The schedule for ’08 is out, first stop Willow Springs. It bills itself as the fastest track in the west, and you certainly spend a lot of time on the throttle. Exit of turn nine, the big sweeper, is wicked fast and ‘make or break’ as lap times go. One decent passing zone (under braking), going into four and a really good hole shot passing zone if you nail the exit of nine, draft a bit, and are willing to be pretty daring going into one.
I haven’t been to W-Springs in quite awhile (I have a race video from May 2005), but my memories of the track are bad, good, good, bad and good. Just to date myself, I went to the weeklong Jim Russell School back when it was there (oh about, 1978) and when the school’s reputation was less than stellar. I learned nothing at all, complete waste of time even on those very few sessions where the car I was in actually ran. After the school I had no money for racing for about the next twenty years… Of course that doesn’t mean that the school hasn’t improved enormously in the last thirty years. I don’t really know.
In September 2004, I took delivery of my Mazda GT, and found myself back at Willow springs (on the “streets” course) for the SCCA School. While waiting for another session, a twenty-something young father, wandering the pits with his two young boys, stopped to admire my car. So I offered to let him take some photos of his kids sitting inside the cockpit. The younger one, perhaps four or five years old, told me “I like your car the best of all!” And when I asked him why he said, “I like the flamethrower!” Now granted I had just taken delivery of the car, but I didn’t recall ordering a flamethrower as an option, EGT gauges, yes, Shift Light, yes, Flamethrower, sadly no… Although as a defense against dive-bombing it could be… no I’m sure that would be illegal.
Anyway, it wasn’t until a month later, during my first race, when trailing Mobi-Dave’s car that I realized what the kid was talking about. One distinctive feature of the MazdaGT is its 12a peripheral port rotary. For those not familiar with different porting types for rotary engines, peripheral porting basically means cutting a hole in the side of the motor and dumping as much fuel as humanly possible from the Weber carburetor straight down into the combustion chamber. As you can see from some race video, one of the side effects is that when you lift the throttle it spits out a couple of feet of flame. When first looking at it you might think the car is turbo-charged, but no, I swear it’s not.
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