All photograph credit: Luke E.
On August 19th and 20th 2016 Club 456 finished its season with an appearance at the Trackjunkies two day time attack event at Castrol Raceway in Edmonton Alberta. The conditions were great for some fast times to be put down on the track with a fairly decent field turning up. Over the 2 days there were approximately 40 cars entered in multiple classes.
Although the event was unsanctioned by the WCMA it was ran very well and offered transponder timing as well as the usual professional package put on by the track junkies organization. Club 456 racers were ready for the season finale and put down some personal best times even though our silver Evo 4 went off track and suffered a cracked wheel in qualifying.
The event highlighted a few things for me personally in amateur time attack and made me reminisce about my time in Japan and analyze the Japanese way of doing things. Lets not forget that time attack is a Japanese sport. Time attack is meant to be about precision and perfection as well as the drive to pull the absolute fastest lap out of an automobile on the day.
When I was living in Osaka I was involved on the periphery with the Japanese Corolla class racing. My roommate was a Corolla class amateur race driver and he and I spoke a lot about what makes a successful car at any level of racing. The fact of the matter was that even at the amateur level the most successful cars had a team behind them.
These teams had specialists in every discipline. A mechanic, a driver, someone who had garage space, a body man, tire guy, and so on and so forth. In the Japanese amateur scene you would rarely see a one man show and if there was an owner operator who did it all himself he would rarely be successful.
At the Track Junkies event I damaged a wheel and was able to limp the car back into the pits to assess the damage. My teammates were there to jack the car up and give me some pointers on what they saw. I deemed our silver Evo “good enough to run” and ended up putting down a decent enough time to be effective the following day. The point is there was some deliberation, support and early the next day my teammate traded sleep to have another friend of his get up early as well to swap tires on to a good set of wheels so that I was able to compete on day 2.
That’s what amateur racing is about and the Japanese have it right: Small victories by a group working towards one common goal. Looking around the track on day 2 I noticed most of the competitors were there on their own. Without my team mates I would not have been able to finish day 2. I would have scrambled to get the tire change done and I would have likely packed it in having a damaged car. With extra eyes and opinions I was given confidence to continue, all of us should take the opportunity to be supported by others.
2017 will be an exciting year for Club 456. We will be competing in events in three provinces. Our major event will be sending cars to the 60th running of the Knox Mountain Hillclimb… and we will be doing it as a team. See you at the track!
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