Dirty Duck Racing at Sears Point - Results, Data and What If

DDR Team, Fans, Friends and Neighbors,

 

As you may or may not have known (how could you have not known!?) the Dirty Duck Team raced our Magic Rabbit at Sears Point Saturday and Sunday, Dec 7th and 8th in the 24 Hours of LeMons. 190 cars were entered for the endurance race and 183 cars actually made it out onto the track. And the weather was freezing all weekend.

 

OK, let's do the numbers!

 

First, some overall stats:

We completed 205 laps for a distance of 519 miles, just longer than the famous Indy 500! However, just a little slower than those Indy guys, with an average of 55 mph around the 12 turns and 2.5 mile Sears Pt. (now called Sonoma) Raceway. You can notice a disparity on laps between Rye and Paul and the rest of us. Well, good reason for that! Rye and Paul stayed relatively out of trouble! Peter spun in turn 2 and got hit and bent the right front tie rod, Tedders was hit by a Mini-truck with camper on top, spun out between Turns 2 and 3, and Mr. Unruly got hammered, and not in a good way! First time Mr. Unruly was entering Turn 7 and some bozo ran out of talent and brakes and hit the passenger door and spun me out. Visit the penalty box and then back out, then a few laps later, another bozo (plenty of bozo's at this crapcan race!) came out of nowhere to hit me in the drivers door as I was speeding up the back staightaway. So the three of us had lost time in the penalty box and therefore fewer laps in total.

 

Rye had the most laps and was also the hot shoe with the best time of 2:17.4! Congrats Rye. Hot on his heels were both Tedders and Peter with best times just a half a second slower!

Here are the top times for each driver and a comparison with previous races at Sears Pt.:

The last column is interesting (I know, not that interesting, but I am a numbers guy, so bear with me on this). It is the difference in best times between our "Arse-Freeze" race two weeks ago and our "Even More Pointless" race in March when our team won Class B. Everyone was slower, up to 6 seconds slower for Mr. Unruly. The primary reason is number of cars, like 100 less cars on the track for "Even More Pointless" race. Also, I know that Mr. Unruly couldn't get his concentration level up as needed after being hit and spun off the track twice. It definately takes 110% concentration to go fast.

 

OK, one more table of useless data before I get to the anxiously awaited "What If". This table compares between drivers the average time for their best 10 laps, 20 laps and 30 laps along with their median time. (For those of you who didn't take a statistics class, go look up Median in the dictionary, Mr. Unruly is not your teacher!)

What does it all mean? Well this will soon come into play.

 

And now the "What If"

 

Even though the first chart says we completed 205 laps, we were docked 5 laps of BS penalties, by the BS Judges. They would let us run in Class A with no penalty or Class B with 5 lap penalty. We took Class B with 5 laps, but grudingly! So we were credited with 200 laps which put us in 71st place overall out of 183 cars racing.

 

So, lets do the run down:

 

Laps credited 200

 

Add back the 5 BS laps, because they are BS!, so now we are at 205 laps and moves us up a little to 66th place.

 

Now, what if Peter doesn't spin and get hit and no bent tie-rod, that saves us almost 1.5 hours, then what if Tedders doesn't get wacked by the Mini-RV, that saves 6 minutes, what if Mr. Unruly doesn't get hit twice, that saves almost 23 minutes, and what if we ran a little long stints on Saturday and saved one pit stop, that saves 4 minutes. Total lost time 1 hour and 59 minutes.

 

And what would that be in laps. OK, remember the Median times in the above table, well here they come. How about taking the Average of the Median Times (now that put at least half of the readings to sleep!) and that would be 2 min and 32sec. Divide the 2:32 into the 1hr and 59 minutes and you get 46.8 laps, call it 47 laps!

 

So add 47 to 205 and you get 252 laps and....drum roll please.....that would put the Magic Rabbit into 10th overall !! and one lap ahead of Panting Polar Bear's Ford Crown Vic (the Class B Winner), so we would have won Class B again!

 

Top 10 and Class B, that is where we should have finished!  (And Mr. Unruly should have won the MegaLottery yesterday too!)

 

So, that wraps up Dirty Duck Racing's 2013 Season! As always it was more fun than should ever be allowed! The team will be pounding out all the dents and bends that the Magic Rabbit endured and will be ready to attack Sears Point again on March 21st to 23rd for the start of the 24 Hours of LeMons 2014 season.

 

Merry Christmas to All and a very Happy New Year!

 

Mr. Unruly

What If Sears Pointless

What if 24 Hours of LeMons held a one day race at Sears Point on Monday and called it Sears (Even More) Pointless? What if evertyhing that broke on Saturday and Sunday didn't break on Monday? What if all 5 drivers had their fastest times on Monday? What if The Magic Rabbit only had one black flag?  What if the Otter Pop VW Rabbit (that was in class B and shouldn't have been) broke on Monday? What if with one hour left in the race the Magic Rabbit was in second place behind the Communist's R Us BMW and Rye had them in his sights?

 

The answer is, WE WON!!!!!!!!!!!  We won Class B and 8th overall in starting field of 72 cars! Yahoo!!

 

The Dirty Duck Racing Team, the entire team all the way down to Dixie the dog, made it happen. Thank you to everyone! Thanks to the Young Gun pit crew of Nash, Ryezee and Austin to diving in both Saturday and Sunday taking out and replacing three times the front axles and hubs, we couldn't have done it without you. Thanks to each of our support team, Nancy L., Nancy F., Kristin and Kelly! Also the support and advice from John Waite, I think he is now hooked on LeMons, poor soul!

 

Now for some data from Monday's winning race. But first, Saturday and Sunday, we were running fine, but each day we had a failure that cost us 2 hours each day to fix. Failed left front wheel hub and damaged axle on Saturday, probably caused by a failing wheel bearing. Tedders finds new wheel hubs at Viking Auto VW Specialist in Novato, send Ryezee and Austin off in Rye's 911 to pick up the parts. Hey Rye, we now know that the 911 will hit over 100 mph on Highway 37 between Sears Point and Novato! On Sunday the same left front wheel fails again, this time the inner CV joint of the drive axle. Again, fingers do the walking and find an axle at NAPA Auto Parts in Petaluma. This time Tedders heads out, no report on top speeds attained. Oh yes, while these front wheel issues were being fixed, we realized the right rear wheel hub was bent when the Magic Rabbit was hit in Turn 7 by a brain dead dive bomber (who did come by our pit to apologize), so we replaced that hub on Sunday too.

 

OK, back to Monday and the WIN!

 

First off, Hot Shoe award, with only 72 instead of 175 cars on the track, there was a much better opportunity to put down quick laps and WE DID! And the quickest and the resulting Hot Show Award goes to Tedders with a lap time of 2:14.5. This time was over 3 seconds faster than our quickest during the crowded Sat and Sun race. Second quickest was yours truly, Mr. Unruly, with a time of 2:16.1 and nipping at my heels was both Rye at 2:16.5 and Peter at 2:16.8. Paul's top time was 2:18.1.

 

Now there is some real significance to these times, they are closely bunched and that is why we won Class B and also finished 8th overall. Most teams do not have 5 drivers that are so closely matched, that is our advantage, relative speeds are very close so we don't give up much when we change drivers!

 

Some historical info at Sears Point for DDR, 2011 and 2012 had a shorter distance, of interest is the improvements between Pointless and Even More Pointless this year.

 

	Skankaway	Pointless	Pointless	Even More
	2011	2012	2013	2013
Tedders	02:10.5	02:15.9	N/A	02:14.5
Ted	02:13.5	02:56.0	02:17.9	02:16.1
Rye	02:17.5	02:16.8	02:19.3	02:16.5
Peter	N/A	02:26.6	02:17.4	02:16.8
Paul	02:16.4	03:05.0	02:19.7	02:18.1
	Short	Short
	Turn 11	Turn 11
		Wet Track

 

Some more data, the top 13 times were run by Tedders! Great driving, he has a firm grip on what it means to drive a "momentum" race car (that means keep your speed up in and out of corners because we don't have the brute horsepower like the bigger cars). And I also must give an atta boy to Rye (as much a Mr. Unruly hates to) for going out as the last driver on Monday and told to be smooth and stay within yourself (but first past that Dirty Commie car) which he did and we won. I do want to also say that the team from the Communists R Us came over to us after the race to congratulate us, very nice team. Oh yes, they are Russian.

 

	Top 10 Laps	Top 20	Top 50	Top 100
Tedders	10	18	25	30
Ted	-	1	9	28
Rye	-	1	10	21
Peter	-	-	6	15
Paul	-	-	-	6
	10	20	50	100
Fastest Time	02:14.5	02:15.9	02:16.7	02:17.9
Slowest Time	02:15.9	02:16.7	02:17.9	02:19.7
Difference	00:01.3	00:00.9	00:01.1	00:01.9

 

And look at the fastest vs slowest time in each bracket each must about 1 second variation, great driving everyone.

 

We finished 182 laps or 460 miles, that was on top of 203 laps or 514 miles, for a total of 974 miles of blistering, brutal, door banging, wheel squeeching, barrels of fun!

 

Again for Monday, here is how the time on track and laps broke down:

 

	Time
	on track	Laps	Miles
Tedders	1:15	33	83.5
Paul	1:52	46	116.4
Ted	1:49	47	118.9
Peter	1:04	26	65.8
Rye	1:09	30	75.9
	7:09	182	460.5

 

And lastly, pit stops, I will just say that the exchange between Peter and Rye was by far the fastest, all the other exchanges involved at lest one senior member of the team and tended to take just a little longer. Plus those senior stops also involved two cans of gas, not one.

 

Which leads to one last bit of info...we almost ran out of gas at the end!! We decided to put only one can of gas in since Rye's stint was only one hour. Well, we finished and had just enought gas to get off the track, get on the trailer and off the trailer at home, but then NO GAS! So we had about two laps of gas remaining at the end! PHEW! We need some work on the gas gauge!

 

That it for Sears Pointless and Sears Even More Pointless, the trophy is planned to go on a World Tour along with the $500 prize money given to DDR. There you go, we can now offically call ourselves "Professional Race Car Drivers" as we have won real money for our efforts.

 

Next outing for Dirty Duck Racing to defend our Class B Championship is the beautiful, scenic, lush playground of Buttonwillow Raceway, tucked against Interstate 5 near Bakersfield, CA!! That will the the last weekend in June, 29th and 30th. See you there!

 

Mr. Unruly