Membership Magazine of Oregon Region Sports Car Club of ...

Tools of the trade range from computers
to hammers. He’s willing
to take on almost any task, including
building specialized parts for
million-dollar yachts.
“We finally changed our name
to FMR Industries,” he explains.
“Folks building yachts wanted an
invoice without the word `racing’
in it.”
His services are in demand around
the country. It’s not uncommon for
a race team to send out a call for
help and have Gaston or
one of his crew on the next
plane to Elkhart Lake, Wis.
In October he’ll be going to
the Mid-Ohio road course
to help a half-dozen local
racers compete in the Sports
Car Club of America’s
invitation-only National
Runoffs.
Portland’s Don Walker is
one of the Gaston success
stories at the Runoffs.
Walker combined a series of
high finishes -- but never a
win -- in his Mazda coupe
to secure an invitation to the
national championships in
1990.
“We were working on the
car by ourselves,” Walker
says.”I knew how to drive
the car fast, but up to the point
Norton came on board we never got
the car balanced, never really got it
to work well without being hard on
it.”
“He took over the preparation, so I
could concentrate on driving.”
Walker came home with the national
title.
Last week Gaston was at PIR, working
with some of the drivers headed
to the national championship meet
next month.
A hands-on innovator, Gaston
wedges his 10EEE frame into seats
made for 9-narrow drivers, to put
his theories to the test.
“It’s like a dance,” he explains to
one frustated pilot. “You go right to
the edge and see what your partner
is willing to do next. You keep doing
it until it doesn’t work anymore
. . . until it doesn’t get better . . . then
you try something else.”
A sports racer comes in off the track
and Gaston plugs a computer into
its brain and downloads a record
of each of the preceding laps, a log
of engine speed, G-loads, throttle
position, temperatures and so forth.
“It’s valuable stuff,” he agrees, “but
it’s easy to get lost in the data.”
“Sometimes you can know too
much.”
He recalls a time when he was helping
an Indy-car team doing setup
work on its chassis.
“They had a whole trailer full of
computers and a crew of German
engineers and yard after yard of
data coming out of the printer.”
Still, they couldn’t get the car
right.
“Al Unser Sr. was working with
them. I finally asked him what the
problem was.”
“It just needs more bite
in the rear,’ Unser said.
So we adjusted the rear
wing. That’s all it took.”
The sun is baking the
asphalt along the pit road,
turning it into a sticky
tar that squeaks beneath
the feet of his crew as
they take another stab at
dialing in the suspension
of a car trailered in from
Canada.
The clock is moving closer
to the 4 p.m. track closing
time as they motion for
the boss to make one last
round of laps in this rolling
classroom of applied
physics.
Gaston settles down deep
inside his dancing partner,
snugging up the belts and shoulder
harnesses until they create valleys
in the surface of his padded blue
racing suit.
He pumps the throttle once and fingers
the starter button. The engine
comes to life, and the music begins.
This article about Norton ran in
The Oregonian in 1996.
Loud Pedal 9