak come in. Kyle is the SCCA program director for the Jetta TDI cup. We chatted for a good while about our series, about Kyle’s former series that we worked with (Champ Car), track sponsorship, media, etc. It was getting a bit late and we decided to pack it up. When I got back to my hotel, I was so dead tired I ended passing out after watching Michael Phelps win his 7th gold medal by 1/100th of a second. Unbelievable. I was thinking, I wish I can be great in tomorrow’s race like he is.

Saturday
Saturday morning, I got to the track pretty early, as we had a media training session at 7:30 in the morning. We went over more about setting up our own press releases, how to approach journalists, how to answer technical questions we didn’t know, etc. After many of us drivers being pissed yesterday, I think we had all cooled off and were just ready to race that day. Later on, we had our driver’s meeting with SCCA informing us that the race would be the full 30 minutes, regardless of if some people started getting tires blistering or chunking. Afterward, Motorsport manager Clark Campbell introduced us to racing legend, Sam Posey. Mr. Posey lived right near the track and helped with the reconstruction/repave of Lime Rock. We had a Q&A session about the repave, the curbing and he talked about his days racing at Le Mans, in Formula 1 (he’s still a commentator on Speed for F1), racing at Daytona, Lime Rock, you name it. He was a very humble and reserved man, and I wish I had more time to sit down and talk with him that day.

After awhile, we all headed for the cars and we were informed we would get a 10 minute warm-up an hour before the race. Because of the tire issues from yesterday, Jan Heylen went out and tested different setups for the car. In the end, they found a setup that they though would work fine. They adjusted the rear swaybar, added some negative camber up front and they did not allow us to change tire pressures for the race (still at the default 26psi F/35psi R). After waiting about 15 minutes on grid, we headed out for our warm ups. I didn’t really push it that hard as I wanted to conserve my fresh slicks up front, but I got a feel for the car’s handling. To me, it felt like I had a tad bit more understeer than the previous setup. After we got out of the cars, Andy Lee commented on how he ran a faster time in the warm up than in qualifying. For most of us, we were running about a second or two off our qualifying time. After getting out of the cars, about 20 minutes later we had to get back in and get belted up. After sitting on the grid again, we headed out for our race. We did our parade lap around the track with the E60 BMW M5 pit car (seeing as how Lime Rock is heavily sponsored by BMW), then we all got lined up by SCCA on the starting grid. I was right behind Jimmy Underhill and Andy Lee was right behind me. I knew what I was gonna try to aim for off the start. After 5 seconds, the red staging lights came up, we all hit our launch control, lights went off, bam! We all shot off as we had the previous 3 rounds and I was chasing Underhill, trying to get a good spot into T1. I got right behind Underhill and Chris Holman was right on my left. We were all side by side for a few turns and coming out of 4, we were all so close Andy Lee gave me a ‘love tap’ coming up to the uphill. After going nose to tail with people, we came onto the front straightaway and went chasing for T1. It seemed like Andy had so many speed and was definitely on my tail the whole time. When we got into the braking zone for 1, I hear a loud WHAM and then I feel the car hop and get pushed out by Holman. “Sh*t!” I yell to myself. After he drove into my right door/fender, a few people pass by and I immediately try to get back in line. After struggling to get grip after getting hit, I am just trying to hold on for my position. In one of the next laps, I am right behind Gary Williams, Jr. After rollercoaster, we fly down the hill and I am reeling him in. After drafting him, I try to get out of his draft to attempt a pass, but he immediately pulls out, I go even closer to the inside, but he’s still right there. In a final attempt, with a few inches for me to spare, I dive in on the inside of him, when all of a sudden *CRASH*…Everything happens so instantly I didn’t even know who I hit. I see a black Oakley car behind me, but here I am, try to get on the power…nothing. No drive power at all. I sit there for what seems like forever. I saw the whole field pass me by atleast twice and only with a local yellow. Not too smart, considering I was a little bit on the track in one of the hottest braking zones. I have no clue how bad the damage is, but I don’t even care at this point. I am so pissed at myself for crashing out and not scoring any valuable points. I crashed out in the very early laps of the race. After getting towed back to pits with everyone taking pictures, one of the techs runs up and gets a car cover. He says, “hey can you help me cover this up?” I see a little bit of the damage but I helped cover the car up anyway. Later I find out, I had crashed in the 5th lap out of 25. How disappointing. To crash so early, when I was near the top 10 and about to get some much needed points. Near the end of the race, I see Andy Lee and Nick Mancuso roll in.

I am already changed into my street gear and I know I will be discussing what happened to about 30 different people. I see my sponsor, Ed with Induktion Motorsports, and I give him the bad news. He said he thought something happened when the whole pack rolled around and he didn’t see the Induktion vinyl. I also see my friend Bobby showed up just in time to see my carnage. Chris Castagna took the win, Mark Pombo took 2nd and Josh Hurley finished out the podium. Those guys did a helluva job, as I watched from the tech shed and they didn’t act stupid and try to challenge each other and risk their positions. They fought hard and did a great job. Full race results here. Derek Jones comes up to me and says, “thanks for taking me out”. Oh dammit, I didn’t realized I had taken out my friend Derek. I felt horrible and immediately apologized. Before that, Chris Holman came up to apologize for driving into me. I felt very terrible for Derek, but he is such a laid back person. He told me, “if it was anyone else, I’d kick their face in”. I spent the next hour or so discussing over what happened with a few drivers and going over the damage report with my tech, Travis. All the spectators were joking, “are you doing the insurance estimate?” Looks like I had wrecked my driver fender pretty good, the headlight was missing, bent the hood a little, the bumper was ripped off the mount on that side, the door wouldn’t open because of the fender and I had a nice donut on the side of my passenger door and fender from Holman. I didn’t have time to eat lunch because I was running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off. We all had a mandatory autograph session and that felt pretty cool. After talking with Andrew Cordeiro and Adam Love, it turned out that we were all autocrossers. We gave each other high 5’s and finished up the session as it started raining. As I was about to grab my bag from the lockers, Derek runs out and yells for me. I run back and he says, “SCCA is trying to penalize me for what you did”. I was in shock and we both ran to the technical trailer. As they showed their footage from their camera angle, it did indeed look like it could be partially Derek’s fault. Besides the accident, seeing the footage from the Speed cameras looked pretty cool I have to admit! But I immediately told the SCCA officials it was my fault, that I was racing Williams to the corner, and in the midst of that as we were carrying way too much speed, Derek was at the wrong place at the wrong time. I saw on video that I collected Derek’s rear quarter panel and didn’t touch Williams. So theoretically I made a clean pass on Williams, but unfortunately, Derek was there to take the hit. We talked about different incidents and other stuff that was important to bring up to the SCCA. They told Derek I had just saved his butt from getting penalized. It was the least I could do for him as I felt terrible for taking him out of valuable points as well. I had just had another difficult weekend and was ready to go hang out with my friends. I left Lime Rock feeling real down, but still with optimism. I told myself this is the halfway point of the season and i have about 1/10th the points that the top guys have right now. I need to really step it up for the next 4 races. I can’t afford to give up any more chances, I can’t afford to crash and I really need to place podium. We’ll find out in a month at Iowa.

Thanks again to Induktion Motorsports and Soldier Design for their support this season. I hope to get you guys in the spotlight soon!

SCCA recently introduced live timing for our series. You can see our real-time lap results for the remainder of the season here:

http://leaderboard.vfx.com/SCCA/VW/LiveTiming.asp?width=1024&Class=On%20Track

After a very long, 2 month hiatus from the Jetta cup, it was time to go racing again. The original schedule would’ve included a street race in downtown Toronto with Champ Car, but seeing as they went bankrupt earlier in the year, that wasn’t happening. The decision was between a race at Miller Motorsports Park outside of Salt Lake City, Utah, or run during the all Mazda weekend at Portland Int’l Raceway. SCCA/VW chose the latter and after visiting and checking out Portland, I’m glad they did. Portland was actually a perfect venue for the Jetta TDI Cup as Portland is a very ‘green’ and environmentally conscious city. Everyone bikes everywhere and the public transportation is great.

For this race, my sister insisted on coming out and checking out Portland, as well as my race. We both met up in Atlanta’s Hartsfield Int’l Airport and arrived 5 hours later on the opposite coast, arriving around 7pm (10pm EST). After getting screwed over by a taxi driver to our hotel, we finally settled in. I have to thank my iPhone for being so resourceful this past weekend. It was so damn useful as neither of us brought our laptops. I used it for booking hotels online, using GPS to see where the hell we were at, using it to search for food, etc. What surprised me and amazed me at the same time was finding out how close everything was in Portland. It is unheard of for a race track to be so close to downtown of a city as it is in Portland. Without traffic, you could literally go from the track to downtown in about 7 minutes. The hotel from the track was about 3 or 4 miles, and same for the airport. I was impressed and wished that everything was as close on the East coast.

After walking around North Portland through the night on Thursday, we finally were able to get an awesome rate from Enterprise rent-a-car for their weekend special. 50% off sounded sweet. We picked up the car at noon on Friday and immediately went into downtown. What a fantastic city, not only from the mountains and city skyline, but how the vibe is throughout the city. We met up with my sister’s friend from Boston, Jon. Since my sister and Jon are into biking and it was the last Friday of the month, turns out there would be a Critical Mass ride. Jon insisted we go to the track first to check-in. After running into traffic on the I-5 (which was only about 20 minutes), we got to the track to find out that they weren’t doing check-in until Saturday morning. We headed back to downtown and did the Critical Mass ride. Even though it wasn’t a huge turn-out like in Boston or Chicago, we had our fun rolling through the city as well as riding down some awesome trails. After the ride, we headed to another hotel for the night in Vancouver, WA (just over the bridge from Oregon).

Saturday
Saturday morning we had to get to the track real early since they would be cramming in a track walk session at 7:15 am. We got in the golf carts as usual and hit the track at PIR. Portland is definitely a change from what I’m used to. PIR is very flat and pretty short at 1.9 miles. After studying the track with Jan, Mark and Ryan, we headed back to the hospitality tent. This weekend presented a change in the driver line-up. Not only was it James Kirkham’s hometown and his birthday weekend, he got replaced by one of the alternates, David Heinz. Good luck to whatever you do in the future, James. Hope you can run in the Jetta cup next year. I was excited for this race. I brought in 2 new sponsors, Induktion Motorsports (www.4induktion.com) and Soldier Design (www.soldierdesign.com), and was antsy to go racing again. Actually, the weekend before, I was in Englishtown, NJ at Waterfest 14 helping Induktion with their booth and promoting our sponsorship. There was a Jetta cup car there as well as the W12 GTI concept car, for the first time in the US. I also ran into one of the girls who helps with the Jetta cup, Nicole.

Anywho, the practice session around 9:45 came up so we all got suited up and into the cup cars. I was figuring out the course lap by lap, but it still felt like I was messing up key corners of the track. I never felt confident during the session and the lap times felt real sluggish. I had no idea what to expect as I didn’t know PIR times. Once we came into pits and checked the times, I found out I was 7th fastest! In fact, from 5th (Juan Pablo Sierra Lendle) to 6th (Timmy Megenbeier), we were a few thousandths of a second apart. In fact, from 1st to 30th, the times were around 2 seconds difference. Very impressive for all of us. As always, I checked up with the data engineer Matthew to see where I was losing time to 1st. It looked as if I was losing time at the final turn (T12) onto the straightaway, about a half second. And also, it looked like I could carry more speed into T3 and setup better for the festival chicane (T1 & T2). After getting approval from the new SCCA Jetta cup program director, Kyle Novak, about my sponsor graphics, I went to the tent to apply the sponsors on the hood and fenders. After applying the graphics, I saw the Playboy MX-5 Cup guys lining up. I saw #81, Ryan Schimsk, and said hi. He told me that they were going out for qualifying. When I tried to tell him that 1st to 10th place in practice was 8/10ths of a second difference, he proceeded to tell me that 1st to 7th in the MX-5 Cup were 2/10ths of a second difference! Holy crap…very close considering that the MX-5 Cup guys have a little bit more leniency with setup adjustments than we do. Oh, almost forgot to mention, finally they put in the ballast for weight equalization and we were now allowed to adjust tire pressures up to +3 or -3 psi.

After walking around the pit, watching all the different Mazda series run and cleaning my new painted helmet, it was around 4pm, time for qualifying. Qualifying went terrible for me. After talking with Matthew, he told me to do a few laps, come into pits to check times and to let the tires cool down. I ended up overdriving the car. I did a few hotlaps like he insisted and went into pits. I told the techs to check tire pressures and Matthew told me the top time was high 1:29’s. I saw on the AIM datalogger my best was a 1:30.03. After a few minutes in the pit, I headed out to chase after 1:29’s. I ended up missing my braking zones, understeering like mad trying to fight the car into a corner and once I came out of T12, I ran too wide, ran past the rumble strip and hit a nice, deep rut. Later what I found out would be a flat tire, I was wondering why the car was handling horribly. I would turn hard into a right hand corner and all it wanted to do was hop or understeer like crazy. It made sense later as the flat tire was essentially rolling over itself. I said screw it and finished the whole session instead of coming in early. Surprisingly, I was still able to stay in the mid 1:30’s, even with a flat front left tire. I had been chasing after 1:29’s so hard that I ended up overdriving to a 21st qualifying position. Ouch. Full qualifying results here.

I was very disappointed with myself as I was 7th fastest in practice. What a let down. And to make matters worse, during the 2 month break, I had completed forgotten about the tire strategy. I kept on thinking we were allowed 6 fresh tires per weekend. Not the case, we were allowed 4 fresh slicks and 2 scrubs from the previous race. So from practice and qualy, I had used up all my good tires and was now stuck with my useless scrubs that I had managed to burn during practice and qualifying. Great, it was only getting worse. Even with my sister trying to tell me encouraging things, it didn’t change my mood. After cleaning up the cars, the original schedule was supposed to be an autograph session, but we found out that that was cancelled. I had to get away from the track and take my mind off of the dismal performance I put in that day. We ended up checking out Wahkeena and Multnomah Falls, 30 minutes east of the city. It was good for me to get my mind off of qualifying.

Sunday
Sunday morning, we didn’t have to arrive at the track until 10 am. I got lots of sleep as there were all kinds of festivals and pretty much every hotel in the Portland/Vancouver area was sold out. We lucked out and found 1 room available in Vancouver at the Phoenix Inn. We went over media training with Shand Spencer and Maria Burkel (VW public relations people). Turns out whoever receives the must publicity wins a free trip to Germany and possibly 1 race in the German Polo Cup series! After the presentation, I immediately showed them my pic and insert in the September issue of Diesel World Magazine (thanks Chris Neprasch!) about the Jetta TDI Cup. Todd Steen, a marketing consultant, gave us a very informative slideshow presentation about brand identity, marketing, sponsorship, etc. Like I had experienced with corporate businesses, 6 figure deals take atleast 12-18 months while $5-15,000 deals take 3-6 months. I finally received a reply to my sponsorship request emails from a few corporate companies the other day, which I had originally sent out in March. Todd also explained, don’t look to companies who are already sponsoring another race team or sponsoring some motorsports event. Sponsorship is strictly a business deal and the sponsor must see benefits. It is not a charity. An executive from ViON (one of our series sponsors) explained that their logo on the side of the car means nothing and that it does them no good. He explained the real benefit of being a sponsor is the business deals that happen in the background and connections you make at race weekends. Most of this was information that I had already learned from Mike Levitas of TPC Racing.

After the meetings, we all did our own things for a few hours until we had to get to our cars around 2:30 pm. Lining up 21st on the grid, I knew I had a lot of positions to make up. Realistically though, we were all so close, it would be hard to make a pass on anyone. Before the race, I saw tire pressures and it was vital information. Since PIR was mostly a hard right hand turn track, the rear left tire had the most pressure/load, so I balanced out the pressures to make the handling more neutral. We lined up on grid and did our warm up laps. We gridded up again, the staging lights came on, they went off and then we all shot off. On the first lap, SCCA told us to go straight instead of hitting the festival chicane. We all took off and headed for T3. The first lap was absolute chaos as we were all fighting for position and trying to find any space on the track we could. Once it settled down a bit, I was behind #4 Juan Pablo Sierra Lendle and was immediately in the chase. Lap after lap, it didn’t matter how hard I drafted him on the straights, I couldn’t overtake him. I didn’t want to chance taking both of us out, so I always backed off. I could never find grip in the corners, due to running on scrubs. A couple of times I went off and was screwing up real bad, but somehow managed to keep #32 Adam Kretschmer behind me.

A few laps later, I saw one of the blue Auto Logistics cars screw up in the festival chicane so I immediately tried to overtake it thru T3. As soon as I tried to hold the inside line, the front tires pushed hard and I was so close the Auto Logistics car and I came together, which ended up breaking my driver’s side mirror housing as well as scuffing the front left wheel. Immediately after the race, #2 Adam Crepin came up to me and told me I was lucky, because as soon as I got by the blue car, it had collided with Kretschmer. Whew. Lap after lap I was pushing it as hard as possible to draft and pass Juan Pablo, but it wasn’t happening. I got very close by setting up on him before the long back straight at T6, but he still had better grip and a better exit speed. Later on through the race, I felt my head getting real heavy as this was the 1st race that we had ran without a full course caution. The full 30 minutes actually felt really long! By the end I was far away from the guys behind me and still far away from the guys ahead of me. I ended up finishing 18th, almost 25 seconds behind the leader, gaining a mere 6 points. I had done such a great job in practice and threw it all away in qualifying, and to make matters worse, screwed up my own tire strategy. My roommate from Phoenix testing, Josh Hurley, took 1st with 60 points, DC area driver Liam Kenney took 2nd with 48 points and David Jurca finished the podium with 40 points. Full race results here. I left Portland frustrated as I really needed to be atleast within the top 10. I should’ve had a podium in Canada. But I can’t dwell on the past as there’s 5 more rounds left that are very very crucial. I’ve already given up 3 races and I can’t risk giving up any more. The next race is at Lime Rock in Lakeville, CT in about 2 weeks. Hopefully Lady Luck will be on my side…

Yes!! Finally got my helmet back from my good friend and helmet painter, Bill Schofield. His company, williamdesignworks, specializes in vinyl and graphics as well as helmet painting. Huge thanks to Bill for his amazing paintwork and thanks to Jeff Shaw of Collision Craft for clear coating the helmet.

This is his 3rd or 4th helmet he has ever painted, but at first glance you’d expect it was done by someone with even more experience. He truly outdid himself.

I have the Korean flag on top, American stars & stripes along the bottom. The stars on the front chin bar are also inspired by legendary Austrian racer (and VW representative/motorsport consultant) Hans-Joachim Stuck and the rear sections are inspired by the ‘Drift King’, former Japanese racer (and SuperGT team manager) Keiichi Tsuchiya.

The red part of the yin-yang or taeguki is very sparkly in direct sunlight and so are the silver stars up front. There is a slight fade from dark blue to a pearl blue that wraps around the rest of the helmet. The VW, RedBull and Castrol logos are vinyl, so I can rip off easily after the season is over. The rear gold emblem and Chinese characters is my family crest.

From concept:

…to realization:

I can’t wait for Portland. Freshly painted helmet and bringing along new sponsors. Should be an exciting weekend.