Gatorac

This spring some of my buddies and I decided to put together a team to run the Chumpcar "Not Quite 12 Hours of Sebring". Chumpcar is a little different then Lemons in that it focuses a bit more on the racing.

The race exceeded all expectations. The competition was tough and tight. A mixture of well practiced teams and newbies that may have never been on track before. Some of the cars looked to be a bit suspect on the $500 limit but the officials did a good job at leveling the field with penalty laps.

We ran in 2nd for a long time. The first place car was ahead by 3/4 lap. Depending on the driver we would gain or loose time on them. They wound up having to change brakes and that put us in first. Bailey got in the car and with 3:45:00 to go the clutch failed. He came to pits and we swarmed the car trying to see if we could do anything. While looking under the hood I noticed our alternator wire was not connected to the alternator anymore. We fixed that and bled the clutch to no avail. We decided to run with no clutch. A push start out of the pits and Bailey was off. He ran consistent laps within 3 seconds of our fast lap keeping it in 3rd gear. I got in for the final 1:51:00 stint in 5th place. No clutch. Funny noises coming from somewhere. Headlights that seemed to block the view better then they lit up the road. It was the toughest drive of my life. Sebring is really dark. Our car rode like a dump truck. I kept asking Bob on the radio "do I need to go faster?" I could have went faster but I risked blowing the little crap can up or completely destroying the transmission. Some of the leaders suffered mechanicals. One went off at 7 and hit the wall. We now found ourselves in 3rd, several laps down from 2nd. About 3 to go Gassie says "go go go, 3rd place car is dropping back fast". I start grinding gears and taken the revs to 7500. When I take the checker, timing and scoring updates to take me from 3rd to 2nd. The 1st place team was pitted right next to us. They were nursing the gas to make it to the finish. People were all gathered around the computer for the last 30 minutes of the race watching the changes in position, lap times and listening to race control. WOW. A great race from a crew or a spectator's view.

I would defiantly recommend Chumpcar. We were concerned that some of the inexperienced (or no experience) drivers would make for some scary track time. Not so. Novices would stay clear. Faster drivers would run hard, door to door, nose to tail without an issue. This was far more enjoyable then the races I did with SCCA. Turn 1 Trailer Trash will be racing with Chumpcar many more times.

billy25us

I have ran Lemons and Chump. I enjoy the Chump a whole lot better. Am I the only one out there that is about tired of the Lemons BS.

rfn026

We're running LeMons because of the schedule. I think Chump is a better series though. The interesting thing is that people are flocking to the LeMons races and Chump entries are still rather small. I hope Chump can grow.

Richard Newton
Sebring Pictures

Gatorac

ChumpCar is in it's first year. If our experience at Sebring is how they intend to run normally, I believe they will grow. I expect they will draw not only from Lemons but NASA, SCCA, HPDE groups and even some local round d round guys. John is no stranger to the local short track scene.

Running almost 2 hour stints in the car I felt like I could run at my own pace. You have times that you are running B2TW dicing it up with a competitor and other times that you are being conservitive trying to regain concentration and save the car. More like an HPDE then an SCCA race.

Next year they plan on running the full course for 14 hours.

The next Southeast race is at Roebling the last weekend of January. We will be there. For a 5 person team we had about $1000 each including the car, consumables, fuel and entry fees. Those costs go way down if you can amortize your cap costs over a few races. I think anyone in racing will tell you that's not bad for the amount of track time you get.

waktasz

My boys won it all at Sebring in the Schumacher Taxi Service CoROLLa. I haven't been able to do any events this year but the team is still going strong.

Z06Tracker

I agree that Chumpcar is much bettter than Lemons!