Welcome to the weekend! And for that we have some wallpapers for you. Both are from the Super Car Grand Prix of Utah. One is from the Pirelli GT3 Cup, and features a quartet of 991 GT3 Cup cars coming on to the front straight. But you can see that.
Here we have a trio from the SprintX race going through turn 5, the Black Rock hairpin. I think it’s pretty rockin’, figured you might too.
All you gotta do to have one of these all over your desktop is right-click and Save As, then you’re good to go!
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It comes once a year, and everyone looks forward to it. It’s a night full of excitement and fun that lasts into the wee hours of the morning. Usually some bad things happen throughout the course of the evening, but everyone looks back on the night through rose colored glasses.
Halloween? New Years Eve? That one guy Bill’s birthday rager?
Hell no! It’s the Western Endurance Racing Championship six hour endurance race! A rare chance to see racing under the serene and black Tooele night sky. And also pit stops, something you don’t normally run across at your usual NASA weekend. All very exciting stuff!
Since starting in the middle of the night and running til sunrise is a generally bad idea (how ready to go are you at midnight?), this started at 6PM and ran until midnight. The fading golden hour light allowed those gathered to spectate a chance to see the cars in some dramatic light.
DRAMA! Anyway, on to some sweet, sweet pit lane action!
Things were the same, no matter who was coming into the pits: one person hops the wall, and adds fuel while someone stands a few feet away and points a fire extinguisher at them. A fresh driver and another crew member hop the wall to get the old driver out and the new one in. Someone might clean the windshield, and there was usually one photographer hanging around. However, not all pit boxes are created equal.
There were small teams, with only the bare minimum crew.
Then you had the GMG pit box, which was a full on, pro level pit stall. A lot of crew members, an engineer, racks of tires, fuel hoses and lens flare!
But most teams were like Paul Mitchell and Team Unfair Advantage: crewed almost entirely by the drivers.
The QMD/034 Motorsport even had Gavin Pouquette with them! Say hi Gavin!
*sigh* moving on…
Artsy fuel can shot
The action shifted back to the track after the teams cycled through their pit stops.
Where some people were not adjusting to the creeping darkness!
Not everybody was having brake issues though. Heading into Black Rock, almost everyone was lighting up their brake rotors!
With the light practically gone it was time to break out the tripod, open up the shutter for longer and longer periods, and take a stab at who was flying past you in the blackness.
Some cars were easy to identify. That blue streak was from the LED strip one the B-pillar of the QMD/034 Motorsport A4. However, most cars were just noise points of light.
LED light bars are cheap, and readily available. That means most everyone was running them so they could cut through the nearly impenetrable night. This also meant that anyone, or anything, looking into the oncoming traffic was treated to brief periods of blindness. The trails that the hyper white LEDs cut into the darkness were impressive, but looking away from traffic provided and even more impressive display. I didn’t stick around to see the checkered flag, but I do know who won!
In EO, the #61 BMW completed 153 laps, which put them one lap up on the #44 Inverter Technology/Achilles M3 and secured the win.
The #65 BMW, representing Bullet Perofrmance took home the win in E1.
The QMD/034 Motorsports A4 was the sole E2 competitor, and therefore took home first AND last. Impressive.
E3 was the deepest class with eight competitors, it was also extremely diverse. In a field that included several Miatas, an Audi 90, and even a E90 BMW M3, it… Well, to be honest it came as no surprise that the HPD Race Club Fit took the win. It completed 140 laps, and probably had to stop for fuel once.
The GMG R8 LMS Ultra completed 169 laps in the six hours of the race, and recorded a 1:54.514 lap during the race. Suffice it to say, they won their class, and the race overall.
AND FINALLY, we come to ESR. ESR, like E2, only had one competitor. However, the Competitive Edge car managed to record the 5th quickest lap of the race!
And there you have it folks, six hours of racing condensed into less than 1000 words. This might be easier to digest, and more convenient to read while at work, but this does not compare to actually being there. As soon as we have the schedule for next year, we’ll let you know, and we’ll all have a little party while out there! It’ll be fun!
I feel safe in assuming that you do most of your maintenance yourself if you read this site with any regularity. There’s a garage full of tools, a family or significant other who understands why you do these things, and a host of manuals in the garage and websites bookmarked to help you keep your vehicle road worthy. But what if you encounter a problem with your vehicle that you can’t handle yourself? It’s not a catastrophic failure, but it’s not as simple as fetching the correct size socket out of the drawer and adjusting. What do you do? Go to the dealer and get it coming and going? Trust your pride and joy to a “specialist” shop that specializes in 47 different makes? Oh if only there was a dealer alternative!
We’ve featured some good shops in the past, and we still highly recommend them. But say you’re cruising around in your GTi and it does a VW thing and stops working properly. It still works, albeit in limp mode, and you can’t figure out what happened. The internet has no useful answers and your friends are stumped. What do you do? Dealer? Viking funeral? Hope it goes away on its own? No. You limp that thing up to Layton and get it to Makes & Models. Why? Because you’re getting factory trained techs and service without having to go to the dealership and pay those ridiculous prices.
Their bread and butter is the VAG makes: Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche, but they also service Mercedes-Benz and BMW vehicles. And if you’re thinking about joining the uber-affluent set by getting a Lamborghini or Ferrari, then you’re in luck! They already service some bulls and horseys, and they’re working on becoming a full blown Lamborghini service center. Doing that requires acquiring all sorts of specialized tools and sending the techs off to get the necessary deutschetalian training. However, if you prefer your mid-engine supercar to sport rings on the nose instead of livestock, you’re set.
Not only do many a R8 come in for service, but members of the staff own them and even race an R8 LMS in NASA Utah region competition! Technically TW Racing campaigns the R8, but if you wander in to the shop you might be able to see it tucked away in a corner of the show room. You might even get to meet on of the drivers! But back to your non-functional Golf for a moment. You get it there, and the techs work their magic and voila! IT LIVES! And for cheaper than what you budgeted for. The more sensible amongst us would pocket the money and go about their day, but not us. No no no, we see the massive list of companies they’re authorized dealers and installers for and suddenly that extra money is gone. Who is on the list?
Akrapovic
034 Motorsports
Global Motorsports Group
Integrated Engineering
APR
AWE Tuning
VF Engineering
and more
But what if they told you that the car was toast? OH GOD WHY??? Well you’re in luck! They are also a dealership! Yes, you can buy a car from them, have them service it, AND have them modify it! It’s a one stop shop for all of your Euro needs!
Thankfully there is an alternative to dropping your baby off at the dealership, and waiting to see how many 80 hour weeks you will need to work to pay off the bill. It’s up in Layton, and they have a racecar hanging out in the showroom.
No time for shenanigans, time to get to the… Hey! Thats an Aston Martin Rapide… So pretty. The parking lot held some intense vehicles, but more on those later.
We were here for the racing! Not the parking lot finds, and we managed to get quite a bit in on our last day. We caught some of the SCCA Pirelli World Challenge GT/GTS race. You know, the one with the GT3 cars in it now. We saw a lap or two from ground level, but then decided to get a better vantage point.
We (Cherp, James and myself) climbed the Tower. Well, we rode the elevator up because it was a lot of stairs. We got some great shots up there of the GT/GTS guys and the Porsche Cup races. We also got some touristy ones.
These guys were running hard, but in the end Madison Snow took the Pirelli GT3 Cup Trophy race, while James Sofronas won the GT class in his GMG R8 and Andy Lee put his Best IT Camaro on top of the podium in the GTS class.
But then it was time for the main events! The first race almost saw Mark Winterbottom put his Pepsi Max Crew/FPR Falcon atop the podium, but a bad pit stop relegated him to a disappointing 7th. Holden locked out the top six spots, with Coulthard, Lowndes and Whincup on the podium in the order. Rick Kelly in his Jack Daniel’s Racing Nissan placed 9th and Tim Slade put the Heavy Haulage Australia Racing Mercedes in 20th. Then we had an hour to kill between the races, so we wandered…
And wound up at the Start/Finish line. We consumed energy drinks and water, purchased souvenirs, and then heard 28 cars bounce off the rev limiters before launching up the hill.
And what a hill it is. It’s 150 feet of rise from the bottom of the hill to the top. That makes it the most elevation change of any F1 circuit on the schedule. See? You learned something! We then moved down the front straight, to turn 20. The final turn of the circuit.
We saw plenty of action.
And also some inaction…
And then the checkered flew. The big news? A MERCEDES FINISHED BETTER THAN 20TH!!! Tim Slade and the HHA Racing Mercedes came in 17th! Meanwhile Rick Kelly was yet again the highest placing Nissan (8th), and Mark “Frosty” Winterbottom put his Flacon in 6th. Holden took places 1-5, with the podium consisting of Jamie Whincup, Fabian Coulthard and Shane van Ginsbergen.
And that was it for the races, but the parking lots at CotA held a few gems themselves. There was the McLaren on Saturday, then there was this SRT Viper that was being loaded in to a hauler.
And these!
Holdens! We ran across two fellows who import Utes, then convert them to left hand drive by sticking Pontiac GTO or G8 dashes in them. The best part is they then can be legally registered!
After ogling the cars, we packed up and made our way in to Austin for dinner, then shenanigans. The next morning we returned our faithful chariot to the rental agency, hopped on the plane and made our way home. It was an epic trip for the lot of us. Nobody races like the V8 Supercar guys.
Words by Michael Chandler. Photos by Michael Chandler, Nicholas Cherpeski and James Dahl.
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