Home tracks – every racer has one. For some, it may be the track nearest to where you live. For others, it may be the track you started racing at or the track where you perform the best. For most people, it’s likely to be the track where you’ve spent the most time. If you’re fortunate enough to live near Watkins Glen, Road America, Lime Rock Park, Road Atlanta, Seattle International or most any track in the East, then your home track is probably a beautiful, bucollic setting, nestled in tree-lined hills. Aaaah, it warms the cockles of my heart just thinking about it. For those of us who live in Southern California, the picture is not quite as rosy. For racers as far south as the Mexican border and as far north as Santa Barbara, our home track (in fact until recently, our only track) has been Willow Springs Raceway.
Recently, I was giving a speech at the wedding of Alex Seiler, my long-time friend, racing teammate and business partner. As part of the process of raking him over the coals in front of one hundred or so of his family and friends, it became necessary for me to try and describe to the collected audience this place where he and I have wasted so much of our adult lives together. Somehow, I had to boil down the essence of this place into one or two sentences. What I ended up telling them was, “Picture, if you will, a lovely little spot that combines the scenic beauty of the surface of Mars… with all the accommodations of a Mississippi prison camp.” That – in a nutshell – is Willow Springs.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve spent some of the most enjoyable days of my life at this Godforsaken circuit – but jeez! First of all, like all great Southern California racetracks of the past, it’s in the middle of the desert. I guess between zoning laws and property values, you just can’t build a track in So. Cal. unless it is either in the middle of the desert or on a National Superfund toxic waste site. Welcome to the Stringfellow Raceway! Home of the DDT 250.
One of the aspects of “Willow” that can make it a challenge is the climactic disturbances. Most tracks have weather – Willow has acts of nature. You know, the type that you normally only see on Fox or the Learning Channel in docu-dramas like, “When God Went Berserk,” or “Killer Weather of the Kalahari.” First and foremost amongst these little “climactic shifts” is the wind. Some days it may be dead calm, while on others you might have your Turner stripped to bare metal by lunchtime. Now, it’s not always this bad… it just seems to be that way when I’m there!
The other weather peculiarity is the extremes of temperature. In late fall and early spring, it can be beautiful – sunny 80 degrees. This idyllic weather blesses, maybe, two vintage race dates of the year. However, I’ve competed in a number of July 4th weekend events where (I kid you not) the temperature has been 115 degrees or higher. The upside to this, of course, is that races can start from the pit lane because everyone’s tires were up to temperature at 7:45 in the morning.
The weather may be a nuisance, but you get used to it after awhile (not unlike a recurring rash, I suppose). But, the thing that really fills me with track envy is the beautiful green race courses that the rest of you folks get to enjoy. Not just because it is so beautiful, but because it is so much easier on the cars! If you spin off course at Lime Rock or Mid-Ohio, what happens? You get grass stuffed up underneath the car. An annoyance, sure, but not a very big deal. You go off at Willow, anywhere, and it is like doing the Baja 1000 in an over-full gravel truck. I once went off at Willow’s infamous turn 9 (a very fast, decreasing radius turn leading onto the front straight). The minute I left the track, it sounded like I was inside one of those rock pulverizers they have at gravel quarries. Pow, Bang, Poppita-Poppita, Bang, Bang! When it all came to an end, I was completely blinded. All I could see was brown. The cacophony of sound that seemed to go on forever had been replaced by the sound of me hacking my lungs out because I was in the middle of a dust-filled mushroom cloud, the size of which would have made J. Robert Oppenheimer proud. While the car sustained no real damage in all of this, it looked like someone had dropped a skip-loader worth of dirt over the top of it. I discovered new little caches of pebbles in the car at every race for the next three seasons.
All in all, I guess home tracks really are like family: you don’t necessarily get to pick them, but you have to love them… faults and all.
