FUMES

Monday

Jan242011

Monday, January 24, 2011 at 09:57AM

January 26, 2011

Editor's Note: We're re-running an excerpt from a speech Peter has given on a few occasions in honor of the upcoming opening of the 2011 racing season at Daytona this weekend. Enjoy! - WG

For Love of the Game.

By Peter M. De Lorenzo

Detroit. I’m going to ask all of you a question: When did it start for you? Was it that guy down the street in your neighborhood, the one who marched to a different drummer by driving a sports car, an intriguing machine decidedly unlike any you had ever seen before? The one that caused you and your friends to ride by on your bikes and stare because it was the antithesis of the colorless station wagons and sedans that everyone else drove?

Or was it that slightly crazy uncle who’d show up every Christmas in yet another brand-new Corvette?

Or was it the family trip to a see a race when you were a kid, when you were able to get an in-person look at serious racing machines for the very first time, a visual etched in your memory like it was yesterday?

Or was it going to the races with your dad, while he chased his racing dreams?

Maybe it was your own trip to a race later as a young adult, when a mixture of unsupervised freedom and a newly-minted perspective about the world combined with a heady mix of horsepower and speed to draw you in and never let go.

Everyone here has a story of how they fell in love with this sport. The sport that confounds us at times, frustrates us often, makes us sad, glad and euphoric, and usually all on the same weekend too.

For me it was growing up immersed in a fuel-injected childhood, surrounded by auto industry titans and the legendary machines of the late 50s and throughout the 60s that were the conduits of America’s hopes and dreams. Machines that captured this nation’s unbridled, anything-is-possible future in shimmering metallic hues and gleaming chrome, making their presence known with barking exhausts and raucous exuberance.

And then racing took hold.

At first it was a local track in the early 60s – Waterford Hills outside of Detroit – that captured my attention and intrigued me to no end. This was a world that was at once completely foreign yet instantly familiar, an incendiary mix of color, sound and of course, speed that would light a fire under me that continues to burn hot to this day.

Then it was Meadowdale Raceway, in Illinois, for the United States Road Racing Championship weekend in September 1964. It was there that I witnessed Ken Miles and Bob Johnson lead the vaunted Shelby American Cobra team to a dominant victory over a gaggle of Sting Rays. And then a few hours later I saw Jim Hall and Roger Penske spank the rest of the sports racer field in their Chaparrals. (A footnote to that event? After he won the “A” production race earlier in the day, the Shelby American mechanics removed the windshield from Ken Miles’ Cobra and performed some other tweaks before sending him back out against the sports racers in the USRRC feature race, where he finished a stunning fifth overall!)

That event sealed it for me, but it was only the beginning. From there it was a meandering journey to tracks big and small. Watkins Glen. Wilmot Hills. The Milwaukee Mile. Mid-Ohio. Nelson Ledges. Blackhawk Farms. Grattan. A long lost airport circuit up in Grayling, Michigan. Lime Rock. IRP. Sebring. Indianapolis. Road Atlanta. Road America, and on and on and on to tracks all across the country and in Canada. Even the hallowed Nurburgring Nordschliefe.

And the journey continues.

We’ve all been there. We all have our stories and our memories and those scenes that will remain forever etched in our collective consciousness and that will never let go. That’s what this sport does to you. It lights a fire and instills in you a passion for it, and it just won’t let you go, no matter how hard you might try at times.

But what about this sport that we all love? Where is it going? Better yet, where should it go?

It’s no secret that the nature of racing has changed. The explosion of technological innovation in the 60s and 70s transformed the sport, and the run-up of technology was fascinating to watch.

Remember the jaw-dropping impact of the ghost-white Chaparrals with their high wings and their boldly visionary aerodynamic perspective that rocked the racing world?

Or the awesome speed – and sound – of the magnificent McLaren Can-Am cars with the sun glints off of their wings as they roared around Road America in dominant formation?

How about the pursuit of the magic 200-mph lap at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway?

Or the mighty Porsche 917 Can-Am car, the quintessential definition of the Penske-Donohue doctrine of the “Unfair Advantage” - ?

Or Mario Andretti’s trail-blazing, ground-effect-bending, championship-winning Formula 1 Lotus?

The list is never-ending, right up to the awesome machines of today like the Le Mans-winning, turbo-diesel-powered Audis and Peugeots.

The problem is that all of this brilliant technology has come with a heavy cost.

The blue-sky ingenuity and flat-out creativity that powered racing in its most glorious era have given way to a game of restrictions and rules packages designed to keep the performance of the racing machines in check, because the fact of the matter is that technology has swallowed the sport whole, and the Genie is never going back in the bottle.

I mean, after all, it is said that a modern Formula 1 car can be programmed to circulate any Grand Prix circuit in the world by remote control, without the driver.

Now, the application of advanced remote control technology might be terrific for the U.S. Air Force and their unmanned, hunter-killer surveillance aircraft program, but it’s not racing.

And it can’t be the future of racing either.

What can be done about it? Some say we should pull all of the restrictive devices off of the cars, move the spectators further back, and let the drivers push their unrestricted machines to new limits.

That’s certainly one approach, but IndyCars circulating the Indianapolis Motor Speedway doing 250 mph+ racing laps doesn’t sound like a good idea right off the top of my head.

I, on the other hand, advocate returning racing to its rightful role as the birthplace of technological innovation and the developer of advanced automotive technology. Once upon a time that’s what automobile racing was all about. A guy by the name of Ray Harroun won the very first Indy 500 in 1911 driving his Marmon “Wasp” with a strange device attached to it – the very first known use of a rearview mirror. It allowed Harroun to drive the race without a riding mechanic, which had obvious advantages.

And from that moment on, racing and the development of advanced automotive technology went hand in hand.

Can we get racing back to the forefront of developing advanced automotive technologies? Yes, I believe we can, but it will take a tremendous amount of vision and real guts by some seriously committed people who also have the power to affect real change.

I believe we need to press the “reset” button in racing and start over. By that I mean we need to establish new challenges that will inspire a new level of ingenuity and creativity and foster a whole new dimension of innovation.

Imagine for a moment that the new rules package for the 2015 Indianapolis 500 consisted of a one paragraph statement instead of an inch-thick book. Imagine if everything was “free” in terms of engine design, chassis construction, materials, propulsion, etc., as long as the cars fit into a dimensional envelope established by the Speedway and met the required safety criteria.

And then imagine that every car must average 15 miles per gallon – or an equivalent energy use formula for non-ethanol-powered machines – over the course of qualifying and the entire 500-mile race distance.

Would we have a grid of cookie-cutter “spec” cars showing up for that month of May? I seriously doubt it.

Instead, we’d see a variety of technical applications and solutions brought to the Speedway by a slew of manufacturers - and hopefully some “shade tree” innovators (after all, there have to be a few modern-day Smokey Yunicks out there, right?) - because all of a sudden the same technology that manufacturers and tinkerers all over the world are exploring to meet future mileage and efficiency goals would come into play, and the lure of attempting to win the most prestigious motor race in the world would be icing on the proverbial cake.

As we all well know, there’s nothing like the white-hot heat of competition to accelerate technological development.

You could apply the same sort of thinking to other racing formulas too.

The 24 Hours of Le Mans already places a high priority on overall operating efficiency, but what if the organizers accelerated their efficiency requirements? What if they required new levels of efficiency - let’s say with a sliding scale of mileage increases over a ten-year period – so that by 2020 every car entered would have to achieve at least 20 miles per gallon over the 24 Hours?

I bet we’d see an explosion of technical innovation, the kind that would benefit all of us too.

The same goes for Formula 1. As appealing as it can be – although for me that is occurring less and less frequently these days – you just know a rules package that revolved around delivering a mileage number would transform that genre of racing in a positive way. It may even make the cars look decent again, too, which would be a very good thing.

Even NASCAR would benefit from this new perspective.

I speak to the brightest minds in the automobile business on a regular basis, and what strikes me the most in my discussions with them of late is that despite all the talk of electric vehicles they firmly believe that the internal combustion engine has a long, long way to go in terms of overall development and increased operating efficiency. In other words, we’re going to be driving cars and trucks with ICEs for many years to come – only they will be much more efficient, achieving mileage numbers that would simply have been unheard of just a few short years ago.

The net-net of my point here is that motor racing – in all forms – should lead the development of automotive technology for the benefit of all of us. It did so in the past, and it’s time for the sport to do it again. I would much rather see the latest automotive technological breakthrough debut on the starting grid at Le Mans, Indianapolis or Road America than at a government-funded research laboratory.

Publisher's Note: As part of our continuing series celebrating the "Glory Days" of racing, we're proud to present another noteworthy image from the Ford Racing Archives. - PMD

(Courtesy of the Ford Racing Archives)
Daytona, Florida, February 6, 1966. A morning freight train at the Daytona 24 Hour race composed of the the winning No. 98 Ford GT Mk II entered by Shelby American and driven by Ken Miles and Lloyd Ruby, leading the No. 95 Ford GT Mk II entered by Holman & Moody and driven by Walt Hansgen and Mark Donohue, and the No. 96 Ford GT Mk II entered by Shelby American and driven by Chris Amon and Bruce McLaren. The Miles/Ruby Ford qualified on the pole and won by eight laps, the No. 97 Ford GT Mk II (not pictured) entered by Shelby American and driven by Dan Gurney/Jerry Grant finished second, and the Hansgen/Donohue entry finished third for a dominant sweep of the top positions by Ford. The Amon/McLaren Ford finished fifth behind the NART Ferrari 365 P2 driven by Mario Andretti and Pedro Rodriguez.

Publisher's Note: Like these Ford racing photos? Check out ford.artehouse.com. Be forewarned, however, because you won't be able to go there and not order something. - PMD

See another live episode of "Autoline After Hours" with hosts John McElroy, from Autoline Detroit, and Peter De Lorenzo, The Autoextremist, and guests this Thursday evening, at 7:00PM EDT at www.autolinedetroit.tv.