member stories – Page 2 – Chapman Report Online

May 22, 2010

A piece of Lotus F1 History

The mailman just brought me this amazing piece of Lotus F1 history: a piston from the Cosworth DFV engine #339 used in the Lotus 81 Formula 1 car.

In the 70s and 80s, Team Lotus was in the habit of keeping the pistons from rebuilds to use as VIP gifts. Each engine’s pistons were labeled and stored but not all were presented. With reference to the team’s archives, Classic Team Lotus is able to identify the detailed competition history for the engines in which the pistons ran. A great deal of polishing, then mounting on a wooden plinth, complete with presentation plaque, makes a rather special item of memorabilia.

Now while a piston from an F1 engine is amazing in itself (Ferrari charges >$600 for a 2000 piston), this particular engine has some additional history that makes it even more unique. The DFV 339 was used by not one but two F1 world Champions: Mario Andretti used it in his final season at Lotus while Nigel Mansell used it during his first two seasons in F1.

The piston comes with documentation of the engines usage and you can see that while it was used primarily in practice and testing, it was also used by Andretti in the 1980 USA GP West where he retired after a first corner accident.

If you’d like to get your hands on some original Team Lotus history, head on over to the Classic Team Lotus webstore and be prepared to fight the temptation to buy out the entire store.

[via The Racing Geek]

May 9, 2010

Lotus F1 car in Iron Man 2

Movie fans have been pouring into the theaters this weekend to watch Iron Man 2, the sequel to the 2008 hit about the Marvels mechanized super Hero. In the movie, the first meeting between Iron Man and Whiplash occurs during the Historic Grand Prix of Monaco which is a real annual event for historic F1 and F3 cars and is held 2 weeks before the Monaco Grand Prix.

Now the more more eagle eyed motorsport fans would have seen that P3 was listed “Locke” with “Chapman” in P2 plus one car on the grid looked suspiciously like a JPS liveried Lotus. At this point I contacted GGLC member and Historic Grand Prix racer, Chris Locke to see if he was associated with the movie and and he referred me to this blog post which explains how the movie producers borrowed his fantastic Lotus 77 for the movie along with 5 other historic grand prix cars.

caption="Image by Jerry Garrett" — Lotus 77 on the start line. Image by Jerry Garrett

The actual race scenes were shot in a giant green screen in Downey Studios with the 6 real cars and 19 other additional cars that were built based on the design of the 1978 Wolf F1 car. In the photo above you can see the Lotus 77 on the right of the grid. Only 2 of the faux F1 cars actually ran and most of the on track action was created using CGI to insert the cars. The actual confrontation scene was shot on the set using one of the running cars and a lot of pyrotechnic explosions. The photo below shows the Chris (left) hanging out on set after the scenes had been filmed.

Chris Locke and James King on set. Image by Jerry Garrett

For more info on Chris Locke and his historic racing check out his website at Checkered Past Racing and also drop by the Historic Grand Prix website. If you who haven’t seen Iron Man 2 yet, I highly recommend watching it and don’t forget to keep your eyed peeled for the Lotus (2:03 mark in the trailer below).

[via Jerry Garrett]

March 26, 2010

GGLC Membership Map

A few days ago I received the latest GGLC Memberhip roster in the mail (if you have not gotten one please contact David Anderson (ggmail AT gglotus DOT org) to update your postal address) and was fascinated to see the large number of cities that our members are spread over. After talking it over with a few folks at our last monthly meeting I hacked together the following map of club members:

View Larger Map

Each marker on the map represents a zipcode that has at least one GGLC member. The size and colour of the markers varies based on the number of members in each location (darker and larger = more members). You can also get the information about the marker by clicking on it to get the name of the location as well as the number of members. You can also click here to see a larger version of the map or click here to see a zoomed in map showing the Bay Area.

February 2, 2010

Remembering Roger Becker

The news of Roger Beckers retirement has brought out fond remembrances of his time at Lotus. One of these comes from our very own Barry Spencer who used to work in the Engineering department at Group Lotus. In his own words:

The very first week ( Nov 1980 ) I was in the US, I spent it at the SF auto show with Loose imported cars. That week I meet Miss San Francisco and we dated for two and a half years. The first time I went back to England after moving to the US was in 1982. I took Lisa with me and had an appointment to show her the Lotus factory. Roger gave us the complete tour and then he asked Lisa if she would like to go for a ride in a Lotus. Lisa sat in the front and I was in the back of an Excel. On the test track we go and all I could hear was Lisa screaming. A great ride with an awesome driver.

A big thanks to Barry for sharing this story with us. Rogers influence on Lotus will certainly be missed by the entire Lotus community but we do hope to still keep seeing him at various Lotus events.

September 10, 2009

GGLC Club Members win at SCCA Nationals

Congratulations to GGLC Club Members Shelly Monfort and Ben Martinez for winning their classes at the 2009 Tire Rack SCCA Solo National Championship. Shelly won her 3rd national championship in the Super Stock Ladies class in her Lotus Elise against heavy Corvette opposition while Ben took the D Street Prepared class in his Merkur XR4 Ti. Additionally club member Jesus Villarreal was the runner-up in C Prepared while autocross series regular Elise Sias finished 3rd in the Street Modified Ladies class.

Full results available at here (SSL) and here (D Street Prep). Photos by Norcalturbo

May 31, 2009

Going for a win – GGLC Members compete in the 24 Hours of Lemons

Story originally posted on the Racing geek:

The Goin’ For Broken race at Reno Fernley raceway was the 5th 24 Hours of LeMons race for the Formula BMW team and the debut of our new Pink Pig race livery. Additionally the car was quite a bit lighter than the last race with the sunroof, dash, heater core and inner door skins being removed. We cracked our windshield during the dash removal which we replaced with a sheet of lexan to further drop weight. We were going with our regular driver lineup of Guy Argo and GGLC members Gabriel Matus, Rob Dietsch and myself. Since the racedays were of unequal length (8.5 hours Saturday, 5 hours Sunday), our plan was to have Guy, Rob and myself run a single 3 – 3.5 hour stint with Gabe splitting his stint between the two days. The long stints would minimize our driver changes and would allow us to pass people in the pits and finish higher than the 10th place we recorded at Thunderhill 08.

I was driving the first stint for our team and got off to an inauspicious start when I had to pull in to the pits just before the green flag (Lemons has a rolling start) because of a loud noise and vibration from the right front on right hand turns. It turned out that our new wheels were rubbing against the right front strut while at speed. We had test fitted the new wheel on the left front tire where it fit with no issues but we had forgotten that we had bent our struts for extra camber at Altamont 07 which meant that while they fit fine on the left there was rubbing on the right which was aggravated on right hand turns. Luckily we were able to borrow a wheel spacer (Thanks Squirrels of Fury!) but by the time we put that on we were already 2 laps down on the leader without having driven a single lap. 🙁

When I first went out under green my immediate impression was that we were waaaay faster than most of the cars out there and was passing several cars at each turn. This was probably down to my familiarity with the track and the car because after about 5-10 laps the cars became more difficult to pass as the other drivers became more comfortable with the track. About an hour into the race I noticed that the fuel gauge on the car was still registering full despite having plenty of hard racing laps in that time. This meant that our gauge was broken and we would have to time our pitstops based on fuel starvation. At about the 2 hour mark the car started fuel-starving on the fast right of turn 14 but was still doing pretty well elsewhere on track. We decided to keep going as long as we could and/or to wait for the next yellow. I kept driving the car in higher gears to help with the fuel economy but after about 5-6 laps the fuel starvation was getting bad enough that we were sputtering on the straights after right handers and i brought the car in for a green flag fuel and driver stop. It was about the 2.5 hour mark when I came in and despite the fact that my long stint had put us back on the lead lap (9th overall), we were still well short of the 3+ hour stint we were originally planning on. The good part was that we knew that we could use the right hand turn fuel starvation as a gas gauge to decide when to time our next pit stop.

Photo by Jeff Balliet/ASK photography

Guy drove the next stint and kept in touch with the leaders. At this point we knew that we were in the top ten and were basically trying to put in reasonable laps without doing anything crazy. Guy drove for about 3.5 hours before the fuel starvation became bad enough that we were forced to do another green flag stop. At this point we were 4th overall and just 5 laps behind the race leader despite having the slowest “fastest lap” of any car in the top 15. Gabe got into the car with about 2.5 hours left in the day and was putting in some excellent lap times when he had an unfortunate spin at turn 15 which brought us in for a black flag penalty. Since we had been good racers for most of the day (and bribed the judges with some excellent Guatemalan rum 😉 ) we were let off with a driver change penalty which put me in back in the driver seat for the final 10 laps of the day.

At this point the traffic had thinned considerably and I was able to able to drop my fastest lap down from a 2:51.844 to a 2:46.177. Right about this time the #72 E30 of the B-Team (who I knew from Lotus Talk) pulled up right behind me and tried to get past. I knew that I wasn’t racing them for position so I did not try to block, but I certainly wasn’t going to move aside and let them past either. They tried a few different attempts at getting past but I hung onto the inside line and was able to stay in front. About 5 laps into the battle they came right alongside me on the front straight which led to the action you see in the image below.

Source photos from Jeff M/The B-Team. Animation by Rahul Nair.

This moment started as we were coming onto the main straight when I got a bad run into the corner while the B-Team got a great slingshot out and pulled alongside me down the straight. This had happened a couple of times before but since I always held the inside line into the esses they had had to lift in the end and tuck in line behind me. On this particular lap the #26 Team Carpet Pissers CRX was pulling out of the pits and made it into the first bend of the esses right just before the two of us. Normally I would have tucked in line behind the CRX and passed them going into turn 2 but on this lap I spotted an opening and decided to pass them between the 2nd and 3rd esses expecting that the B-Team would get boxed in behind them which would give me some more breathing room. As luck would have it the B-Team driver decided to do the exact same thing on the outside and suddenly we were three wide through the turn at about 95mph. I was up on the rumble strip on the left while the B-Team was on 2 wheels in the gravel on the right. At this point the driver in the CRX sees the B-Team on his right (and I suppose didnt see me on his left) and jinks left to avoid them. The front bumper of his car hits my right front wheel and leaves a black line down both doors. The impacts pushes my car to the left but I am able to maintain control while the CRX unfortunately spins out. Amazingly both B-Team and I are still side by side entering turn 2 and I am able to get ahead under braking. While it looked (and was) pretty exciting it was still a dumb move on my part especially since we were not racing for position and the next day both B-Team and I went up to the driver of the CRX and apologized for putting him in a difficult spot.

At the end of day one we had completed 129 laps and we in 4th place overall, 6 laps behind the Eyesore Racing FrankenMiata. We were still the second slowest fast lap in the top 10 but we used our long stints to make up for our wheel issues at the start as well as 3 green flag pit stops. Now we just had to keep on doing more of the same for day 2 and hope that the leaders would trip-up enough for us to pass them in the pits.

Day 2 started with Gabe driving the car. It was obvious from the lap times that we had no chance on catching the FrankenMiata with speed alone. They were pulling away from us at 10 seconds a lap when they suddelny spun and stalled on course on lap 5. As they were being towed in we began to push like hell to make up laps and we got back 4 of the 6 laps before they got out on course again. Gabe kept putting in consistent laps but the FrankenMiata was back on pace and was consistant pulling out 8 seconds or so per lap. Both teams came in for a driver swap just a lap apart which kept us 3 laps behind with 3 hours to go. Rob put in some stellar laptimes including our fastest race lap of a 2:42.809 but in the end it just was not enough to catch the FrankenMiata.

We ended finishing first in class and 5th overall just 4 laps behind the FrankenMiata which hung on to win the race. We did get a nice trophy to stick on the mantel place but I personally am still annoyed at some of the mistakes we made which cost us a possible win. The good part is that we know what to fix and we know what we need to do at Buttonwillow in 3 months. We wont rest till we get some nickels (Lemons cash prizes are awarded in nickels 🙂 )

Rahul Nair
GGLC Blog Editor
www.rahulnair.net/blog