PCA OCR Autocross Extravaganza - PCA - Orange Coast Region

Team Fullerton Continued from Page 9
“parts car”, a white ‘74 914 also soon
found its way to our house. When not
disassembling both cars Evan read, and
as far as we can tell largely committed
to memory, most every historical and
technical article available on Porsches.
While I have been somewhat of a car guy
from childhood, being strongly drawn
to the simplicity, purposeful design and
engineering of old Porsches, it became
apparent from an early age that Evan was
a hopeless car nut. Anything fast, loud,
and shiny and he would be enthralled.
As a teenager, I sustained a succession
of injuries from racing and crashing
motorcycles and decided early-on that
I needed a plan that would help entice
Evan away from riding motorcycles.
As Evan’s 16th birthday approached
and we neared the completion of his 914
restoration, we stumbled across the PCA
OCR autocross registration web page
while searching the internet. From the
first PCA OCR autocross we attended,
we were hooked. Evan’s 914 handled as
lively as a go-cart and had us both grinning
as we hurled ourselves around the twisty
course. The PCA OCR autocross events
are well organized, more so than some
of the other organization open track day
events that we had attended. El Toro
is a safe venue for driving events with
a spectacular amount of asphalt and
concrete relatively free of walls, curbs,
fences or other sudden stop hazards. I
am one of the few people that I know to
have spun sufficiently hard enough to
end up in the dirt actually off the runway
at El Toro.
I like racing as much as the next
guy does, maybe more; however, Evan
really likes it. He soon started on a
seemingly endless quest of coaxing more
performance from his 914. Significantly,
improving the performance of Porsches
most often proves an expensive
undertaking and Evan’s experience
substantiates this. In three years of
autocrossing, his relentless pursuit of
speed and quicker lap times has resulted
in three engine rebuilds, five exhaust
systems, three changes in springs, five
sets of wheels, and countless hours of
tuning and tweaking. Evan funds his car
projects from his part time job as a boat
valet at the Cannery Restaurant. He can
truly claim ownership of the line “80%
percent of my money I’ve spent on fast
cars and women, the rest I have wasted”.
PCA OCR autocrossing has even
influenced Evan’s choice of colleges and
majors. He chose to attend a college
close to home so that he could continue
competing in local PCA events.
After our first autocross, we
mistakenly assumed that driving a 34-
year-old car to the limit at autocrosses
would be very hard on the car and we
started the search for an inexpensive old
Porsche for Evan’s mother, Britt, and I
to autocross. I ran across a Guards red
1976 912E that a PCA OCR member
had parked in her back yard six years
earlier when she could not get it to pass
a smog check. After changing all the
fluids and searching wrecking yards all
over California for the missing smog
parts, we were able to pass a smog test
and the 912E was on its way to autocross
glory. For those unfamiliar with the
912E, it was a one-year-only Porsche
of which 2,099 were built by putting the
remaining 914 four-cylinder, essentially
hot-rodded VW-bus motors, into the
911 chassis. It is arguably the highest
weight-per-horsepower ratio and the
slowest accelerating Porsche built since
the late 1950’s - still it has plenty of
potential on tight autocross courses. If
one is an average driver, not inherently
gifted with supernatural smoothness and
exceptional seat-of-the-pants judgment,
then a couple hundred extra horsepower
makes getting around a tight twisty
course that much more complicated.
However, competing in the same class
as a stock 2.0 Liter 914 with the 912E’s
400-pound weight disadvantage poses a
significant challenge; the 912E driver’s
only recourse is to out-drive the 914
driver.
The originator of the GM Corvette,
Zora Arkus-Duntov, best described how
to drive these low powered momentum
cars in an article after winning his class
in the 1954 24 Hours of Le Mans in a
1.l-liter Porsche 550 Spider. “We were
applying driving techniques developed
in the days of our youth on journeys with
our mother…. The fundamentals are:
The coaching of mother into a false sense
of security and exclusion of violent fore
and aft or sideways acceleration. This
means limited usage of brakes, extensive
use of all available road space, guts in a
tight knot, and treatment of steering as a
fragile tender flower.”
Unlike Evan’s 914, the autocross
modifications of the 912E have been
minor: sticky tires, a few suspension
modifications to help keep all four wheels
on the ground in a turn, and fabrication
of a custom set of J-tube exhaust pipes
(I really love car projects that involve a
welder). This car now has 175,000 miles
on it, has mostly been my daily driver,
remains nearly stock, is great fun to
drive through the twisties, and has been
remarkably reliable. All this and it cost
about the price of a set of performance
shock absorbers for a new Porsche.
Here comes the cautionary part of this
tale: Beware of the quest for continuous
improvement in lower lap times – it
has been known to cause otherwise
logical and frugal persons to spend like
drunken sailors only to achieve modest
improvements in lap time. It is always
cheaper to focus on improving the driver
instead of the car. The conventional
wisdom is that two autocross cars being
equal, with one driver 10% better than the
other is, it will take a 40% improvement
in the car to equal the 10% better driver’s
times.
One of the best things about PCA
OCR autocross is that every month
course designers Dave Palmquist and
Attila Szilagyi setup an interesting and
challenging new course. They create a
new puzzle for drivers to figure out while
averaging over 50 miles per hour. Every
few months they set up what gets termed a
“Corvette course” by the drivers of lower
powered cars. This is when courses have
about a 1/8 mile drag strip in the middle
of the course. After two seasons of Britt
and I campaigning the 912E, the need
for more acceleration on the “Corvette
courses”, my desire for another garage
project and the encouragement of Evan
overcame my better judgment and I
bought a rough white 1975 911S Porsche
without an engine. After six months of
10 At the start