Portland Folks: E30 Pro-3 cars to race Oct 21 in 8 hour enduro at PIR

[Lance Racing]

There will be a number of BMWs entered in this year's 8-hour endurance race at Portland Int'l Raceway on Saturday, October 21. Race starts at noon with the traditional Le Mans style start (gun sounds, drivers run across track, jump in cars, belt up, and drive off). There are usually 45-50 race cars entered.

Race runs into the evening with the final driver stint run at night. I know some club members are planning to drive down Saturday AM to catch the 12-Noon start. If you do go down, I suggest parking on the outside of the track and walk over the footbridge to stroll the paddock. Once the race starts, no vehicles can leave the inside of the track. Most of these BMWs will be placed together along pit row. I'm not sure if there is any sort of nominal entry fee or not.


Drivers: Ken Hill, Frank Greif, Walt Conley


Drivers: Mike Olsen, Bob Mearns, Cyril Greenawalt, Steve Schaeffer


Drivers: Lance Richert, Stephanie Richert, David Lightfoot, Bill Spornitz


Drivers: Andrew Newell, Will Diefenbach, Brian Horne


Drivers: Fred Wright, Ted Anthony JR, Greg Miller, Ian Alexander


Drivers: Jeff VanLierop, Erik Brannfors, Toby Basiliko, Peter Jenkin

[StereoInstaller1]

OK, so who all is going?

[Mot]

I'll be there

[Lance Racing]

This is for the Portland, OR area E30 owners. Others can disregard.

http://www.bmwpugetsound.com/vbb/showthread.php?t=32529

I'm looking for a couple of people interested in helping with the race effort on the day of the race as spotters for my team. What we need are 2 people who can share duties of planting themselves at the top of the bleachers overlooking the festival curves and watching the cars as spotters as they come into view towards the end of the main straight all the way through the west end twisties (turns 1-6) until the car goes out of sight as it heads onto the backstretch.

We have the car and drivers wired to Uniden radios. The crew chief in the pits and you at the West end would have head sets and radio communication with the driver out on track. The responsibility is to help be eyeballs for the driver as they work that end of the track each lap. There are 3 classes for the enduro, our E30 is classed in the middle class, P2 (engine sizes between 1800-2500cc). The P1 cars are very fast, some hitting 170-180mph at the end of the front straight (whereas we hit about 135mph). You as spotter would help the drivers in our car know if any of the fast P1 cars are looking to overtake them, to help with clean passes. Almost every lap something like this is going on. You would also alert the driver to any other crashes or flags thrown in your field of vision to give them an early heads up. We might also ask you to feed the driver lap times to help them know if they are slacking off. :-)

We will have five driving stints of 96 minutes each. Having 2 people taking shifts as spotter of 96 minutes means you would switch back and forth as the drivers change. One will work the radio while the other takes a break. When you are not working the radio, you can head back to the paddock area and watch the pit activity if you want. When we change drivers is when we change spotters. The pit stops take about 3 minutes because of the slow fuel deliver rate.

So one spotter will do stint 1, 3 and 5. The other will do 2 and 4. Obviously the spotter doing 1, 3 and 5 is there longer.

There's no pay for this, but we'll feed you during the race. And you get an interesting vantage and experience for an endurance race as a spotter. The weather could be nasty, so you would need to be dressed for nasty rainy weather. We will drive rain or shine. The nastier it is, the more we find the extra set of eyes up high is of benefit to us because our visibility is less, and more incidents/wrecks will happen when it is wet. There are usually 50 cars in the race, so the track is pretty busy.

Qualifications: You don't need to have actual racing experience yourself, but it would help if you've watched a lot of racing on TV, so you would know better what some of the issues the drivers are facing are out on the track.

So if interested, please shoot me an e-mail. Let me know name, age, and a phone number contact. E-mail: Lance@Richertnet.com

Thanks!

Lance Richert
#135 Pro-3

[Lance Racing]

Here are the pit stall numbers for some of the BMWs (six in a row!):

16 - Mike Helton, E36
17 - Fred Wright, E30
18 - Lance Richert, E30
19 - Jeff VanLierop, E30
20 - Ken Hill, E30
21 - Mike Olsen, E30

There are a couple other BMWs entered, but I don't know their stall numbers.

[NickS]

Lance, slightly O/T, but do you know if any of the specE30 guys are going to run the Test'n'Tune on the 20th? I'm not sure if I'll stick around for the race on Saturday, but I'll be at PIR on the 20th doing the DE with CSCC. It would be cool to check out the spec cars while I'm down there...

[m.olennick]

I look forward to being there. Lance, I sent you an email regarding the Spotter position.

[Lance Racing]

If by SpecE30 you mean Pro-3, I don't think any of them are running on Friday. The concern is beating on the car on Friday, knowing it has to go a full 8 hours hard on Sunday. The 8-hour race equals a third of the regular season in regards to car wear and tear.

m.ollenick, I have not seen an e-mail from you. Do you have a cell number I can call you at to discuss? Thanks, Lance

[aaron.j]

hmm. question is, will the e30s last 8 hours

[joshh]

I could help but I wont be able to be there till 2pm or so. I've done many hpde's and 3.5 years of autocrossing. Will there be cones?? ; )

[Lance Racing]

Race report:

We ran well with no problems for 8 hours. Just driver swaps and added fuel. We targeted completing 300 laps and ended up actually completing 311. In years past that would have won our class. This year, the E30s were strong and 311 laps only netted us 4th place! But we all had fun, and the weather was good. Special thanks to Tucker Sheppy and Josh Hopwood for coming out and helping with lap times. It was really helpful to be able to feed the drivers their laps times during the race. We had radios working between the pits and the driver in the car.

Here is a thread were on the first post is a 7-minute video of in-car from an E30 from the race, driven by Ian Alexander. Starts out at dusk, then shows some laps driven at night!

http://www.bmwpugetsound.com/vbb/showthread.php?t=32670

And this thread has a number of pictures of BMWs from the 8-hour race as well as race reports from most of the E30 teams.

http://www.bmwpugetsound.com/vbb/showthread.php?t=32624

[Alpine003]

Sounds like a cool event. It looks like those guys could've had a group buy on Panasports based on the pics. :D

[Lance Racing]

Right, lots of Panasports. The reason you are seeing so many is the rules required the cars to run the stock wheel diameter, so we had to run 14" wheels. Panasport was about the only thing out there in a lightweight racing wheel in 14".

For this year we changed the rules to allow 15" wheels. This way there are a few more wheels in the 13-pound range available for purchase. The 14" Panasports are around $220 a wheel I believe, whereas 15" racing wheels can be had for around $135 each. When someone is building a car and looking at buying 2 or 3 sets of wheels, the savings can add up.

Most of the guys already with 14s are staying with them because the Toyo RA1s we all run on are cheaper for 225-50-14 versus their 225-50-15. And we've noticed no measurable performance gain for the cars running 15" wheels versus 14" wheels. In fact, we think the slightly smaller 14" wheel gives a little better launch out of the turns. Most of the cars are fitted with 4.10 LSDs too.

[Stu]

Nice save at 6:45! Night racing must be nuts.
Lance, are you required to run stock headlights?

[joshh]

Thanks for letting me help!

Lance was very very consistant with his times. Very impressive. Wish I could have stayed longer.