sopwith21

Millen won on dirt (Mickey Thompson, rallies) and road courses. He was in IROC but we're not sure if he won. That would have qualified him on asphalt ovals. But even if he did, he still has no desert wins. Fangio, Hill and Gurney aren't even close. Not as easy as we think, is it? The most common combination is a driver with wins on dirt, road courses and asphalt ovals, or a driver with off-road racing and road course wins. But finding a single driver who has won on all four is nearly impossible.

Very true, but all those only qualify him on road courses. Didn't win overall and I don't think he won his class unless someone has more info. Even if that was an oval, it still leaves him short. Tough to find these guys, isn't it? We hear all the time about guys who won in different types of cars, but to find guys who win on totally different types of racing surfaces is really hard.

BTW, it looks like Mickey Thompson may make it into this elite group. If we have any more additions, it will have to be from guys like MT or Herschel McGriff (who doesn't qualify, BTW).

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but our research shows so far: Paul Newman had a class win - yes, that counts - at Daytona in 95 and tried Baja in 04, but never won. I can't find anything but road racing wins for Newman. Foyt won on ovals at Indy, won on dirt everywhere, and won at LeMans, Daytona and Sebring in road racing. I can find no record of him competing in a desert race. Schrader won on dirt in midgets and sprints, on asphalt ovals, but nothing on road courses or desert/off-road. Al Unser Sr. won on dirt, asphalt ovals and he even did some time in sportscars and F5000 although I can't find any wins there. But nothing in the desert or off-road. And Pike's Peak is partially asphalt and part gravel, BTW, not a dirt track. Bobby Unser won on dirt and asphalt ovals, and came out of retirement at age 50 to win the Fastmasters tournament on a road course, but nothing in off-road or desert racing. So of all the drivers named, we can find only one with definite off-road/desert experience. Good names, but believe me, this is a TOUGH question. Any more takers? Remember, stick to the criteria!! This is a research project so please stay the course! Thanks!

Okay guys, we need your help. DO NOT CHANGE THE FORMULA!!! Stick with the exact question and help us please! We are trying to determine how many race drivers in history have WON automobile races on ALL of these surfaces: 1. Dirt tracks of any kind. This includes but is not limited to dirt ovals, Mickey Thompson, all-dirt rallies, short course off road circuits, etc. Any track that is genuine, 100% dirt. 2. Road courses. 3. Asphalt ovals. 4. Desert race courses such as Baja, Vegas to Reno, Dakar, etc. Yes, local and club racing counts so long as the driver WON. Any type of car counts if it has four wheels. Near misses are irrelevant. Car type is irrelevant. We are still early in the search, but the list so far has turned up only two names - Parnelli Jones and Robby Gordon. Parnelli won on asphalt ovals (Indy 500, no less!), desert courses, Trans Am road races and he won on DIRT ovals in midgets. Robby Gordon won on asphalt at Michigan, won on road courses in NASCAR, he began his career in desert racing and his dirt wins came on the indoor off-road dirt tracks of the Mickey Thompson series. They were all dirt, so they count. We are finding that its difficult to find drivers who even drove on all those surfaces, let alone won. Most of the modern drivers are specialists nowadays... they are groomed specifically for open wheel, stock cars, etc., and have very little racing experience on other surfaces. Please help if you can. We need more than ideas or maybes... we need to know for sure. Many thanks for any thoughts you have - and help us stay on topic!

No. But your Z looks cool.

Motor pooped out last summer in a 2nd place finish. Had to sit out late the rest of the year while I worked ridiculous hours on a new TV project. Now that I have time to breathe again, its time to get back on the track. So I'm giving the car a once-over, new engine, more horsies, new paint and signing on new sponsors. Dying to get on the track again. I'll be showing it off here with new pics as soon as its done. Woo hoo!

Greetings, Noble Z Car Brethren! Sound the village bells! After 7 long years painted like a watermelon, my team's 260Z gets a beautiful new paint job in team colors with GT racing stripes. Take a last look at my car's pics cause it'll soon be a blazing white and blue speed machine. And you can see the last race as a watermelon here... scroll down to "Hallett Feature." http://sopwithmotorsports.com/multimedia.html And what of the engine? Glad you asked! A totally wicked new motor is on the way, allegedly before my next race on April 26th (and they bloody well better make it!). Woo hoo! No more getting trounced on the straightaways and catching up in the next corner. No more bringing a knife to a gunfight. My 35-year old Z has 9 wins and 2 series titles and it's just now reaching its prime. Beware, owners of BMW's, Porches, Camaros (holds nose) and other heathenous abominations that soil our land. Rejoice, Z Lovers! Next time you see a white 260Z with way cool blue racing stripes and a big #21 on the side, say goodbye and get a good look at my bumper. (Insert evil laugh here).

4-wheel disc brakes and fresh Hoosier DOT slicks.

Some guys have had good experiences in SCCA... listen to them and hear them out. They can offer some good balance and knowledgeable opinions. However, there is a growing number of racers across the country who refuse to drive SCCA, and for good reason. Some SCCA groups - not all, I'm sure, but some - are arrogant beyond comprehension. I quickly found out that most of the corner workers, half of the spectators, all of the officials as well as their mothers and their pets were all determined to vicariously drive my car for me. Despite the fact that I finished third in a car that I'd never sat in before, on a track I'd never driven, and never put a wheel off or touched another car, I was continuously assailed by arrogant, obnoxious people insistent on correcting my every move whether it needed correction or not. During the license "application" process I offered licenses from other series (gained from 15 years of driving), at which they egotistically sneered "Well, we don't recognize those sanctioning bodies." The thought undoubtedly never occurred to them that perhaps those sanctioning bodies don't recognize the SCCA because it appears to so obsessed with its own rules that no one is really sure if their drivers ever actually run a race. They also wanted everything but DNA and a retina scan to "consider" your "application." I found the amateur level to be somewhat enjoyable with the avoidance of a few people, and the pro level to be completely intolerable. I suggest attending some races and really investigating the officials and people involved in your local group before making a commitment. There's no shortage of people who despite the SCCA, but surely, in an organization with that many people, they can't all be obnoxious egomaniacs. So some comments from guys who have had tolerable experiences in the series would be helpful to provide some balance and I welcome your input.

I'm probably telling you way more than you want to know here... sorry... Another huge advantage of working with experienced drivers in open track sessions is that they mostly drive street cars that HAVE BRAKE LIGHTS. When you're following them, watch for two things: 1) Assuming you're in a comparable car, try to match their braking point. IOW, try to make your brake lights come on at the precise spot on the track where their brake lights came on when you're following them on the track. By doing this you'll learn exactly when to brake for each corner... you won't have to experiment on your own by smoking your tires and making mistakes (expensive!). 2) Watch for the point at which their brakes lights go OFF. Try to be off your brakes on or before that same point, and minimize the time between letting off the brakes and getting on the gas. Make that transition smoothly. Smooth is fast. Frantic is slow. 3) Watch for a small puff of white smoke from the exhaust pipe of the experienced driver that you're following. When you see that white puff, it means he hit the gas about ten feet earlier. Try to do the same. And squeeze the throttle, don't punch it. Better to get on the throttle earlier and easier than later and heavier. That's probably more than you ever wanted to know, so I'll shut up now. There are lots of good drivers on this forum and some of you experienced guys should take a moment to offer advice here. If you don't help a newbie, no one else will either.

I consider track days, or "high speed touring," or whatever you want to call open track driving for street cars, as very valuable training and I'd suggest doing all the track days you can manage. Doesn't matter what car you drive... take anything with four wheels to the track and just learn to drive it to its limits, while still managing your tire wear and car consumption (the rate at which you "use up" your car during a race). Some of these drivers that show up for open track days, even in plain old street cars, are VERY good. The best thing to do is make friends and ask them for help. Go to the series director and ask them who the top drivers are, and which ones are have the kindest and nicest personalities. Those guys can point out things like tracking tire temps, air pressure in tires, and all the basics. Also - and this is important - ask them to drive about 70% for the first two laps of their next session and allow you to follow them. If they drive 100%, they'll go off and leave you very quickly. And of course you can't really ask them to go slow during their entire session because they want to drive fast like everyone else. But as a favor to help a rookie, most experienced drivers will give you two laps at 70% and allow you to follow them. Get about 4-6 car lengths behind them and practice following their line down to the inch. After two laps they can go off and leave you, and you can spend the rest of the session working on what you learned. Then in the next session, make a new friend and repeat the process with them. If they sit out for a session, ask them to watch your line and critique it. Most will be glad to do so. That's the best and cheapest driving school in the world.

I'd like to offer some encouragement and perhaps what little advice I'm qualified to give. Don't let anyone tell you that you can't do it, regardless of your budget or lack of experience. I never drove a racecar in my life until I was 21. I had no money at all. I was a first generation driver and I spent the first years of my career running at the back of the pack, very discouraged, with no one to help me or offer advice and no internet through which I could get help from others. No, I did not make it to Indycar or Cup, but I got about 80% of the way up the ladder despite being in conditions as bad or worse than yours, and driving remains a critical part of my living. FWIW, here are a few thoughts: - I normally don't recommend driving schools. But if you cannot get seat time any other way and if you're a rank rookie with no background or experience at all, it would probably be worthwhile. - If you can't afford a car yet, go to every event you can find and make all the friends you can. - Drive anything you can get into every time you can... ANYTHING. Even go karts or autocross or dirt cars. Just drive. It all transfers to one extent or another. In the end, you're either a driver or you're not. - Z-cars have a pretty good balance and they are good cars to learn with. If your budget is tight and you're a beginner, I'd say its a decent choice. If you're truly good with a 200hp Z-car, you can drive a Rolex car. No, that is not a misprint, and no, I'm not guessing. - At some point in your life, do a few oval races. You'll learn things about yourself you never knew. And that last right-hander at Road Atlanta won't look so tough anymore. - The term "professional driver" is a misnomer. Nearly all the drivers in every major series had gobs of money before they started; they never relied on racing to eat and pay bills. The reason they're a "professional" is because they started out with wealth obtained from another source. They are no more professional than you are. They can just afford more expensive hobbies. - You can skip much of the mechanical stuff; drivers are specialists nowadays. But you can't skip tires. Learn all you can about tires and how they work. Ditto for suspension. I'm still awful with suspension stuff and it still hurts me.

Isn't it great to have you high school car? I still have my 1980 Mustang, too. Other guys have to sit around and say "Hey, you should have seen the car I had in school. It was so cool!" You and I don't have to tell stories... we can walk out to the garage and show them the car we had in high school. Mine still runs like a top, with a modified 302 V8 and lots of upgrades.

In frontal impacts, the new helmets can be safer if one discounts the additional weight added to the helmet which exaggerates the effect of forward spinal impact and puts additional pressure on the HANS device. Should the HANS device fail, the resulting injury can be even more serious than with the old helmets. In rear impacts, the expanded area of new helmets will press against the cervical vertebrae of the upper spinal cord and act as a fulcrum, increasing forward pressure and again causing potential injury, especially for drivers who do not use the HANS device. So yes, perhaps the new helmets are safer in many regards, and no, in many aspects perhaps they are not. The driver, who owns his head, neck and spinal cord, should be the one to weigh that decision and choose which risk he will accept. But all that is really irrelevant because my original point remains - a five year old helmet is perfectly capable of doing the exact same job it was designed to do the moment it was purchased. It is preposterous to expect a helmet to do a job for which it was never designed. Did we outlaw 1978 Trans Am's because they don't have air bags? Of course not. Air bags didn't exist then. The idea is ludicrous. The car was designed for seat belt usage and if the seat belts are well maintained, they still deliver all the function and safety that they were designed to deliver when the car was new. If Trans Am drivers want additional safety features, they can go buy a new Volvo without you or I snooping around and trying to force them into it. Further, if no massive, quantum leap advances in helmet technology are achieved in a given five year period, do you really think that Snell will say "Well, I guess everyone should just keep their old helmets?" Baloney. We both know better. The helmet industry will still pressure sanctioning bodies to force their drivers to purchase new ones whether any major advancements were achieved or not. From 1990-95, the advancement of helmet technology was largely in the field of aerodynamics for open wheel drivers to prevent helmets from being sucked off the driver's head at high speeds. This was not a safety element in any way, but did they lift their helmet replacement recommendations during that time period? No. And remember, Snell isn't the enemy here. They openly admit that their recommendations are based on nothing more than an arbitrary judgment call. When we begin attempting to force those recommendations onto others... well... that's when we have problems. Mandatory helmet replacement - not recommended, but mandatory replacement - is a racket and a scam, and rather than participate in it, driver's should oppose it. It is wrong. The reasons given for it are lies. Its purpose was, is and always will be to artificially boost helmet sales by outlawing helmets that are still perfectly capable of doing what they were originally designed to do. BTW, the Z's on your home page are gorgeous beyond words. I wish mine was half as good looking (and fast looking) as the ones you worked on. The blue one is especially nice.

To some people its a fortune, to others its pocket change. But the point remains... mandatory helmet replacement is, by Snell's own admission, based on nothing. The delusion that helmet replacement makes us safer is a lie concocted to sell more helmets. And safety decisions should be left up to the driver.

No, but Snell and Simpson would love it if I did.

I'm beginning to think cars are cheaper than bikes.

Yes, its expensive, I agree entirely. And after driving Busch and Rolex cars I understand completely the whole firesuit, harness, etc., thing. But no matter what level you race at, budget is always a consideration. Blithely assuming that everyone can afford another $400-1500 helmet is arrogant... mandating that they buy one when they may not even need it is criminal. Sanctioning bodies need to stop participating in the scam. They are aiding and abetting it and they should be held accountable. Mandating that someone needlessly spend $500 that they don't have is no better than breaking into their home and stealing it. At least burglars are honest thieves.

The source was named in the very sentence you quoted... "Even the Snell foundation openly admits that their own ratings are a judgment call based on absolutely nothing." Just look at Snell's own web site. Go to http://www.smf.org/, then click on FAQs, then click "Why Should You Replace Your Helmet Every Five Years?" Their answer, in their own words, is merely based on an arbitrary guess. Snell says "the recommendation for five year helmet replacement is a judgment call." Then look up Snell's testing procedures and you'll see that they test for retention, stability, penetration and flame resistance, but they have no testing, no data and no empirical evidence whatsoever to test a helmet's integral degradation due to age. Nothing. Then go to "Research and Funding" and look for anything related to age degradation research by Snell. Guess what you find? Nothing. These are not my words, they are Snell's. I encourage you to look for yourself. We should not accept the arbitrary judgment call of sanctioning bodies, manufacturers and the institutions with whom they closely work without question. The helmet replacement mandates imposed by sanctioning bodies are a racket and a scam. They force low-budget racers to take money that they cannot spare and make redundant purchases to replace items that are still perfectly suitable for their purpose. Racers should protest the helmet mandates of sanctioning bodies and stop accepting the word of institutions without question.

... the ability to make my own safety decisions. The notion that sanctioning body bureaucrats care more about me than I do is outrageous to the enth degree. You are. How many sanctioning bodies require that you buy only a certain brand of tire, and that you buy it from them or their approved distributor? Any time someone begins a sentence with "For your safety" or ends a sentence with "Thank you for your cooperation," you can bet that whatever they said in between was none of their business. Even the Snell foundation openly admits that their own ratings are a judgment call based on absolutely nothing. Zippo. Nada. Not a single, solitary shred of empirical data to demonstrate that a 6-year old helmet is incapable of doing the very same job that it was the day you bought it. Let's not be gullible... the Snell rating and mandatory helmet buying racket is, indeed, a racket, a scam, a sham and a rip off. The only thing worse than the scam itself is that we, the victims, have been carefully conditioned to defend it.

I'll feel much better once I say this... Racers everywhere should openly protest the helmet standards. Helmet ratings are deliberately designed to artificially make perfectly good helmets obsolete in order to force racers to buy new ones. Helmet structural integrity does not break down for more than seven years after manufacture, and then only in the areas of glue (affixing trim, etc.), liner material, etc. The actual protective capacity of the helmet does not deteriorate with any reasonable amount of age. Even Snell, which provides the safety rating on helmets, openly admits that "the recommendation for... helmet replacement is a judgment call." In other words, there is no scientific, independent data whatsoever to indicate that a 4-7 year old racing helmet will provide anything other than the full protection that it was designed to provide. And even if it did, its your head inside the helmet, not theirs, and you are far more capable of making your own safety decisions than anyone else. Still, many sanctioning bodies are mandating new helmets every third year, and in some cases, every second year. The helmet standards mandated by racing organizations are fabricated. They are an unabashed racket and a shameful scam that only adds to the financial burden born by low budget, weekend enthusiasts. Every racer should openly and repeatedly protest them until they are repealed by your sanctioning body. Wow. I really do feel better now.

I've got no camber plates, so I have virtually no camber/caster adjustment. I don't know the gauge of my sway bars but I can try to find out. When I say that we "maxed out" the struts, I mean that we have no further adjustment available (they adjust from the softest setting of "1" to the stiffest setting of "5"). We're running 1/16th of toe out to help the car turn into the corners. The car has a full cage as well, plus additional roll bars running back to the frame near the rear strut mounts and forward of the firewall to add rigidity. I'm anxious to read the thread Preith suggested. Right now the only real answer I can think of is to reverse the springs, with the 350's in back and the 250's up front. That would surely help pin down the front tires. Any other thoughts?

Last fall I had a new suspension put on my 260z including 350# springs in front and 250# in rear, adjustable Tokico shocks and Proshock coilover kits, and a locked rear end. When I was running in GT-2 (and could use racing slicks) the car handled pretty well. It would go where it was pointed and was a fast car. This year I switched to Production Superstock class which requires DOT tires. Man, did that change everything! I've used both Toyos and Hoosier DOT slicks. No matter what I do, the car pushes like a dog on DOT tires. I've adjusted the coilovers to compensate and maxed out my strut settings. Of course that didn't make the front grip any better, but it did loosen up the rear considerably. The result was that the car didn't have any grip at EITHER end when we were done. Soooooo.... some of you had suggested that the heavier springs should be in the rear and the softer springs in front. It worked better the other way around with slicks, but with DOT's it appears that I need to make the change. Something MUST be done to make the car turn, and softer springs on the front would - theoretically - do the trick. Any thoughts? Reversing the springs should free the car up so much that I'll probably be struggling to get bite in the rear tires... a nice change from pushing all over the track. Then we can start working with sway bars, coilovers and struts to get some traction in the back end. What sayeth the Z car faithful?

I've only done two autocrosses in 17 years of racing, but they were fun. A little too tame, but I won't knock it. It was better than not driving at all and it still hones your skills and gets you behind the wheel at a great price. How is this a bad plan?