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
