The Racing Geek

I was recently at the WOM World get-together in SF when we started discussing the some of the ways that Nokia should market the N-series devices, specifically the N95 vs iPhone issue. One of the things we all agreed on was that the camera on the N95 is a huge differentiator that Nokia really hasn’t been pushing as much as it should. People are so used to seeing crappy photos from devices like the Razr and the iPhone that they dont expect phones to have good cameras. I, on the other hand, have been using various variants of the N95 for well over a year and the camera is so good that I can honestly say that I will never buy a point-and-shoot camera again. People who see the shots are blown away by the quality of the images and often wont believe that they are from a cameraphone. Additionally the fact that I can use ZoneTag to upload, tag and geotag photos directly from the phone means that I upload way more photos from my phone than I ever did with my point-and-shoot camera.

So anyway, I had a quick look at some of the photos I’ve taken over the last year and have pulled out a few of the really outstanding shots to demonstrate the quality of the N95 camera - hope you like them.

One of the first really great shots I took with the phone was this shot of the wreck of the Peter Iredale of the coast of Oregon. I took a bunch of photos of the wreck but I particularly like the contrasting colours in this picture. You can also see that the photo has been automatically geotagged using ZoneTag which allowed me to do 2-click upload the photo while on vacation while also suggesting the tags “shipwreck” and “beach”.

In case you have any doubts about the print quality of the images you should check out this photo of mine that was used in a full page advertisement in SportsCar magazine. The photo was taken with an N95 classic after I spun out at the track.

One of the things that people forget is that not only does the N95 take great photos but it also shoots 640×480 video at a full 30 fps. The above video was taken at a BMW club autocross using an N95 8GB (N95-2) on my homebrew track video setup. As you can see the picture is clear and skip free. The loud rustling sound is the wind noise from the air entering the cabin once you go above a certain speed. Also check out this trackday video that I made at Reno-Fernley Raceway using the same camera setup.

The two photos above are part of a set that I took from the front row of an Iron Maiden concert in San Antonio using my N95 classic. The concert environment with its combination low light, moving subjects, backlighting and audience jostling is pretty hostile to cameras and makes it super challenging to take clear photographs.

The biggest issue for me was the time it takes for the N95 camera to both switch on and also focus on its subject. I would often click the button to capture an interesting moment but the moment would be well past by the time the camera actually took its shot. I took about 150 photos on that day and roughly 40 were worth putting on Flickr with another 40-50 worth saving. Not a very good ratio but since people were having worse ratios with high-ish end cameras I certainly cant complain. Also being a cameraphone means that there are zero questions asked when you take it into the venue

The last thing I want to share is some video that I shot from another Iron Maiden Concert (this time in Concord). This was from an N95 8GB NAM and as you can see the video is pretty damn good despite the tough camera conditions. The sound is once again the biggest issue - it just cant handle the loud noise and ends up clipping most of the audio.

All in all I can say that the N95 has a truly spectacular camera (for a phone) and it can easily be a replacement for a point-and-shoot camera. Plus if Nokia can fix the sound/clipping problems on the phone they should seriously market the N95 as a full-on camcorder replacement as well. The addition of easy uploads to Flickr and YouTube (the current Flickr share SUCKS!!!) would make this the perfect point-and-shoot photo and video capture device.

Its been almost a month and I’ve finally sat down to write a recap of Lemons SF 2008. We entered our trusty #56 Formula BMW E30 with the only changes being the addition of an LSD ($65 from the Pick-n-Pull) and putting in some stiffer springs ($200). We also put in a new (junkyard new that is) left rear hub ($150) to replace the one that led to our crashing out at Thunderhill. All in all we put in 2-3 days of work and we had the car back up and running for well under the $500 limit.

We originally planned to have a Max Mosely mannequin bent over the trunk (pants down of course) but we ran out of time and as you can see the car looked pretty much exactly the way it did at the end of Thunderhill (apart from the aforementioned left rear hub).

Since there was no practice day this time we all just showed up on Saturday and got ready to race. Rob took the first stint and was making excellent progress through the field. It was about an hour into the race when we looked at the scoreboard and realised just how excellent the progress was - WE WERE IN THE LEAD!!!

Photo by jyri1

We were trading back and forth for the lead with car #65 (a green MR2) with our buddies at Team Red Bear just half a lap behind us. Coincidentally all three teams were pitted next to each other making it the fastest section of the pits. The original plan was for each driver to drive stints of 2-2.5 hours so we we immediately knew that something was wrong when Rob pulled into the pits at about the 1.45 mark. It turns out that the heat from the exhaust had literally melted the engine mount which is never a good thing. Luckily we had a spare and we were able to replace it and send Jyri out for the second stint.

At this point we had fallen out of the top ten but we were only about 20 laps down on #64 who was leading. Jyri kept up a steady pace and about 1.30 hours into his stint we had made up a few of the spots when tragedy struck Lemons and driver Court Summerfield died on track. The rest of the days racing was immediately cancelled and we wet to the hotel wondering about the future of Lemons. After battling with it overnight and talking to Courts family, Jay decided to continue on with the race in Court’ memory. The Lemons organizers have organized a memorial fund in Court’ name and I encourage readers to donate what they can. The next morning the organizers made this statement:

A California Highway Patrol investigation was undertaken at the track. The CHP informed us that there was no mechanical failure or unsafe track conditions and that no other cars were involved. The CHP also informed us that, based on physical evidence and witness statements, it appears that the driver was not conscious prior to impact.

The race was now down to 6.5 hours and we had 3 driver who hadn’t turned the wheel yet. Gabe got to take the start and despite a couple of scary moments kept up decent pace. About 2 hours into his stint he came into the pits for the scheduled driver change when we noticed a crack in the oil pan. At some point the oil pan had struck something on the track and developed a crack that was furiously leaking oil. This was heroic fix time and like last time Rob came up with another winner. He used a dril to drill a small hole in the center of the crack and then used a screw to attach a Gatorade bottle tap filled with red silicone. Amazingly enough this bottletop fix not only lasted over 4 hours at race speed but also took a couple of heavy wall impacts without coming loose.

At this point we were some 60 laps down and had fallen all the way to 37th place. It was time to get back on track and put in steady laps. While that sounded great in theory it was further complicated by our shifter mounts breaking. This meant that the entire drive train would move under braking and resulted in our car popping out of second gear under anything resembling heavy braking. Since there was no time to fix that we just had to drive around the problem and drove the entire lap in 3rd instead. This meant that we were very slow coming out of corners but once we got into the working range of the engine we would take off. This must have confused a lot of our competitors who would come alongside by the midway through the banked turns only to be left behind when the car hit its stride It also made the car much more of a momentum car - I found that I could take the esses quite a bit faster than the other cars out there but would usually have to brake to avoid hitting the car in front only for the other car to out accelerate me coming out of the turn.

Guy and I put in some steady laps and which pulled us back into the top 25 before handing off to Rob for the final stint. He putting in some excellent times when someone put him into the wall just 2 laps from the end.

Photo by Murilee Martin

In the end the car went through a lot and kept on running. We finally ended up 20 and some 50 odd laps behind the winner. The 2 laps we lost in the end were crucial since we were just 2 laps behind Red Bear who finished 18th. All in all it was a fun event though the tragedy did bring home the dangers of racing. Formula BMW will definitely be back for Thunderhill.

Jalopnik just posted this incredible screenshot of a Ferrari F40 from Gran Turismo 5 Prologue.

Compare that with this photo I took at Canepa Design using my 5MP Nokia N95.

Not only does the GT5 shot have much better colours, the details (check out the wheels) are truly spectacular. With the recent Blue Ray win I think I might just have to buy a PS3 after all

Head over to Jalopnik for more GT5 info.

Since my car just turned two years old I figured it was time to write a follow-up to the original year in pictures post.

30 Dec 06: Another trip to LA down Highway 1. Tons of pics here.

17 Feb 07: Visited the Tesla factory and saw the latest roadster to be built at Hethel.

24 Feb 07: Start the track season at Thunderhill with TEAM

1 Apr 07: East Bay Etalk Brunch

24 Apr 07: Met Crudson and JnC on their cross country trip

12 May 07: Had a 95 mph spin at Reno-Fernley Raceway

15 June 07: A photo of my car (post spin) is used by the SCCA for an ad in Sportscar magazine

16-27 June 07: 2500 mile roadtrip to Vancouver

12 Aug 07: Broke down on Highway 1 with no cell service. Had to hitch a ride to town to call the tow truck.

18 Aug 07: Saw a bunch of classic Lotus at the Monterey Historics.

1 Sept 07: Elisetalk photoshoot in Alameda

22 Sept 07: Finally convince Nithya to drive in the GGLC autocross - was in the GTI rather than the Elise but she still had fun

Nithya @ the GGLC AutoX from rnair on Vimeo.

20-12 Oct 07: 24 Hours of Lemons with Team SFF1. More details here.

2 Dec 07: 2 years and 33,500 miles later my luck finally runs out and I get rear ended

We got to the track at 7 am on Sunday so that we could prep the car for the 9 am start. The car was in reasonable shape and the main thing we wanted to was to replace the transmission mounts and the driveshaft with parts we had managed to scrounge up from various disreputable sources :). However just as we were about to jack up the car we realised that we had left them at home . Seeing that we had no way of further patching up drivetrain, we got to work fixing the front end bodywork which had taken a few hits on Saturday and was dangerously close to the radiator. Rob hooked a chain from the car to the trailer hitch and stood on it force the bodywork back into shape.

Guy once again started the day and gave a good account of himself. Midway through his stint there was some contact which ripped our front bumper out of the car and left the radiator unprotected. Though Guy was still continuing, we knew that it would be too risky to run for to long without a bumper. At this point we went around the pits to see if we could scrounge up any spare parts. In a typical display of Lemons (and racing) spirit one team gave us about 5 feet of hollow iron bar while another team lent us the use of their welder. Unfortunately I don’t remember the team names but major thanks to them for helping us out. We lost about 45 minutes as Rob welded the bar in as a replacement bumper and then Gabe went out for his first stint.

Unfortunately just a few minutes into his stint we has a run-in with some very heavy Detroit iron that felt that smaller cars should magically disappear from its path. Since we haven’t yet mastered the fine art of teleportation, there was some fairly hard contact which ended with the other car getting a flat tire and our car slicing its lower radiator hose. We pulled the radiator and got to work fixing the powersteering bracket which was bent out of shape. After another round of begging in the pits I got a spare hose from the Edge Motorworks team while Team Blue Goose donated a hose clamp. In all we lost about 20-30 minutes during the fix.

At this point we had lost some 3.5 hours due to repairs and we were way behind on laps. Gabe, Rob and Jyri did some great stints but we knew that our only chance of making up ground was to do long stints and pass people while they pitted. I got into the car with a full tank of fuel and went out to do a hour stint. The lack of a real front bumper meant that I to be extra cautious about traffic and sometimes had to step HARD on the brakes to avoid any front end contact (even got rear ended a few times as a result :(). After a few warmup laps I really got into the groove and was pulling of some pretty fun passes through the traffic. My laptimes were good enough that the team asked me to stay out there as long as possible. About 90 minutes into the stint, driver fatigue started becoming an issue. Interestingly the effect first started during the yellow flag laps - I started feeling a bit hot and uncomfortable. However the second the flag dropped adrenaline would start flowing and the fatigue would disappear and I would get back to race pace. After going through another 2-3 yellow flags I decided that enough was enough and ended up pitting after an hour and 45 minutes on track.

Jyri took on the next stint and was doing quite well until he was punted off the track. As you can see in the video, he recovers well from the first hit in the esses but a few seconds later he gets hit again while going through the right handed sweeper and goes into the tirewall. This ends up bending out left control arm and completely messes up our toe settings. Rob once again came to the rescue and eyeballed a toe adjustment to get us back on track. Gabe then took over for the final stint of the race and despite a couple of ‘moments’ he brought the car safely to the end.

Ouch from rnair on Vimeo.

We finished 44th out of 85 cars which is a pretty good for a group of Lemons newbies who were lying in 62nd on Saturday night. A big thanks to our sponsors - Dietsch Werks, Griffin Motorwerke, ChaseCam, Livermore Performance and Autopower - for helping us prep the car. All of us had a great time and we are already planning what we need to improve in time for the December race at Thunderhill

Our tactics for the race were to run 45 minute stints at a healthy pace and to avoid any unnecessary contact. Guy was our first driver and got to experience the Lemons start procedure. All the teams are asked to lineup in the pits and are slowly let out onto the track for yellow flag laps. Once the whole grid is on the track, race control randomly picks a team and throws the green flag the next time that team crosses the start/finish. At this point the race is on and its every man for himself. This is a short video of the start of the race - Guy enters the frame from the left at the 40 second mark.

Race start from rnair on Vimeo.

We were keeping up an excellent pace and were among the faster cars out there. Our pitstops, while not spectacular, were decent enough and saw Rob and Jyri taking stints 2 and 3 respectively. About 2 hours into the race, Jyri pitted and I got into the car for stint #4.

I started out pretty tentatively, this was after all my very first race in a real car. On lap 2 I started to feel really brave and tried to pass a couple of cars around the outside of the banking. While I did end up going around the cars, I was unsighted going into the esses and found that someone had dragged quite bit of gravel right at my braking/turn-in point. This being Lemons there was no debris flag and I basically had two choices: a) squeeze the car on my left and attempt to avoid the gravel with the possibility of getting broadsided if it doesn’t work out and b) hit the freestanding tire barrier and hope for the best. Having seen other cars hit similar barriers without too much drama, I decided on option b and hit the brakes which locked the second I hit the gravel.

Debris flag anyone? from rnair on Vimeo.

As you can see I hit the barrier with a glancing blow and knocked them over. You probably also saw that there was a third option available - turn right, avoid the barrier and skip the esses. Unfortunately I didn’t think of it at the time so that route really didn’t come into play. After the it the car seemed to be working fine and after slowing for a few corners I continued on my merry way. The following clip should give you a good idea of the action we encountered on track. Watch the grey Subaru wagon (Team Scooby) as it tries to pass me, it was one of the fastest cars on the track but I kept getting him stuck behind slower cars until he finally passes me two laps later

On track action from rnair on Vimeo.

About 30 minutes into the session I came around the banking and was about to pass another car when the back end of the car suddenly let go and spun me around. Luckily the car missed the tire barriers and ended up facing the wrong way on the inside of the first S. I tried putting it in neutral to start the engine but the gearshift had sunk about 6 inches lowers and I could not change gears. I tried starting it with the clutch in but only got an loud banging noise from the transmission with no forward movement. I then sat around waiting for the tow truck and watched cars coming head-on towards me at race speed - I even had one guy blow the turn and drive across the front of my car. After a few minutes the race was yellow flagged and the tow truck pushed me into the pits with the transmission making loud banging noises all the way.

Spin out from rnair on Vimeo.

When I came into the pits, we got down to diagnosing what was wrong with the car - the transmission was obviously busted but we didn’t know how or why. When we opened the hood we saw a most interesting sight, the radiator was bent outwards rather than inwards. It appeared that when our car had any forward contact (such as the tire barrier I hit), the engine was actually flexing the engine mounts and moving far enough forward in the engine bay for the distributor to hit the back of the radiator. This motion kept pulling the transmission forward until the transmission mounts finally snapped. At this point the transmission stressed the driveshaft enough that the two piece driveshaft just separated at the joint. /the driveshaft snapping was most likely the cause of the spin - it was equivalent to lifting mid corner which produced lift-off oversteer with no drive to allow recovery. Our car was now officially dead and we did not have any spare parts to fix it.

Enter our in-team mechanic: Rob Dietsch of Dietsch Werks. Now Rob usually spends his days doing high quality repair work on his customers cars, this obviously was NOT the time for quality work so he settled for quick and dirty fixes (emphasis on quick :-)). He started out by removing the two pieces of the driveshaft and used a hacksaw to clean out the joint between the two pieces before mating them together once again. We did not have any spare transmission mounts so he fixed the transmission in place using straps and bolts passing through holes drilled in the car floor. The final piece was to anchor the engine in place using chains so that it would no longer move forward if there was any impact.

The repairs took about 2.5 hours and dropped us to 62 place in the standings. Rob took the car out first to see how it would hold up. He put in some good times before handing it over to Jyri for the final stint. By the end of the day the car had suffered only minor body damage and was still putting in some excellent times. We were just glad to be running at the end of the day despite having such potentially race ending damage to our drivetrain.

P.S.: If you have nothing better to do and want to kill a full 30 minutes you should watch this video of my entire stint.

Saturday stint from rnair on Vimeo.

* The yellow car is a Lamborghini Gallardo (which is the only lambo with regular doors) while the silver car is a Honda with what are known as Lambo doors

Photo found floating around the interweb.

[tags]irony, photo, lambo, doors, lamborghini, honda, ricer, funny[/tags]

I’ve been very interested in the 24 Hours of Lemons since I first heard about it last year and when I found out that the first race of the year was this past weekend I just had to go check it out. The Altamont Motorsports Park in Tracy, CA is the home of the race and features two ovals which are interconnected to create a road-course for the Lemons race. The cars all had to be bought and race prepped for under $500 (excluding safety gear) with a team of 4-6 drivers. Despite the name the actual racing would only go on for about 14 hours with a 10 hour break at night to let people recuperate as well as repair their cars.

I got there just as the drivers meeting got underway and found that it was pretty well organized. The organizers were very strict about a no bumping/no blocking rule and had come up with a set of humourous punishments for the drivers that broke the rules. The competitors would spin the “Wheel of Misfortune” and have to serve whatever penalty that came up. Some of the penalties included:

• The Al Gore Carbon Replacement penalty: The competitor would have to wear a tie-die shirt and then plant a rather large sapling in the ground before they could continue.
• The Colonel Sanders where the participant would be doused in soapy water and then feathered using large pillows.
• The Legion of Odour involved hanging a half pound of smelly blue cheese around the drivers neck as well as placing another pound of it on the hot intake manifold - should make for a truly odourous experience.
• The Egg Man winner (or loser) would have an open bucket of eggs welded to the hood of their cars - the idea being that as they drove the eggs would fall out of the bucket and smear the car.
• My favourite was the Highway 17 penalty where the driver would have to follow a VW microbus around the track for 10 laps.
• Anyone who bumped other cars on the track would initially have a set of training wheels welded to the sides of their cars
• Repeat “bumpers” would get the Sword of Damocles penalty where a plate with sharpened spikes would be welded to their radiator with the spikes pointing inwards. At this point they were let out on track knowing that their next bump would be their last.

The organizers required that the drivers have some sort of competition license and the racetrack was more than happy to sell you a NASCAR license at the gate for just $75 dollars. The fact that people could buy licenses at the door was the main factor that dissuaded me from running the Lemons race last year - after all who want to be side by side with a novice driver in a $500 car. However it looked like the penalties did a good job of keeping the track action pretty clean - the serious racer didn’t want to lose the time while the joyriders didn’t want the embarrassment. The speeds are low as well which keeps the event pretty safe. One of the teams was racing an 80’s Golf which went into the tirewall and flipped onto its roof. The track was immediately red flagged and the safety vehicles were at the car in under 5 minutes. The driver was completely unhurt and with the help of the marshal he roled the car back onto its wheels before continuing with the race :-).

All in all it was a great event and I am seriously trying to get an official SFF1 entry together for the October race (UPDATE: We just got accepted into the October event) - wish me luck. In the meantime you can look at a video I shot as well as some photos of my favourite cars. I have posted the full collection of photos on Flickr though you will probably be better off looking at the excellent photoset that Nithya just posted.

Video of the first few laps of the race:

Shagpile is an excellent aero-aid:

Got Jesus?

The Ford Cow:

Do or Die:

A Japanese Zero:

Squadra Pinto:

[tags]24 hours of lemons, altamont motorsports park, lemons, altamont, racing, video, 2007[/tags]

One of the photos I took of my dust covered Elise has been used in an SCCA RallyCross ad in the July Issue of SportsCar magazine. And no I do not RallyCross my Elise - the dirt was a result of my Reno-Fernley spin. It was taken with a Nokia N95 and looks remarkably good in a full page print advert (proof image here).

This happened a few weeks ago but I only just got around to blogging it

[tags]scca, ad, lotus, elise, dirt, rallycross, advertisement, sportscar, magazine, nokia, n95[/tags]

This photo was taken by an SFF1 member moments after Robert Kubica’ high speed accident during todays Canadian Grand Prix - you can actually see his race boots sticking out of the remains of his BMW F107. It appears that Kubica hit the rear wheel of Jarno Trulli’ Toyota and was launched into the air before going headfirst into a wall. The car then bounced across the circuit flipping several times before hitting the opposite wall. Though no official figures have been released I would expect that he must have been doing at least 150 mph at the time of impact. Amazingly, despite the absolute destruction of the car, Kubica only suffered a mild concussion and a sprained ankle - it is a great testament to the safety of modern F1.

Check out the crash video below
Video from Axis of Oversteer

For more photographs, including shots of the actual crash, click through to the Flickr set.

UDATE: Another angle of the crash from a spectators handycam

[tags]F1, crash, Kubica, SFF1, formula 1, accident, youtube, vimeo, video[/tags]