SUCH - Tarheel Chapter BMW Car Club of America

CLUB RACING REPORT
BY PAUL HOECKE
We can only guess what kept local hot shoes
from their usual haunts these past couple of
months. Maybe it was the early onset of sweltering
summer heat, or maybe it was something
else. But the fact remains that as the midpoint of
the racing season approached, participation by
Tarheel drivers in Club Racing (CR) events as well
as other non-pro circuits continued to be pretty
sparse.
Between late May and early July, only a half
dozen or so of our guys showed up at CR and
NASA races that usually attract at least twice as
many. But several of them, especially Jason Crist
and Roman Lifson, deserve an award for persistence.
(We sort of like to call it the ‘Woody’ – for
comedian Woody Allen, who supposedly once
said that “99 percent of Life is Showing Up.”)
As we mentioned last month, Crist (JP) and
Lifson (IP), along with Tom Tice (Spec E36), Sri
Haputantri and Mike Skeen showed up at the
Club race at Mid-Ohio the last weekend in May.
To reach that Lexington, OH track is not exactly
an easy haul, which alone is a feather in our guys’
cap. Only the date of the event was past our deadline
for that report, which is why we had to leave
the results until now.
Those were pretty decent, especially for Crist,
who won JP in all three races (two sprints and an
enduro) that weekend. Lifson suffered a DNF in
the fi rst sprint, sat out the fun race, but returned
(with Skeen as co-driver) to fi nish sixth in IP in
the long race. And Tice fi nished all three races in
mid-pack.
Within two weeks, the Crist/Lifson duo was
Crist, Lifson Keep At It; BW Struggles
at it again, this time at the NASA Southeast twosprint
event at Road Atlanta. Competition must
have been tough, as Crist only managed fi fth and
fourth-place fi nishes in GTS2. Lifson did a bit better,
taking the checker in third place in GTS3 (and
seventh overall) in one race, but apparently chose
to sit out the other sprint. The next Southeast
Region race after Road Atlanta – the Firecracker
Run at Charlotte over the July 4th weekend – took
place past our deadline, but we expect both of our
hot shoes to have stayed their course.
Meanwhile, the NASA Mid-Atlantic Region’s
Hyperfest at Summit Point, also in June, saw only
one Tarheel driver, Madison Whittle, take part.
In our estimation, he too deserves a Woody, although
in this instance, he also did pretty well,
winning GTS1 in the fi rst sprint before fading to a
sixth-place fi nish in the next race. The Region was
to hold their July ‘Heat Wave’ event at VIR (shortly
after the Tarheel HPDS and Race School) but any
report on that NASA event (and Whittle) will have
to wait until next time.
One surprising aspect of all the NASA events
we’ve mentioned is that, despite sizable contingents
of Spec E30s at all of them, none included
any E30 racers from around here. This was so
much unlike times past that it’s gotten us to
wonder: Where was Carter Hunt, or Al ‘The Rev’,
or any of the other local E30 pilots? And, come
to think of it, where have all of our E30s gone?
Is there a massive push underway to rebuild and
reclassify them en masse, as it were? Conspiracy
theorists are welcome to theorize. Or, better yet, if
you know what’s happening, tell us.
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