Car racing????

This is what I'd do if I was loaded. No trailer, no tools, no mountain of spares /wheels / gear. Just cruise over to the track with your helmet bag. And probably cheaper than owning the car.

Not to mention the days spent ferrying the car to various shops between races.

 

Agree. If this racing venture is pocket change level investment for him, sub it out to someone who does it full time and arrive and drive. It ain't worth the hassle.

 

I have quite a few friends who do this with sprint cars. They own the seat and their helmet. Other then that, they either pay to drive the car, or drive it for a percentage of the purse.

To be dead honest, if i could find a good shop/team that would let me pay to ride WERA/ASRA/STK1000 for $3-5K a weekend id rather do that than own one of these dumb ass motorcycles. lol

 

Depends on the type of experience he wants.

My advice is to look at endurance racing. I'd say check out the Lucky Dog or Champ Car endurance series and as stated above, go find a team and buy a seat for an event or two (or the entire season). You can start with a C-class sh!#box or an A-class Corvette depending on how much you want to spend (hint: start with a decent C-class team first).

If you want the mini-IMSA experience go WRL. It's a national series and they have some "pro" level teams show up with factory built cars. You're looking at more coin but they even "televise" the races on their YouTube channel.

Endurance racing means LOTS of track time. Lots of passing and getting passed. You will learn a LOT.

Prepare to be humbled when Randy Pobst or Ross Bentley or some 17 year old kid form the MX-5 Cup shows up and starts gapping the field in a beat to crap E36.

 

If I had mountain of money, this is the loose plan I'd follow:

- Confirm that all of his Porsche schools include the one that makes him eligible for a novice SCCA license - that class is the Masters RS course.

- Contact a team like TOPP Racing and talk through their arrive and drive program with one of their existing Carrera Cup cars and repeat this with a couple other teams, brands, and types of vehicles to figure out which car, series, format (sprint v. endurance or both) etc. gives him the experience he's looking for. Drop in for a race with each team that interests him, runs at a track he likes, and learn the rhythm of a race weekend, working with a race engineer, looking at data, driving in traffic, passing, etc.

- DO NOT BUY A CAR YET

- Once he figures out which car, team, series, etc. meet his expectations, work out a deal to be a paid driver for a season including testing, driver development, etc. etc. and pay for that.

- DO NOT BUY A CAR YET

- Contact a NASCAR team to buy a current year road course car and find a local to him track to store it at - use this as a training car instead of a kart. Teams sell these for pennies on the dollar, they are professionally built, simple, and cheap to run. Karts, in every guise, in my experience and observation, are an absolute pain in the ass to maintain and end up requiring constant fiddling, adjustment, set up, blah blah blah...

- Complete the full season as a paid driver and see if the pile of ash that was once money is of a size that he is comfortable creating every year versus his vision for his long term financial outlook.

- Buy into a seat in a team he likes and gets on with and go racing again. After 2 years, decide if he really wants to go all in, buy his own car, etc. If so, then let the currency immolation commence.

Good luck!

 

You blokes must all be 30 yo. When you get to be 60, all you want to do is show up and drive a badass, good looking car that sounds bitchin' and drink champagne.

 

One of the shitty things about racing, (wether it's cars or bikes) is you pretty much have to just do it for 6 months before you figure out how you should have done it in the first place. Unless you have some really good friends that race. But even then, after 6 months you may realize they are doing it all wrong anyway.

 

I've been working on converting a Hyabusa powered DSR from aftermarket analog gauges to an AIM dash. The engine is a Gen1 so there's no configuration available from AIM (they have one for the Gen2+) and no CAN bus, used analog inputs to the dash. Had to replace a few sensors (replaced the single wire water temp sensor with a two wire sensor with a 1k pull-up resistor, replaced the dumb oil pressure switch that activated an idiot light on the old dash with a real sensor for displaying actual pressure) and reverse engineered the stock Suzuki gear position sensor because the stock Suzuki dash didn't display gear position (connected only to the ECU with no signal out). Owner doesn't race, only track days. Everything is working, probably have to do some additional scaling of the water temp for higher temps once the car is ready to drop back on its' tires and put some load on the cooling system, dash reads accurately up to about 35C.

 

I just went though the same thing with the Miata. Wired everything into separate analog channels. You probably already know this, but you can use a math channel for gear position. It learns it based on GPS speed / RPM. The Miata doesn't have a gear pos. sensor. We also did Fuel Pressure, and Air / Fuel because those are the only power adjustments you can make on a Miata.

I also did coolant pressure, because I've heard horror stories of losing coolant and by the time the temp guage starts going higher the engine is toast. So I have an alarm set for that.

I'm working on the fuel level now, Going to have to add one gallon at a time and check voltage so I can calibrate it manually. Isn't racing fun??

All this data better make me faster dammit.

 

I'm sure it's not the direction your boss wants to go, but this seems like a good thread to put this in.
Been chomping to talk about it.
I'm having a 2025 Canam Maverick R set up for offroad racing. These things are a beast.
Plan on getting some races is up in the states first and then hit NORRA next year.
It for sure isn't pretty girls, wine and cheese. Plus it's gonna beat my 65 year old ass worse than Go-Karts ever did.
It's going to cut into this action, too.
But it's an itch that needs scratched.

 

And for what it's worth, the TA2 route sounds like a great option.

 

I love that the car has the silver/blue look of the Gen1.

 

I know about the calculated gear but I decided to rely on Alessandro Volta instead and tapped into the gear position sensor and calibrated the custom sensor by reading the voltage in each gear.

 

Ad in my PCA magazine

sounds right up they guy’s alley

 

Did you guys watch the Patrick Dempsey special on FS1? It's a one hour thing about his return to racing. The Porsche Endurance series which has 2 classes, GT4 and Cup- he runs a GT4 and makes some moves that would get you yelled at in Spec Miata.

But the point is, it seems like a gentleman racer series where they have pros come in and do half the racing so they can "win".

 

There's a lot of that in racing. Often the pros are there with the team paid for by the gentleman driver. Pro is also the driving coach. Only the top tier of pro racing is driven by all pros. Even GT4 and GT3 has a lot of this.

That said, Patrick Dempsey can drive. He's not just the money, he's an actual racer.

 

We could ask one of our own. Larry is doing IMSA.
https://www.imsa.com/news/2025/01/06/pegram-racing-taking-on-2025-imsa-michelin-pilot-challenge/

My brother and I usually hit up RA for the IMSA round and have met some of the teams crews hanging at the hotel bars.
Fun conversations about racing cars, bikes and making a living doing it.