So how do you drive MSR Houston in a $500 car with a slipping clutch? Well here is a description from our perspective when the car is working well (relitivly speaking of course).

     In our case with the slipping clutch it made driving the car both easier and harder at the same time. To simplify things we had no gear changes. With the slipping clutch it was not possible to make downshifts that added any benifit. If you were to downshift into a corner you would be in the sweet spot of the motor's powerband however with no way of putting that power to the ground because the clutch would just slip as you added power. This brings up what makes the car harder to drive. With the slipping clutch if you add too much power all you do is rev the motor, as none of that power will get to the ground. As a result you need to carry every amount of speed through a corner inorder to be able to add the small amounts of throttle to keep in the friction zone of the clutch. If you can get this right the car could show some of its perfomance potential.

     So let's go for a lap of MSR Houston with Project Yellow Racing's clutch slipping CRX. As you come down the start/finish straight we are hitting our highest speeds. We topped out about 83-85 MPH just before stabbing the brakes. As we passed the break reference markers we would pass the 1 marker by about a car length while staying track left and stab the breaks. At this point you are looking for the first apex of the double apex turn one and two complex. The car was pretty balanced so that you could rotate the car with a little lift of the throttle. Now track out a bit and start looking for your second apex while begining to add power. As you clip the second apex and start to track out you are desperatly trying to get the power down. This section absolutely killed us. Then came an easy flat left and right that led to a temporary tire chicane. With a brush of the brakes and a couple of flicks of the wheel we could make easy work of the chicane. The next corner was an right hander that crested a hill and immediatly turned left. The camber of the hill and amount of turning caused the back to get light if your line was slightly off, but if you got your braking done in a straight line you could get down to the apex on the left and make your life easier for the next turn. If you got it wrong... as Ben found out the hard way by lifting as he came over the crest, you just might go spinning off into the infield. Turn 8 is a long right hand carasoul type corner. If you have the grip taking a tight line can gain you a bit on the guys who can't hold the inside, or in some cases even open up an oppertunity to make a pass. This leads to a hard left hander that if you take a little curb on the apex you could make a real good run down the short straight to turn 10. Turn 10 is a right hand corner into a single lane track. This was perhaps the most dicey part of the track as the fast cars desperatly wanted to get by to avoid being held up. The tough part was keeping an eye on your mirrors while hitting your marks and getting through the turn 10 and 11 complex would pay huge rewards throughout the rest of the lap. From there we could be flat out through the final complex and desperatly trying to get power down to maximize our speed down the straight. 

     On the starts it was absolute chaos with all the traffic. You can only image what kind of traffic you encounter when you cram 76 cars onto a small track. This point was incredibly fun while being horriblely frustrating. The slipping clutch just absolutely made us a sitting duck for 90% of a lap, and the other 10% was normally spent behind traffic. After about 15 or so laps things would settle down and you could get into somthing that resembled a rhythem. That is when it was time to hand off the driving duties. To signal our driver change we had made a foamboard sign that had 08 Pit written on it. The rules kept people from hanging out in the pit lane so we had to ask for permission each time we wanted to go out and signal the car on track. This was when one of the team members would take the awesome board out and wabe it as our car went by. The driver out on track would pit at the end of the lap and meet us behind the grandstands and we would start the driver change. It is real simple to unbuckle the belts, but when you do endurance racing you rarely have teammates who are the same build as you. In our case we vary from 5'9" 150 lbs - to 6'1" 250. This amount of change makes the belts fit different from person to person so it helps to have help while strapping back in the car. We also took this time to adjust mirrors for the new driver and then send them back onto track.

     Tim took over the helm at this point. As this was his first time driving wheel to wheel with others he seemed to hold his own, as much as the car allowed him to anyway. Tim had some autocross experience but turned in some very compeditive times... again car limited  but it still takes skill to get the most out of the car. We wanted everyone to get a chance to drive so stints were first limited to about 30 min. or so to make sure everyone got to drive before the car had a chance to administer its own coup de gras.