Now that I’ve “Survived the 25” at Thunderhill two years in a row, it’s increasingly clear to me that the endurance branch of motorsports appeals to a particularly sick and twisted group of racers. At the best of times, racers support their speed addiction with money that normal people use to buy a house, and there’s enough late-night wrenching to put even the healthiest marriage to the test, but endurance racing ratchets up the madness to a whole new level. When you go racing for 25 hours in a row, you need more of everything—more preparation, more tires, more fuel, more crew, more spare parts and way more determination. And a touch of madness mixed with masochism, as this year’s 68-hour adventure of barrel rolling, junkyard shopping, fog ducking, tranny swapping, Muscle Milk chugging and trophy raising—as described by me and a few of my MPME Scion teammates—graphically illustrates.
Andrew Wojteczko: Driver and regular Modified Mag contributor
After arriving at Thunderhill Raceway for the Thursday practice, the first thing I noticed was the fog. Visibility was so poor that testing was on hold until the fog lifted, but shortly after lunch the track went green and the MPME Scion tC was ready to go.
I used my first 15-minute session in the car to build speed and learn this challenging circuit with all its elevation changes and blind apexes. Since the fog had shortened the day, I would have just one more 15-minute session to get up to speed before the race on Saturday. After a pit lane driver change, I quickly got back up to speed—a little too quickly, as it turned out. As I learned the hard way, the tC had some high-speed oversteer in it, so if you enter the fast left-hand turn 8 with less than 100 percent throttle the back end would quickly step out. I was unable to catch the slide and went off track, the tires digging into the damp soft dirt and barrel rolling the Scion two full revolutions. I don’t know that words can explain how horrible the feeling that followed was, but trust me, it was pretty gut-wrenching.
To watch a video of the rollover, search “MPME Team Scion” on YouTube.
Marshall Pruett: Team owner/manager, Automotive & Sportscar racing editor at SPEEDtv.com
How do you prepare for something like this? After a month of nonstop work to ready a racing car for a major event, investing large sums of money, having it painted to your exact specification, the graphics cut and applied to perfection, and sending the car out to do some test laps, what do you do when everything goes quiet and yours is the only car that doesn’t come back to the pits?
After my initial shock about the rollover wore off and I could see that Andrew wasn’t injured, I took a look at the remains of my tC and my initial assessment wasn’t good. The roof was smashed in, the trunk and rear wing had been twisted into a fine piece of origami, the right side door was gone, the windshield smashed, wheels and suspension broken, and presumably the frame and rollcage were beyond immediate repair. Or were they?
A good friend, Jim Dunford, took less than 60 seconds to do a complete evaluation of the car. Dunford, a master race car fabricator, assessed the tC’s rollcage and chassis and pronounced, “If you want to make the race, it can be done, but you’re looking at a lot of work. If you jump on it now, I bet you can be on track in 24 hours.”
After GST owner Mike Warfield powered the car and pushed the starter button, the turbo tC came to life. It was possible. The following day and night were a blur, but with the GST Motorsports team and all of the drivers pitching in, making the race wasn’t a question—it was a guarantee.
By David Pratte
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