Steve Davis – Driver Profile

Interview and photos by Dennis Gray
Steve Davis of Carmel, California spends many weekends at the helm of a Eagle Mk 5 participating in the competitive Formula 5000 Revival Race Series. Davis is a repeat F5000 Revival Series Champion, having won the championship in the inaugural 2008 season, in addition to being the 2010 champion.
Steve sat down to discuss his Eagle Mk.5, his Formula-5000 2010 Championship season, and himself. Besides all the history, Steve also shares with Sports Car Digest a lap of Laguna Seca in his Eagle, gear by gear, bump by bump, turn by turn. Great stuff.
Sports Car Digest: Could you give us a quick history of Steve Davis?
Steve Davis: I grew up in Ohio and I just always had a fascination with cars. In 1969 my cousin had a ’62 Corvette. One morning about 4 a.m. we headed out for Indianapolis for Pole Day. He knew Bobby Johns, who was running that year. Unfortunately it rained all day. We got to walk around Gasoline Alley and meet some of the people. I remember the Corvette Club got to go out onto the track, four wide all the way around the track. I was hooked. We got to meet Bobby Johns, got to walk around, look at the cars. I remember Hurtubise had that huge wedge-shaped, front-engine Mallard there that year. It was great fun, and it just kind of spurred me on with cars. I remember at the end of the month laying on the apartment floor listening to the Indy 500. Growing up in Southern Ohio, you could pick any radio station and you could hear it live. A couple of years later a buddy of mine had a big field and he would buy old Corvairs and we would blast around in the field and see who had the best time.
We weren’t the best mechanics, we did the main bearings on a Corvair once, we didn’t have a torque wrench so we asked the farmer down the road if we could borrow his. He said, “You boys don’t need a torque wrench, just tighten them as tight as you can get them, and then give them one more turn.” So we put about an eight-foot pipe on the breaker bar on that Corvair. When we were done we pulled that car down the highway at 50mph, let the clutch out and it didn’t turn an inch. So there’s my introduction to the importance of actually measuring and doing things correctly.
The first car I actually had ownership in was a Fiat 500 Cinquecento that a buddy of mine and I split when I was 14. We bought it for $50 from a country preacher. That preacher must have been truly blessed because the car looked and ran great when we bought it, but within two weeks it was shedding parts all over Cincinnati. When the exhaust broke off the engine we ended up spot-welding lawn mower mufflers to the head and selling it for $25. At 15 I bought a Triumph motorcycle in a box. A ’52 all in parts, a ’52 frame, ’56 engine, ’54 transmission, and built it in the basement over the winter so it was ready for my 16th birthday. It was a fun bike and I got to experiment a little bit with making it run, making it stop and doing all those good things. I even used a torque wrench! In the meantime, I got hold of a Healey 100-6, and that’s actually the car I got to take my driver’s test in. It was pouring down rain and the side curtains leaked and the poor guy who got to go with me just couldn’t figure out what I was doing in that car. You couldn’t see out of the windows, no defroster or anything else. Finally, after about five minutes into the drive, he said, “Just take me back, you passed.” Buying, fixing, and selling cars went on for a while. Just to cut it a little bit short, by the time I was 18 I had had about 20 vehicles. All of them in the $50 to $300 range. At 16 I drove from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico by myself in a Spitfire. So I really, really enjoyed cars. At 18 I ended up in the Navy to let them fund my education. I had figured out I would never be able to afford school on $1.50 an hour at the Lincoln-Mercury dealer, so I took a few years, joined the Navy, saw the world, and I actually found a career in software.
While I was in the Navy, I also met my wife. She was my first boss when I went to Guam. So we hit it off and I still loved cars, but things got set aside while we did our thing in the Navy. We had interesting cars, TR3s, Fiats, Mercedes, Jaguars. Anything that could be fixed and be fun. Once out of the Navy we were able to leverage what we learned and start our careers in software. We worked mainly with wineries and distilleries. We had a great time traveling around to all the wineries, wine auctions and events. We had a bunch of cars through that time, nothing too special. A few BMWs, things that were reliable that could get me to and from the work.
In 1989 my wife bought me a three-day course at Jim Russell at Laguna Seca. We lived across the street and we could see Turn 6 from our deck. There were probably 25 people in the class. For whatever reason, maybe all of that driving beaters in the snow in Ohio, I was about second-quick in the class. I thought that was about it. I was in my 30s and I thought there was no point in going on. Then I went out and watched one of their pro races and took a stopwatch, and I thought, “Hey, I could do that.” As it turned out I ended up running with Russell Racing for eight or nine years, which was a great experience. I ran some of their pro races and their school races. I got to meet a lot of people, Clint and Casey Mears, Mario Dominguez, of course they were just kids then, but it was great to meet them and run with them. These were all Formula Mazdas. We decided to try SCCA with Formula Mazda, and we ran several years and had several cars there. I still did not know quite what I was doing mechanically for setup on the cars. We could win a race here or there and then be slow somewhere else.
By probably 2001, when I was going to sell the car, I started to realize what was going on. So, we sold those cars and bought a Jaguar XK120. I thought I was pretty much done with racing, and I thought we would do touring, maybe do the Colorado Grand, that sort of thing. And then one day I was sitting at my house across from Laguna Seca and I heard cars running at the track. I was heading into town anyway so I took the XK, drove over, and pulled up in front of the bathrooms. When I came out there were guys with a clipboard looking over my car. I asked what they were doing and he said teching the car. I asked did it pass, and he said yes. It turned out it was a HMSA event weekend. So I went over, signed in, and paid my money. It was a couple of hours before the start so I ran home and bolted in the roll bar. I got my gear and drove back to the track and found myself vintage racing for the first time. Had a great time, but the Jaguar was a really, really fast car and you only got one stop for each session, after that you had to go back and let it sit and cool for about an hour for the brakes to work again. So that first lap I could get most of the cars, and then I would just wave them by for the rest of the race. I started looking at the Jaguar and I thought, you know, we were doing 120 mph or so down into Turn 2, and I was sitting on a wooden floor and I’ve got an aluminum door that’s just a little thicker than a Budweiser can and it’s probably safer to go 150 mph in a proper race car, so I decided to look around.
About the same time, a friend of mine, Bruce Leeson, had been vintage racing a Lotus 69 Formula B car, but he also had a Formula 5000 car. I really didn’t know that much about the F5000 cars. I went out to watch him run a couple of times, and there weren’t very many 5000s running. He’d run with Can-Am or he’d run with Atlantics or Indycars, and he really didn’t have a lot of direct competition. I thought maybe I could do this. It’s a Chevrolet so it’s not so exotic money-wise. Bruce had started a group to organize Formula 5000 on the West Coast. He sent me an e-mail one day and said if you’re still looking for a car there is a guy down in Southern California who said he wanted to be put on the list but he doesn’t race his car anymore. It turned out to be this Eagle, #512. I was already going down to Simi Valley to look at a 332 that week, so we added a trip to Santa Ana to see the Eagle. The Eagle was just a couple of blocks from Gurney’s shop, and it had been sitting for 17 years. The owner was involved in some satellite-related business, so his warehouse was humidity- and temperature-controlled. The car was obviously something that he loved. It had sat for all those years and it looked brand new. It looked like a jewel in a museum. He had it restored in the mid-1980s by John Collins, who had worked with Gurney on the Le Mans effort when Gurney and Foyt won. John and his son Graham restored the car in the middle ’80s, and it’s as you see it today. They did a great job. The owner at the time, and rightly so, had a concern about who he was going to sell it to; whether they were going to drive the car, or if they were even qualified to, and to keep it original. We came to an agreement and that’s how I came to own the Eagle.

SCD: Did you have any hero drivers growing up?
SD: Well, A.J. Foyt certainly, and Mario Andretti certainly, and I liked Bobby Unser. Most of the guys, back then were allowed to say what they thought, and I enjoyed that. I think a lot of the brilliance of A.J. Foyt kind of went away when he became a team owner. And I was a little sad to see that when his father died, things kind of unraveled for him. But I think at the time, through the ’60s, on any given day there was no one better in the car. So, those were really my heroes. I have to say that I was not really involved in racing. I loved it, but it’s funny, growing up in Ohio all you had to do was go join the SCCA and get started. It’s really silly, but I did not know that until later in life. I would watch the races if I could, and I got hot rod magazines and all those things you get when you’re a kid. And Dan Gurney was certainly a hero, I never had a hero worship thing going on, but had a real respect because those guys, they could sit in anything and win. And did! I look at old magazines in the antique stores while my wife is looking at other stuff, and if you ever get a chance and you find someone who has a couple of hundred magazines from the late ’60s you can pick up any single one of them and Dan Gurney has won something. I was looking at magazines at Cannery Row and I picked up one and he was winning at Spa and then I picked up another and he had won at Riverside in a stock car. It’s pretty much like anything they sat in they won, they just had a feel.

SCD: Tell me about your first race – what really hooked you?
SD: In the Formula Mazda, as soon as we started we were in the top three all the time with many poles running at Russell. We couldn’t seem to win and I had a ton of second places, and everybody was kind of wondering when I was going to do this, because I would be on pole all the time. I just seemed to have a knack for trying to make each corner work and trying to find some space during qualifying and on that last lap or two just trying to do what it takes to get the pole. Then during the race, for whatever reason, I would drive a little more conservatively, a little more safely, and lose. One day I was driving and Case Montgomery was standing above Turn 2, and I was driving the wheels off giving 110 percent, but still running second. Something had happened to the leader and he was penalized and I didn’t know it. Case flagged me from Turn 2 and told me I was leading because I did not carry a radio. I dialed it back a bit and won the race. From that time on I started to figure out how to win a race. It was always fun, but then it became a mental challenge. I understood what was involved there. I would say it was always fun, but from then on the goal truly was winning the race and not just finishing.
SCD: When were you first exposed to Formula 5000?
SD: About 2001. I never saw the F5000s run during their heyday, though I had seen the cars now and then but I just never paid much attention to them. My friend who is also from Carmel, Bruce Leeson, has a McLaren M10B. So we started going to the races and looking at his car and it just kind of got me hooked to go out and give him some competition.
SCD: Do you remember the first time you saw an Eagle on the track?
SD: For F5000, it’s the one I bought. This is the first one I saw for this model Eagle. When I took it to Laguna Seca for the first time there had not been one on track for almost 18 years. The guy who sold it to me delivered it here to my house, and I went through the car for safety. A friend of mine, Frank D’Acquano helped me inspect the gearbox and rebuild the brakes. I put it on an open U-Haul trailer and took it to Laguna Seca, and before I got out of the Jeep the trailer was surrounded by people. Nobody had seen anything like it in years. That was the first time I drove it. When I bought it, the engine was oversize, it had a 350 engine and it had huge torque and no wings on it. And from Turn 6 all the way to Turn 8 at The Corkscrew it would spin the tires. So you would have to feather the throttle coming out of Turn 6 or it would spin the tires all the way to the top of The Corkscrew. Think Formula Ford on steroids.
SCD: Can you give us a little history of 512?
SD: It was originally bought by John Crean and James Garner’s AIR team. They bought three cars 511, 12 and 13. Davey Jordan was their driver. They had talked to a few other people about driving, I think Hobbs was originally going to be one of them in a Surtees, but that fell through. They were going to campaign these cars in the U.S., but I think James Garner’s interest kind of waned. I think he started looking at racing Baja or something like that. So the money went away. This car did not race in ’69. It was made in February. And in 1970 it was leased to Bill Simpson. Bill took it down to the Tasman Series in New Zealand. His best finish was 4th, but he ended up crashing the car and shipped it back to Crean, where Davey Jordan was still taking care of the cars. Davey got the parts and the tub. It really wasn’t that bad of an accident, it took a corner off, but it took the last of Bill’s money so it came back. Oddly enough, my understanding is a Kiwi in L.A. fixed the tub and you can see there are little hammer marks on it. I got to be pretty good friends with Davey Jordan, a really nice guy, and so he told me more about the car. He had it repaired and Davey took it around the U.S. and Canada in 1970 and raced it. I am not really sure what his highest race finish was with it. The car was designed in ’67-’68, so it was getting a little bit old for competition, and Davey was doing it on a shoestring. I think he finished 2nd at Riverside and might have had a 5th at a few other places so that’s a pretty darn good result for doing everything yourself with an older car. He just didn’t get a proper shot at it.

SCD: One of the many websites on the Gurney cars shows this chassis to have been originally built for a 302 AMC Trans-Am engine.
SD: Yes, that’s true. It’s my understanding it had an AMC engine in it when it was new because Garner did commercials for AMC. Actually I have the build sheet on that engine. It was an AMC block, but everything else inside was Corvette or aftermarket, Corvette pistons, rods and crank, everything.
SCD: Who built the Chevy engine in period?
SD: Ryan Falconer, back then. I have that build sheet too, and he wouldn’t honor that same price for me today. I think the whole rebuild in ’71 was about $1,600. Now Bob Slade does the engine for me. He’s just a great, great friend and a brilliant engine builder. He does vintage Formula 1 stuff, Cosworth, Ferrari, Alfa. He had worked on these Chevy engines back when they were running actively. He worked for Kraco in Indycar, for Michael Andretti. He also had worked with Ryan Falconer, so I got to meet Ryan through Bob and they still do some work together.
SCD: What shape was 512 in when you purchased it?
SD: It was pretty much as you see it right now. The difference is that it did not have wings on it. When we first got it we did some crack testing on the uprights and the suspension pieces, and we ran about three events. The engine was 5.7 liters.
SCD: What year did you buy it?
SD: April ’06. We ran it at several events in ’06 with no wings and really soft springs in it trying to figure out the setup. After the end of that year we pulled the engine out and had a crankshaft made, Bob Slade did all the work and brought it back to a legal 5-liter engine. He also helped me go through the entire car; every single piece that wasn’t riveted was disassembled and checked.
SCD: Tony Adamowicz in 510 runs a high rear wing off the rear suspension uprights. Did this car ever run that setup?
SD: This one never had a wing like that. I’m not sure if those wings were a part of an Eagle parts set. I think that the car was sold and designed without the wings. The only photos I have of this car are with the wings that are on it today. Davey did come up with a bi-plane front wing for a few races but I don’t think it worked. I asked Davey once about the design of the rear wing he had on the car and who made it. He said he’d bent it over a 2×4 in his garage and the design parameter was that it had to fit the words “Highland Toyota” on it.

SCD: Who builds the engines and transmissions for you and how close are they to what ran in period?
SD: The engine is done by Bob Slade. It’s a 5-liter, and I would say that it’s pretty much as close as you can get. I do not use MSD electronics, it has magneto points and condenser. It does not have a rev limiter, it has mechanical fuel injection. It has the original oiling system with the tank in the front, if you look at other cars they have moved them to the back. So the oil tank plumbing alone probably weighs 60 lbs. Braided steel hoses. The engine is really reliable, so the only thing we have done differently than then is we put alloy heads on it, but they are the correct 23-degree heads. We had iron heads on it that were a true work of art that John Collins or somebody through him had done. But they had cracked, or developed cracks in them, so we had to replace them. Alloy heads will last longer so that’s the only reason we did that.
The transmission we had done at Robin Automotive by Tony Nichols’ guys. He’s at Sears Point and he’s also a Kiwi. The gearbox had a little trouble shifting. When we tore the car down I took the transmission up to him and he went through it. He found a few cracked pieces, inspected everything, and re-aligned it all. That was the end of ’06, first of ’07. Since then I have just taken it apart and redone it myself each year and it’s been fine
SCD: How many rebuilds per season?
SD: The engine, what we have been doing is getting two seasons, they’re very reliable. So we run two seasons and take it down.

SCD: What is your redline? I hope I’m not asking a secret?
SD: No it’s OK, it’s all legal. It can go to 8800rpm. I try to shift at 8500rpm because sometimes I need the buffer. No rev-limiter and no electronics to save me.
SCD: What about the halfshafts and U-joints?
SD: The halfshafts and the U-joints, we look at those every year, and the suspension pieces, and the uprights we try to look at every year to make sure there are no cracks. On the halfshafts, the first two times we looked at them they were fine, and the last time we looked at them they lit up like a Christmas tree. I had no offs in the car or dumping the clutch to strain it. It was just 40 years and everything started to go. So I had shafts made and now we’re using CV joints. Some people did run CV joints back then, so they are period correct, and they’re much safer than the small BRDs we were running.
SCD: What about brake pads and tires?
SD: We try to get a set of tires for every race. They are Goodyear Eagles. A brand new set is probably worth a second or two a lap, and I just think that if I have towed the car to Atlanta, why race on old tires. I’ll quit eating out for a month if I have to. It’s really silly to tow it to the East Coast then run it on old tires. It takes a lot of the fun out of it.
They are also the original Hurst Airheart brakes. If you look at the other 5000s, some of them have gone to AP brakes or some other modern brake. Back when these cars ran originally a lot of people gave up on Hurst Airheart brakes because they couldn’t get them to work. We got them to work fairly well. You still have to give them a couple of strokes before you stop. I can get another second or two out of the car if I can get that final, final little bit out of the brakes. I just wanted to keep the car as original as possible. The pads, running on the West Coast it’s not that big a deal because the tracks are short, but when I ran the first time at Road America I realized that place probably takes a second pair of pads for the weekend. It really did. We probably use three sets of pads in a year depending on where we run.

SCD: How do you keep the car in shape? When you return from an event do you take care of the car yourself? Do you have a support group?
SD: It’s just my wife and I. When we come back from an event I’ll take the car apart as much as I can. I’ll look at every little piece. Clean the fuel filter, change the oil, bleed the brakes. A lot of people comment on how clean the car is and there is a reason for that. The only way you’re going to inspect a car is to clean it completely. So I clean every little thing. I clean every clamp, every joint, anything that can have any play in it at all. I look for it and then we replace those joints if we need to. I look over everything on the car and I do the work myself. If I need machine work, I take it to Bob Slade. At the track it’s just my wife, Yolanda, and I. Usually when she and I try to unload the car some chivalrous guy will run over and give her a hand, but she is great. She can do timing for me, she’ll run over and get fuel, and she can get tires for me. But she’s not there all the time, she does some antique shopping and things like that so it’s an easy tradeoff and I appreciate her help
SCD: Besides 512 and Tony Adamowicz’s 510, are there any other Mark 5s assembled?
SD: There are none assembled. There are two others. Michael Brayton has one, but I haven’t seen his, it’s in his trailer. The other one is Ron Brown’s and that one I’ve seen in Portland. He runs a race shop and fuel business there. Ron was nice enough before we ran Portland, to let me come down to his shop and look at his car. It’s a pretty neat car, #505 I think. He bought it from Fred Corbett or Monty Shelton, if I remember correctly.

SCD: Are you going to run Portland this year?
SD: No, I don’t think so. Speaking of photographs, if I can go back to the New Zealand event when this car was crashed. Oddly enough, in 1971 Bruce Leeson was there and took a photograph of this car at that corner. Bruce called me and got me involved in racing the 5000s, helped me find the Eagle, and it turned out to be the car he photographed 40 years ago. He was a pretty talented motorsports photographer at the time.
SCD: The first time I saw you run was the HMSA Laguna event in 2008. Your driving style seems to have improved a lot, is that you or the car?
SD: I think it is a little of both, but a lot on the car. As I mentioned early on the car had really, really soft springs and we had a big problem with the back squatting down and packing air under the nose, actually getting airborne. The car also had some really wicked handling characteristics. At turn-in through the middle of the corner it would push, and at the corner exit it would snap into oversteer.
It’s funny, people who race look for somebody who knows more than they do, and you ask all the questions you can, and as it turns out there were a couple of things going on with the spring rates through the corner. These cars with cam-and-pawl differentials have to be able to roll over. It looks too soft. We stiffened the rear springs to take the squat out, but still soft enough so the car can roll over. What happens is, with the right anti-roll bar, it takes some weight off the inside wheel and lets it actually spin a little bit. If the inside wheel is getting too much grip it’s going to drive you off the corner. So that’s where the push was coming from. We figured that out and then the snap oversteer at the exit was when the car leveled out at the exit the outside wheel would “catch up” with the inside spinning wheel and it went into snap overseer. A little more caster for weight jacking seemed to solve that. The understeer also was because I was going on settings that were over 40 years old. I was explaining to the guy who puts tires on my Jeep, just the tire dealer downtown who runs an old Camaro at track events, and he says, “Well, what’s your front toe?” I told him, and he says, “Run your toe in,” and I said, “I never heard of front toe-in on a racecar,” he told me, “by the time you get up to speed or hard on the brakes it’s toe-out because the car flexes.” So we went to Sears Point and changed it from a little toe-out to a little toe-in, and it absolutely fixed the car. And from that day forward the car’s been great. So the moral is, listen to everyone.

It’s one of the best handling racecars I’ve ever driven. Once you get a car that handles well, then your confidence in the car builds and your driving gets better because you can count on what it is going to do every time. I think that bears true for this car. We got that problem sorted out at the beginning of ’08, but then we had some fuel injection and electrical problems early in the year. And then at Watkins Glen we had a clean weekend for the first time. We had no problems and we were first in class for the older cars, we qualified 4th overall. We won our class in that race and we have won every single race since, except the very last race of 2010 at Sears Point, but we ran fast time there. And also, last year, 2010, we won a few overall poles beating the newer Lola 332s and McRaes, and we won some races outright. Because the car handles this way, we were able to put it on the mark on the spot on the exits. Were able to use the road that before we weren’t able to use because you never knew if you needed another foot or two. A corner worker actually came up to the garage where I was to compliment me on one of my corners and tell me I used same mark on the corner every time, and that makes you feel good. The guy sits there and tells you he watches cars all day and all year and he can tell we’re drifting and we’re sliding out there, but every time we’re hitting the same mark.

SCD: Let’s discuss Laguna, describe a lap at Laguna for me.
SD: Laguna Seca for me is my home track because of all the Russell races there. I have close to 300 races at that track, so if there is any track that I think I know, Laguna would be it, so I am pretty relaxed in the car. I try to visualize the lap at each track over and over before I get into the car. I take some quiet time before I get into the car. Whatever nerves there are, once the car starts, are gone. I am pretty calm I try to focus. You break each corner down to about five or six pieces and you try to focus on each little piece. The mind can do time compression so it seems like a lot to think about in 8/10ths of a second, but oddly when you’re in the car it seems like all day, time slows down until you do something wrong and then it seems fast.
A lap at Laguna you want to be really serious. You want to be serious in the car. Any time you start the car up and you roll out on the grid you watch the grid control people, figure out who is around you and on that first lap or two you just try to bring the tires up to temperature and look around to see the condition of the track, where the corner workers are, and who is around you. A lot of guys will go out there and really stand on it from the get go. That’s just not my style. I like to build up slowly rather than have to dial it back after I’ve scared myself.
To describe a lap, once the tires are up to temperature, coming out of 11, we stay a little bit to the driver’s left up the straightaway so you’re going to come under the bridge probably about a third of the way over from the left side of the bridge in a straight line, over that hill. And in this car you’re going fast, maybe 150+ in fifth at the crest. Even with the wings, the car gets wheelspin over the top of that hill, so you want to keep everything straight, even though the track starts to bend to the left, you can’t turn yet. You have to wait for the car basically to land again. So you will come over that hill and you will be actually pointing off to driver’s right of Turn 2—there is some runoff room there if it doesn’t work out. As the car starts to come back down onto the ground you get onto the brakes and make a turn there so you’re actually on the right-hand side of the track by then. You turn in and you want to make what would appear to be a diamond out of Turn 2. You can’t always do it. It depends on the track and how the car is handling. So you make the turn-in from driver’s right on Turn 2 and make a straight line down to about two feet off the first apex, onto the brakes and a little bit of trail brake and you turn left. The back end of the car will step out, and as it rotates around you can pick up the throttle and transfer the weight to the rear and you get some grip. Now you’ve actually created a diamond or a V shape out of Turn 2. You can feed the power in and clip the second apex. You should be in second gear as you are doing this, and right as you hit the exit and get the car straightened out you can upshift to third in this car. I try to hold third gear down to Turn 3 because I can pull the rpms, and then just kind of brush the brakes at about the one marker and turn in.

If the track is clean and the tires are good the car will hold through there with an even throttle, and you start feeding the power in before the apex. You up-shift to fourth at the exit, and in a blink you’re watching the markers fly by going into Turn 4, which is a flat right-hand corner. A lot of people will crab off the side of the track there, and what they are doing is making a sharper radius. What you want to do is stay all the way to the left before turn-in. Generally, if everything is working there, I’ll leave it in fourth gear and just back off the throttle, not enough to pitch the car just enough to get even throttle so it’s balanced, then turn in to the corner. From that point you can feed the power back in, pointing the right front wheel toward the apex. It’s pretty flat. You can keep feeding the power back in, and by the time you’re at the exit on driver’s left you would be pretty much wide open. Never drop a wheel off the track here. Now, if you’re in third you certainly have to go to fourth, if you’re in fourth it’s a very short time until you’re in fifth. So I would say going into Turn 5 you’re probably back up to about 150 mph. And going into Turn 5 you go back to driver’s right and about the two marker you lift and about one marker you’re on the brakes, down to third gear at turn-in, off throttle and the back of the car will start to come around. You can pick up the throttle just enough to keep it from spinning out from under you and point the left front wheel toward the apex. It’s actually banked, so as the car starts to slide from under you, it goes down into the pocket and the banking catches you and the left front wheel is pretty much unloaded. It skips over the apex and you can just floor it and just absolutely go full power-on and slide the car all the way out to the exit and catch fourth gear. By the time you realize you’ve caught fourth gear you’re at the bridge before Turn 6, it’s that fast through there. Turn 6 you can again do third or fourth gear through there, and again it depends on how slippery the track is. For fourth gear, about the two marker you’re on the brakes, but you need to be off the brakes and on even throttle before you turn in at the one marker. You don’t want to be off throttle or on the brakes because it will cause the car to over-rotate or miss the apex, and up there that’s really important. Just to emphasize how important it is, when you’re riding around on the reconnaissance lap, if you look on the left or on the right you’ll see every color in the rainbow on those walls.
As you’re getting even throttle before turning in you’ll get a feel for whether you’re going to make it to the apex or not. If you’re going to make it, you’ll start to pick up the throttle because again there is a depression right at the apex of 6 to catch you and you can brush the curbing on the apex with the left tire. You don’t want to hit it too hard because you don’t want to pitch the car out, but that depression will start to catch the car and you can start feeding the power back in and go up the hill. At the exit of the corner on driver’s right there are some rumble strips where there weren’t before, but you really don’t want to go over that far because if you drop a wheel off in the dirt then you just have to get even throttle and let it roll up the hill. You can’t possibly try to bring it back up onto the track right away because that’s what ends up putting people in the wall there. But once you hit the pocket and you feed in the power and you slide out to the exit, then you want to make a straight line to Turn 7, which people really don’t seem to think there is quite a Turn 7, but it’s important to get back over to the left side of the track there because that sets you up for a straight shot into the top of the Corkscrew, aligned with the right edge of the track in the braking area there.

In this car you can carry fourth gear all the way up the hill to 7. If you turn in early at 7 you’ll have to make another slight right adjustment in the braking area for 8 to be able to use all the road at turn-in for The Corkscrew. In this car I have to hit the brakes twice, so I’m braking on the uphill before the crest at 8. If I can get things worked out, then I can just brake once after the crest where the track flattens out. While braking in a straight line, I get down to second gear for the left turn into Turn 8, The Corkscrew. When I get it right, it puts the left front tire on the top of the curbing at the apex, the wheels are straight and I’m feeding power on. The car will actually lift the right front wheel off the ground as you come over the top of the corkscrew and then as you come down the hill you want the right front wheel right on the apex of 8A. As you go through the bottom the car is under compression, so you start feeding in the power, but not too much because the car starts to go off to the left side of the track, and you don’t want to use all of the track there. I don’t know if they’ve changed it, but the road used to start to drop away four or five feet from the edge of the track so people would use all the track there and they would start to lose traction as they crossed that camber change. So, even if it seems a tighter radius you stay about four feet off, you get better grip and you’re up to fourth gear moving up on the right-hand side of the track for a left turn into 9. Here again you don’t want to go all the way to the right-hand edge as the track is a bit banked but flattens out there to the right. So you stay about four or five feet in from the right edge of the track in fourth gear and lift off the throttle as you turn in to bring the back end around. And, if you get it right, you can start squeezing on the power 40 or 50 feet before the apex of nine and drift the car all the way out to the exit. The problem with the exit to 9 is the rumble strips are up the hill and too far away for this car. The other problem is it is really rough there and if I go off in 9, it is just going to beat the heck out of the car, I try to leave about a foot extra there at the exit.
As soon as the car’s settled at the exit of 9 you need to get back over to driver’s left for the turn-in to 10. Turn 10 is one of the most fun corners on the course. Just as an aside, the way I figured out how much grip is in 10 is I got my feet tangled in a Formula Mazda one day and I never made it to the brake pedal. There is so much banking in 10 that when you get over to driver’s left you can basically brush the brakes about the two marker and then stay off the throttle a little and turn in, and the car will start to slide and basically you’re just trying to get the nose pointed at the apex and pick up the throttle to keep the car from spinning. The banking and the pocket there starts to compress and it catches the car. You can feed in about as much throttle as you want and go through and slide up to the exit. You can use the rumble strips there at the exit, if you need to. I don’t like to use them. I don’t like to use the exit rumble strips on these cars, because they’re vintage cars and it beats them up a little bit. Once you’ve straightened out at the exit you can move over to driver’s right to set up for Turn 11. Eleven is very important as it sets you up for the longest straight and you want to carry as much speed as possible all the way down into 2. Coming into 11, at about the three marker, I start braking and downshifting because I want to be smooth and in a straight line and the track is kind of slick there for braking. I get down to second gear, turn in at the one marker and get a little off-throttle to rotate the car. Start to pick up the throttle once the car is pointed down the track. Again, clip the apex and by the time you get to the bridge you should be back over about a third of the way off the left side of the bridge. This might be more than you wanted to hear, and it’s just one guy’s opinion.

SCD: Compared to other cars you have driven, is the Eagle unforgiving, sharp, heavy, fast, slow? How would you describe his car?
SD: Well, I have driven an M10B McLaren in a session at Portland, one day, and then Formula Mazdas and so forth, and I would say the way the car handles now, this is one of the better handling cars. This is as good as the McLaren I drove. It has a short wheelbase, so it tends to move around a lot. And, before I got the handling sorted out, which we talked about before, this was a car that you actually had to stay on top of on the straightway, it was that nervous everywhere. You have to stay ahead of these cars, they have so much weight in the back end, and this car is a pretty heavy car, the rules allow 1350 pounds and this is almost 1600 pounds. But the distribution on the front end is only about 600 pounds. So, all that weight is behind you. Once it starts to go around on you, it’s pretty unstoppable. You have to stay ahead of it. You have to turn the wheel before the slide begins. In that way, I would say it’s unforgiving. It just requires what you should be doing in any racecar all the time anyway.

SCD: For those of us who have never driven an Eagle 5000, describe the driving, how far is it between each shift?
SD: Well, the gearbox is an LG600, and the gearset weighs I guess, 75 pounds. So you’re moving a lot of stuff. And the shift is rather long for a racecar. It is about four inches to go from second to third, and it has a heavy feel to it. You have to wait. It’s different than a Formula Mazda where we didn’t use the clutch because it had a very light gearset. You lift a little bit, pull the lever, and get the gear. This LG600, it’s a slow shift, because you’re moving so many things and they’re so heavy and there’s lots of momentum going on. I think people who come from other cars and are driving something like this with an LG in it, they have to get used to being a little more patient with the gearbox, because you can beat them up pretty bad if you don’t. Steering effort, there is a lot of effort in the steering wheel. That is one of the things on this car when I first bought it that was very difficult for me, especially in Portland. That place has a right-hander with what seems like about five apexes. About the fifth lap I was worn out trying to turn the car. It’s running with about five degrees of caster in the front. This was going onto the back section. The G-forces in the car, and then trying to turn the wheel and hold that through the apexes, was really a lot of effort.
The car is not too nervous on the straightaway now, but at a really high-speed section you can’t see the gauges. At Atlanta, we were right around 200mph. I couldn’t read the gauges from the buffeting and the vibration. I don’t know if I’d describe the car as nervous, but it blows around and so you just try to leave as much room as you can for everything.
The braking effort, it takes some finesse on this, because of the Hurst Airheart brakes. What happens is the pedal goes just a little soft no matter what you do, and if you have been in a normal race car, what you have to do is be 100 percent throttle and 100 percent brake, you can’t do that here, because what you have to do is squeeze the brake once in order to get the pucks out against the rotor, and then you can let off and hit them again for the 100 percent. If you don’t do that, one of the four wheels—and it will randomly choose which one—is going to lock up first. Then, because of all the weight in the back of the car, you find yourself looking at what was behind you. So we’re working on that and we have made it a lot better and I have some more ideas to try and fix it for this year. As far as the effort of pushing on the pedals, it’s fairly significant, more than you might think, especially at Road Atlanta. Certainly more than I thought. After 200mph down the back straight the braking area is downhill. I crested the hill, and stood on the brakes. Without locking the brakes, and at threshold braking, I barely got the car down to where I could turn in to the corner at the bottom of the hill. So that was a bit of a surprise, how much effort it takes to brake there. I had never been over 190 or 180 before and then tried to brake downhill, so it was quite the effort. Even more so to convince myself to do it again, on purpose.

SCD: Do you work out?
SD: Yes I do. I go to the gym pretty much five times a week. The one advantage I have over my competitors is even though my car is a couple of hundred pounds heavy, I am 100lbs. lighter than some of them. So that helps. I have always tried to stay in shape. In racing you really need to, especially as you get older. When I was 35 it didn’t seem to bother me, even though that is older in a racecar. When I was younger I would go to a pub and do whatever I wanted to do and I could still go out and be quick enough. Not anymore. Now, I need to get some sleep and rest, and sometimes that isn’t even enough.
SCD: Can you compare the Eagle to the McLaren M10B.
SD: The McLaren is a newer car even though they are both ’69s. The Eagle was developed in ’67, and then built in ’68 and ’69. The McLaren was a new car in ’69. So, they were quite a bit different in engineering and weight. I have driven Bruce’s car and I really like the way it handles. He has had it for a number of years, and with a great crew, so he has had time to get it sorted. At the time I thought it was like driving a Cadillac compared to my car, you step on the brakes and it actually stops when it is supposed to, you can turn the wheel without grunting. I think the Eagle, for the time it was built, is an amazing piece of technology. The other thing I like is that it’s American, and there are very few of those. It’s a work of art, it’s one of the prettiest cars ever built for the F5000 series or anywhere. The McLaren, engineering-wise, it has the DG gearbox is lighter and the shifting is much quicker, the car is lower and the brakes are better. The car overall is lighter itself. I don’t know, I guess if I didn’t have an Eagle, the McLaren is the car that I would want.

SCD: What was your most memorable race in 2010?
SD: I guess there are probably a couple of them that stand out for different reasons, we sat out ’09 because we rebuilt the car again and he had some issues with getting the halfshafts done so we raced in ’08, and we didn’t race in ’09. I was looking at the lap times from the vintage cars that ran in ’09, and I was thinking, even though we are in Class A for pre-1972 cars, I thought we could be competitive with the newer Class B cars. The first race of the year was Atlanta, and we actually led one of the races overall for a few laps. I thought my car was overheating so I backed off a little, and we finished 3rd overall, but our lap time was right there with the leaders.
So the next race was Watkins Glen, and I had been there in ’08, and for whatever reason it absolutely suits this car. The esses and the back side of the track just seem to be designed for the Eagle. This car and my driving style fit that track. So we got there, and unloaded the car and we went out to the first practice and we were probably fifth or sixth. The temperatures were around 60 to 70 degrees. In the second session we might have improved a spot or two and maybe we were up to fourth place or so in practice. This was with Bobby Rahal’s HMP Group, a phenomenally lucky thing, because we had an entire hour of qualifying. I put new brake pads on the car and I put the new tires on the car. I have a routine for qualifying. I put new tires on and I go out and I only run three or four laps for qualifying and then I park the car. I do not run the eight or ten laps that everyone does looking for that lap. I go out and I just get enough heat in the tires to make them gooey and then I put one lap down and then I go in and cool the tires and wherever I end up, that’s it. So we put brake pads on and bed the brakes and do the tire scrubbing, but the temperature had changed from the day before when it was 60 or 70 degrees. Now it was 94 degrees. So I went around to bed the brakes in and scrub the tires in and I looked down and the car was starting to overheat. I went in and tried to sit in the pits to let it cool down. I went out for a lap and it began to overheat again, so I drove it back to the garage and got out. It was 95 degrees, I was in my full driving suit, I am my own crew, and the only way I could change this overheating was removing some radiator tape. To get to the radiator you have take the nose off. So you have to take the front wing off, slide the bar off, undo the Dzus to get the nose off. I removed some of the tape from the radiator, put the nose back on, put the wing back on got my gear back on, strapped inside the car, get the car started. I am just wringing with sweat and I hear the guy on the PA say there are five minutes left in this qualifying session, and no one has improved since yesterday. I drove out of the pits, and I drove around a reasonable lap to clean the tires off, and I go past start finish and I put in one hot lap and the car was absolutely hooked up in every single corner. As I drove back to the garage people were giving me the thumbs up. I just thought they were appreciating the car. When I was unbuckling I heard we’d gotten the pole. It was just really, really neat because earlier in the session we didn’t get a single hot lap, just four laps trying to get the brakes and the tires up to temperature. And in the last five minutes we did a scrub lap and a hot lap to put it on pole. So that was pretty neat. For Saturday’s heat race we won, overall, from pole. Unfortunately, Sunday’s race was called by weather, but the trophy was awarded based on Saturday’s race. We’d won from the pole and it was an overall win. It was the first overall win, for an old car, either here or in New Zealand or anywhere else in the world that I am aware of.
Another event that was special was the Kohler International Challenge at Road America. Again we were lucky enough to win the pole, and this time the weather held and we were able to get the overall win in the feature on Sunday. To make it really special, Tony Adamowicz gave us the PRDA (Polish Racing Drivers Association) Pole Award.
SCD: Has Dan Gurney ever stopped by your pits, or has he made contact with you about the car?
SD: No, not at all, and I’ve had a few opportunities, I probably could have elbowed my way into meeting with him a few times, but I think he probably enjoys his privacy. While I would love to meet him someday, I did have a chance to race against his son, Alex, at either Skip Barber or Russell years ago, and he was a great kid. Someday Dan and I, our paths will cross and I will get to meet him. I saw him at Laguna, when they were honoring him last year, and Doug Magnon was there with Tony ”A2Z” Adamowicz, and I’m sure I could have finagled an introduction, but I don’t really want to butt in.
SCD: What events are you planning for in 2011?
SD: I am a little bit undecided right now. We would like to run the whole series again, but it is a big commitment to go back East. On the West Coast we are going to run the Laguna Seca and the LSR events, in April and June I think, which are not part of the F5000 series. We are probably going to run the Coronado HMSA and the Infineon CSRG events that are part of the F5000 series. We’ll see. As we get closer to a race weekend the desire seems to build. I’m pretty flexible.

SCD: What about other events?
SD: We can’t run at Laguna because they’re sound limited events. The LSR, which is HMSA-sanctioned, I run because they’re open sound, but the regular HMSA events or the vintage SCCA events we can’t make sound, even with mufflers. In fact, the last time, I ran in a sound-controlled event was an SCCA vintage weekend, and we were chasing down the leading McRae and they black-flagged me for sound infraction. How they knew it was my noise rather than his noise, I do not know. Actually, after I thought about it, we had been rolling past the sound meter all day, once I got close enough to him I thought they could not tell who it was, but I guess they picked me. In April on a Tuesday they run an LSR event at Monterey, which is a practice run that we will do. In June they run a two-day LSR event and I think we will do that.
SCD: Anything you want to tell the readers?
SD: We can use more Formula 5000 cars and drivers out there. There are a lot of cars sitting and gathering dust, and we have a good group of people and they come from all backgrounds and racing, like Tony A2Z, he has done everything, he’s raced Le Mans, tried Indy, Daytona 24 Hours. He’s still driving the Formula 5000 he drove back then. We have people who have driven everything from Formula Fords to Sports 2000 to Corvettes. Then we have people who have never raced a car until they bought their F5000. One of the things I’ve really enjoyed in vintage racing is the people involved. It’s one of the few races where we are actively trying not to hit each other. In SCCA club racing, every weekend was a crash festival for one reason or another, and so it’s not that it never happens in vintage, but we really try to give everybody the room. There’s always someone to race with. Not just because of the drivers’ experience, but because the cars span a wide range from ’68 tubeframe cars all the way up to ’76. The capabilities of the cars are different and the speeds are vastly different, and we all run together, and we all have a great time. In the paddock, everyone lends a hand or parts or whatever expertise is needed. The F5000 group also puts on some of the best social events that you’ll ever find. We have had 70 of the original drivers and families come to a Mexican fiesta the group hosted. We have barbecues and wine tastings and it’s a really great place to be.
[Source: Dennis Gray]