MMy Ferrari Challenge Experience

[G.Irish]

A few Historics pics

To be honest I didn't take as many pics of the historics as I should have. Hopefully the CCVT guys took some to fill in the gaps.

This car was not even a Ferrari...it was pre-Ferrari. This was a 1935 Alfa Romeo grand prix car from when Enzo was the race team manager for Alfa. Check out the cool side mounted oil coolers.





Alfa vs Bulldozer


Check out the state of the art external shocks and leaf springs




And without further adieu, my favorite car of the weekend, the Porsche 962. They didn't run during the weekend unfortunately, evidently it was being delivered to the track because it was changing hands. What a shame. Still, a marvelous and beautiful car.









You can actually see the turbos through open vents in the bodywork




288 GTO. One of a long line of Ferrari uber cars.


BB512



Miscellaneous Pics



What's wrong with this picture?


Anti-seizing the axle splines with...Copaslip. Seriously, that's what its called. Cop-a-slip. "Just the tip, just the tip...can I cop a slip?"


Bling!


Kevin showing off his manly nitrogen bottle


Tyler showing Kevin how its really done


Tyler was one of two high school guys that helped out this weekend. He is a multiple time national champion 4-stroke karter and races Spec E30 with NASA now. The other young guy's name was Mike and he is racing Skip Barber and actually won an internship with the Formula BMW program at the USGP. Yes I am jealous and I hate them both.

But it is kinda cool having someone lower in the pit crew food chain than me.

[HAULN-SS]

That guy's shoes?

[CaptainHenreh]

That guy's shoes?

Pssh. That's nothing.

I wish I had gotten a picture of th M5 Guy's Elf Shoes at VIR last time.

I thought I was going to get "beaten real bad, cowboy".

[.RJ]

This is hilarious. Well done :thumbup:

Kevin showing off his manly nitrogen bottle


Tyler showing Kevin how its really done

[Maengelito]

i still think the banana in the tailpipe of that 360 is more hilarious, but it seems like these are a bunch of cool people to hang with

[BLINGMW]

"Just the tip, just the tip...can I cop a slip"

Please tell me this isn't a real song. Or Phrase. Or anything other than something your odd mind came up with. :lol:

[G.Irish]

"Just the tip, just the tip...can I cop a slip"

Please tell me this isn't a real song. Or Phrase. Or anything other than something your odd mind came up with. :lol:

The "just the tip" is me. I just added copaslip to the end.

[DMClark]

Pictures from the historic races:
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Few paddock cars, cars on track during lunch and challenge race:
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[mrbaggio]

G, any chance you could get the images from the first few posts re-hosted. I would like to see them.

[G.Irish]

G, any chance you could get the images from the first few posts re-hosted. I would like to see them.

Sure. I'll have it up in a day or so since right now I'm trying to finish an article.

[GreenFlag]

Gerald,
Great write up and pics. It was good to see you at the track and it's cool that you are crewing for the Ferraris. That was definitely a good weekend.

I'll have to say though, working start for Ferrari Challenge seemed to be more hectic than working for an 80-car NASA field. I don't think there was a car without body damage by the end of the weekend.

It was good when we finally learned that the sound of a carbon fiber rear diffuser dragging the track was considered a normal sound....saved a lot of radio calls from the flaggers.

Favorite moment of the weekend? Throwing the checker on the #8 430...and having him immediately go four-off on the front straightaway and stay there until brake marker one....while still dragging what was left of his rear diffuser (I think his rear bumper cover was stuck on the nose of a yellow car behind).

Steve
(formerly NASA's Starter Steve)

[G.Irish]

So I am here in Montreal for the Canadian GP. We just had a 14+ hour day and I just got back from clubbing in Montreal. Honestly its a bit odd that we had such a long day considering that no one crashed.

As you might expect, the Formula 1 cars are marvelous. When we got to go out for our practice we brought our carts out into the F1 pits and we got to take plenty of close pics of the F1 garages. Honda F1 was bringing one of their cars in when we rolled up and I was able to get a good overhead shot. I also got a funny shot of a McLaren mechanic eating ice cream while working on the car.

Lots of crashes and offs today. The track is only used for F1 so it doesnt have much, if any rubber laid down. To be honest I was surprised our drivers didnt get into trouble since the F1 guys were all over the place.

Tell you what, people are not lying when they say the Montreal women are hot. Maybe not quite like Vegas or LA but close. Maybe better.

Bonehead move of the day candidates:

*Guy who ran his pontoon boat up onto the concrete ramp and had to get two spectators to push him off
*2 French dudes who just decided to walk up in our trailer area while they were LE DRUNK.
*Old guy who leaned up against our people barriers and fell over and busted his ass
*Me. The F1 cars were out for practice and we had road our scooters up to the viewing area. We were about to leave so I kick started my scooter but it was so loud I did not think it was on. I yanked the throttle and the damned scooter did a 12 o clock wheelie and almost lept out of my hands and into a group of spectators....

Make sure you catch the race on Fox at 1 pm EST. Also look for Moto GP at Catalunya on CBS at 1:30. RJ make sure you Tivo that ish!

[Hunter]

I hope you have a damn good time at the F1 race, I wanted to drive up there this weekend, but it's graduation/free everything time. I do hope the traffic isn't too bad around montreal because I'm making a trek out to Mosport in Ontario on sunday and have to make it to the track by 9 or they don't let me in to camp.

Oh and qualifying was awesome to watch today!

[Maengelito]

i havent watched a ton of F1 racing, but from watching today, there's been a lot more action than i remember from other F1 races. definitely a lot of good action for those who caught it

[G.Irish]

I had a draft of this post sitting in my email forever and its almost time for spring cleaning. Its a bit abbreviated because there are some things that are hazy now so long after the fact. Here goes:

First Impressions

We got to Montreal Thursday evening and drove straight out to the track to help with the final setup of the pits and everything. At night I couldn't see much, except that the whole Ferrari Challenge paddock was crammed into a smaller space than normal. No biggie I suppose. We were one of 3 support series (Formula 2000 and Formula BMW being the others) running that weekend so space was at a premium.

The next day when we rolled out to the track in the morning I got my first decent look at the circuit. Its on a man-made island that was constructed for the Olympics some time ago. Since there was not a whole lot of real estate to build the track on it is virtually completed lined in concrete walls and armco.

(This is the backstraight on our way back to the paddock, I'm driving the pit kart)


I had a sense of imminent doom seeing all that armco. I just knew that one of our drivers was gonna hit it and we were gonna end up staying late to fix it, even though we only had one session a day. Our reckoning came in qualifying on Saturday

You Peons are not Allowed

They had us paddock waaayyy far away from the F1 paddock. They didn't want us mere plebians mixing with the F1 royalty, at least not without paying dearly for the privilege. So I never got the chance to walk around the F1 paddock. It kind of sucked but our Ferrari Challenge passes didn't allow us to go all around the track, apparently they changed it from last year. However we did get access to the pits during our on track sessions so we got to see all of the cars and mechanics from relatively close and even got to see some of the drivers walking by.



In the following two pics a McLaren mechanic is eating ice cream while working on the car. This was funny to me because the bossman Ron Dennis is a famously overzealous neat freak. To the point that at their headquarters no one was allowed to bring food and drink in the building (later the rule was relaxed to allow water). I wonder if the Ronster would've flipped out after seeing this.








Here a Honda F1 employee applies that the decals for that awful livery


Felipe Massa




As always, we arrived at the track before 7 o'clock in the morning. It was really cool to see the F1 team members and head honchos coming into the track in rental vans, just like us. Only we got to the track about a half hour earlier than them...lazy bastards.

Da Crash

So yeah, the qualifying crash. The whole crew was in the pits for qualifying and we were watching the cars on track on the LCD TV's in the F1 pit garages (we were right in front of Scuderia Toro Rosso). I forget which turn it was but late in the session one of our drivers spun on a corner exit and backed the car into the armco. For awhile it looked like he was stranded. Maybe he couldn't get the gearbox into drive as the gearbox hangs off the back of the engine. So the car is parked on the side of the track and the corner station is waving the yellow flag. Suddenly he found a gear or got a little bit of drive and started to pull out, but the car stalled or something in the middle of the track. The first four or five cars coming by had slowed down because of the waving yellow but...

One guy apparently didn't see the waving yellow or had ignored it and came blasting out of the turn full speed. He came up on our guy parked perpendicular on the track and -... The camera view switched right before impact! The whole crew yelled at the same time, "AAHHHHH!!" Loud enough that it startled all of the Toro Rosso mechanics!



When the camera switched back apparently the oncoming driver swerved at the last possible moment. I don't know how close he was to hitting our guy but it was easily the closest near-miss t-bone I have ever seen. Our guy got lucky, that would've hurt.

The crash turned our relatively short day into a 14 hour deal but our happy customer was able to make the race.

Spectators

With over 100,000 people at the track we had a lot of foot traffic. It was kind of weird to have all kinds of people stopping to take pictures. Some even wanted us to pose in the pictures

Then there were these two drunk French guys who just waltzed up under our canopy. They both had little coolers with 12 packs in em and were already pretty deep. I was about to tell them to 'le get the fuck out of here' but they were speaking drunken French so I told them to talk to Jason. He talked to them a bit and then they latched on to one of the driver's son and starting yakking to him. Good, that ought to keep them occupied. I saw them smoking something though. I came back later and I swear I smelled weed...

But to balance out the experience of the drunk dudes some hot sisters from Toronto rolled up and were staring at our cars. So I took the opportunity to chat them up and bring them under the tent for photo ops. After all, no one on the team would object to letting hot women past our people barriers. They actually didn't have tickets for the race but decided on a whim to drive out and check out practice and qualifying and party in town that. So I got one of their numbers and Kevin I tried to meet up with them that night.

(Note the 'Dayum' face Frankie is making in the background)




The good news is that we were able to actually meet up with them, but the bad news was that it didn't happen until like 4 in the morning. We hung out for about an hour but Kevin and I had to dip out. 45 minutes of sleep then back to the track! Still we had a pretty good time that night. Unfortunately Kevin lost his phone so we ended up losing contact with them =(

There were actually a lot of women at the race and quite a few women working as volunteer pit marshals and such. Very surprising considering that typically at other races in North America the only women involved are umbrella girls. How odd it is that just across the border women are more into racing. Or maybe its just that way for Formula 1?

The Race

It was a pretty damned dramatic race. Turn 1, front runner gets punted off track, contact all over the place, full course caution. Next the 2 of the leaders got tangled trying to avoid a lapped car and our guy (the owner of the dealership) ended up in the lead. Another full course caution ensued but when the green flag dropped there were only 2 laps to go and Allie was able to take his first win of the series. It was a particularly happy win for the team since Allie had been racing Ferrari Challenge since it was 348 Challenge and now he was finally able to stand on the top step of the podium.

* * * M O ' P I C S * * *

We affectionately called the air wands we use to operate the air jacks on the cars; air dildos


Jason was known to really ram that air dildo in there


The guy in the front of the picture with the had was a pretty cool dude who worked for Ferrari North America. He started out working at GM doing some testing and what not (out of college I believe) and eventually was able to snatch an opportunity at Ferrari. During the week he's a regional financial manager, on the weekends, he helps run the series.


"That's not a torque wrench. This is a torque wrench."


For some silly reason the Ferrari Challenge powers that be had the teams mount the transponder on the back bumper of the cars. When at VIR a car that had crashed was still shown circulating the track at timing and scoring is when they realized the folly of their ways. Apparently one guy rearended someone and got the leading car's transponder embedded in his front bumper. So yeah, Jason is here relocating it.


Probably the only paddock in the world where you'll see a ship floating by.

[WRXtranceformed]

Dude that is so phat, I'm jealous!

[John]

Montreal sure is grand in the summer...

Are you going to support them again this year?

[G.Irish]

Nah, I'll be doing more stuff for TOV this year as well as some other evil schemes so I'm not going to have the time.

[ScottyB]

great writeup, i'd love to see that venue...

[G.Irish]

great writeup, i'd love to see that venue...

I'd say Montreal is actually not a great place to watch Formula 1. The sight lines aren't great and its flat so you just don't get to see a lot of the cars. There's usually a lot of action from people hitting stuff but it doesn't rate among the better tracks to watch a race. The city of Montreal is pretty fun though, no doubt about that.

Of course, its the only race in North America right now so its probably going to be the most economical race you can attend unless you're going to be in Europe for some reason.