I’ve been thinking about 2020 and reflecting on the past years of racing and I realized that we are coming up on an important milestone. 100 Races! It made me think that this is a good time to think back to all of the tracks I’ve been at over the years. Each has a special memory for me – great ones and some not so great. Here’s how they come to mind for me.
Brainerd International Raceway (BIR) – Brainerd Minnesota
My first time on a race track was in my street CRX at BIR during a track day sponsored by Minnesota Autocross Club. Little did I know that I would be hooked that day for sure. I even outbraked myself in turn three!
That day at BIR, I decided I would move from autocrossing not road racing – I went up to spectate the fall race and watched my future teammate go off the top of two into the tire wall on the outside. I didn’t know Wade at the time. But, we would be come good friends as a part of Mark Utecht’s Mayhem Racing team. I had a lot of great wins at Brainerd, and one major disaster.
The disaster. In 1994, we had wrapped up the CenDiv and Land O Lakes Championships in our ITC Civic. We’d won a ton of races, I think we won all but two or three that season. We decided to head on down to Putnam Park in Indiana for the first Cen Div Regional Runoffs. We had been pretty donimanant all season and I was feeling confident of our chances.
This was my second season of races at BIR, so I was a bit cocky about how much of the runoff I could use at the exit of corners – low horsepower cars don’t tend to spin the tires at the exit of higher speed corners, so I kept on straightening out turn six.
Yeah, disaster. I looked in the mirrors and saw a GT5 CRX approaching on the run to five. He was way, way back, so I took my normal line through six, – turning in a little early and going off the track at the exit to use all of the road and more. However…
When I came back on track and turned in to the seven-eight complex, the CRX was already inside me on my drivers rear. I turned across his nose as if he wasn’t there. My fault completely, I never saw him there. I thought he was too far back in five to catch me in seven. Yeah, wrong about that.
I turned across his nose and immediately headed off track backwards – it’s a pretty fast part of the track for us there – maybe 80+ mph or so. It’d been a dry summer and the sand was soft. The car dug in on the driver’s side rear and the front end lifted off the ground as the car went in an awkward end for end flip and roll. I remember being pretty high off the ground at one point.
Then the car came down flat on the driver’s side, hard. My head hit the soft sand through the drivers window net. I was a little woozy and took a little bit to get out through the passengers side window. Odd to be standing on grass and sand through the drivers side window and getting out through the pass side window while the car is still on its side. Other than getting my first win, that’s probably my most enduring memory of Brainerd.
