Close finishes

Followers of World Superbike and World Supersport have had an absolute ball in the last two weeks. If you add up the finishing gaps of the top three riders in World Superbike's two races at Monza, and the top six in the Assen World Supersport race, you'd get a scant 1.165 seconds. That's about the length of time it takes an F1 driver to do a line of coke.

The Assen round of World Supersport was perhaps the closest, craziest bike race I've ever seen. The whole race was like a first lap, with finishing positions very much like what you'd expect to see as the riders come across the stripe for the first time, never mind the 17th....

Yesterday's WSBK round at Monza was another classic, but we've come to expect that from the Italian parkland track. The insane front straight, along with the typically Italian (read chaotic) chicanes make for great overtaking opportunities and we weren't disappointed in either race. What's more, the retirement of Troy Bayliss in race two, along with the superb performances by ice cool German Max Neukirchner and certifiably mental samurai Nori Haga helped make the championship a little less of a one-horse race than it has been so far.

Roll on the next round, which sees WSBK return to the USA, at Utah's Miller Motorsports Park. I'm going to brave that state's bizarre alcohol laws in order to check out this terrific championship. How fucking excited am I....?

Weekend Menu -Week 19

I've been a bit lax the last two weeks publishing the menu, so here's this week's:

• Istanbul, Turkey: F1, Porsche Supercup, GP2
• Darlington Raceway, SC: NASCAR Sprint Cup and Nationwide Series
• Monza, Italy: World Superbike and Supersport
• Barbagallo, Australia: V8 Supercars
• Spa, Belgium: Le Mans Series
• Douglas, Isle of Man: Manx Rally
• Albacete, Spain: FIM Endurance Championship
• Tsukuba, Japan: All-Japan Superbikes
• Idrija, Slovenia: Rally Saturnus (European Rally Cup Central)
• Palermo, Italy: Targa Florio (European Rally Cup Southwest)
• Canberra, Australia: Rally of Canberra
• Dijon, France: FFSA GT and Belcar
• Kentucky Speedway, KY: ARCA/Remax Series
• Algarve, Portugal: Rally of Portugal (IRC)
• Mugello, Italy: Italian GT
• Nurburgring, Germany: VLN

Irish road racing claims another victim

The sport of "real road racing" has claimed another victim, with the death of Martin Finnegan this weekend in the Tandragee 100 in Northern Ireland. This genre of motorcycle racing is well-known for its inherent danger thanks to the myriad of deaths at the Isle of Man TT over the years, but the frequent additional tragedies during the rest of the season every year tend to go less noticed. The last three years have seen the deaths of Richard Britton, John Donnan, Darran Lindsey and now Finnegan on the Irish roads, in addition to the more high profile losses at the TT that have included David Jefferies and Jun Maeda. Back in 2000 there were eight deaths in real road racing alone...

I'll never call for the banning of this type of racing, because those who do it know the risks, but almost always the news articles include a statement to the effect of "he leaves behind a wife and a young child". That was certainly the case with Finnegan, Lindsay and Britton. I guess I just wish these guys would transition to circuit racing once they become parents.

An interview with 0-60's editor

Yesterday I introduced you to 0-60 Magazine. Today, I chat with its editor...

Brian Scotto is the kind of guy you want to hate, given that his day job involves driving and talking about fast cars, but can't because he's such a nice chap. More importantly you're not allowed to because he's one of us. You know how most of the world just nods absent-mindedly and their eyes glass over when you talk excitedly about cars, bikes and/or racing? Don't you long for someone to talk with who actually gives two hoots about the difference between a first-gen and second-gen Lotus Elise or who understands the true importance of the Nordschleife? Scotto is one of those people, and he's transformed that passion about performance vehicles into an exciting new magazine.

Scotto comes from a VW background and in his teens and early twenties this led him to magazines such as Performance VW, European Car and tuner mags like Super Street, but as time went by he took a much broader interest in performance cars in general. It was here that he ran into problems. "None of what you call the 'buff books' here in the States really did it for me", he says. "I just didn't connect to Car & Driver even though I heard the legend of how awesome it was in the 70s." Salvation came when he discovered British imports: "Magazines like Car, Evo and Top Gear returned my interest in car mags, which in turn got me thinking about why we can't do an American magazine like this. After all, the Brit magazines are expensive and they do a lot of reviews of cars we just won't see in the US."

The plan for 0-60 started to form thee years ago, by which time Brian had three years of print journalism under his belt. He had firm ideas of how it should look: "We wanted something more exciting than other American magazines, something that focused on good storytelling and good photography and something that wasn't as concerned with the numbers, which is ironic since although we ended up calling it 0-60 we rarely use performance figures!"

There was an additional element that he wanted however. "A lot of us grew up modifying cars" he says, clarifying that "we might not all mod to the same level but we all speak that language. That's not something you see in the buff books. They're all about OEM, and the manufacturers themselves look at aftermarket as a different world. But look at Subaru - you can buy half their aftermarket parts over the counter. I have friends in their 20s, 30s and 40s, and the first thing they do when they buy a car is upgrade the suspension. So we're trying to blend that aftermarket feel and tie it in with OEM, so we're not Super Street mag, but we're also not Car & Driver."

The results are obvious, and Scotto and his team aren't afraid to make sacrifices in the name of quality. "There's been features that have come back with average photography and we've had to kill the story - we have a certain level of quality that we try to maintain" he says. "You've gotta make sure you have the best photos and that you use the best paper and we put a lot of attention on things like that."

Something I was eager to get Brian's take on was how he feels about the role of print media in a world dominated by the internet, and it was clear it's a subject he's thought about in depth: "Take the last two years, with sites like Jalopnik, you can get news way quicker than you ever can with a magazine, but if you look at the front of Motor Trend or Road & Track, they still spend a lot of time on news. It works for them, but because our readers are so much more focused than the average buff book reader, they've read it all before. And because we're a quarterly it's even less appropriate. This meant that we had to focus on storytelling. The article on driving the STI to the Arctic was 4100 words - there's no way you'd have read that on the internet, it gets a little tiring reading that much on the screen. So we realized that print media needed to be rethought, and to complement what you can get from the internet. We really just want to write great stories, like the Arctic feature, where you don't just report, you actually create the story. Funnily enough, that came out of Christian [Edstrom, Rally America co-driver champion who works as a copy editor on the magazine] and I watching Ice Road Truckers, and I said that we should go there and Christian said 'I fucking dare you', so next thing I know I'm on the phone with Subaru and we're looking at the date the road freezes, and we left the day after Christmas."

By now you're probably wondering what an interview like this is doing on a racing blog, but from reading the mag I was pretty sure that these guys would be mad racing enthusiasts. Turns out I was right. "In the first issue we did a feature on the Nurburgring 24 Hours" he began. "We stayed up for the whole thing and just soaked up the atmosphere. Then we headed up to Scotland and met up with Colin McRae before going down to France the next weekend for the Le Mans 24 Hours. So when we got back we had one month to print and we had to decide how to cover all this stuff. We could have gone the way of reporting about what happened, who won, that kind of thing, but anyone who really cares about the race will already know all that. So we took a different approach and asked ourselves about the culture behind the event. People build these massive viewing platforms and barbecue and bring their families, so we tried to capture the essence of what goes on, the things you don't normally see or hear about. We're not trying to compete with Racer or F1 magazine. This is us taking motorsports from a more lifestyle point of view."

They kept up the motorsport focus for issue two, when 0-60 looked at what makes the Mitsubishi Evo so special. Scotto notes that "we talked to all the people involved like Tommi Makinen and Ralliart's Andrew Cohen, and we also looked at the 1995 Safari Rally, which was the event that really put the Evo on the map. So we just tried to take a different look at it than a simple test drive."

Brian's words rang very true with me when he said "all of us are into motorsport here and in a way that's not limited to just following the results. Some people follow motorsport like kids in the States follow baseball, they know all the stats and details, but I think I think we realize that motorsport is the reason why we all get cool cars." Covering motorsport has not been easy for them however and Scotto and his team have had to constantly justify racing content to their publishers. "They ask us why there's so much racing in here and ask if this is a racing magazine. I try to tell them that I don't see racing as something separate from fast cars, it's part of everything we do and it's what makes all the great cars." It was great to hear Brian say "we try to remove all the politics from racing and focus on the bare essence of racing and what makes it awesome." Wise words Mr. Scotto...

So, what does the future hold for Brian and his band of petrolheads? The good news is that they'll be increasing the frequency of publication, moving to a bi-monthly or 8-per-year format. It's something he's looking forward to: "It's tough to work on a quarterly where if something doesn't work out it's dead, as opposed to changing things around and using it in the next issue like you would on a monthly. It also means that there's a greater chance that what you do won't get old on the news-stand." That very problem hit home for 0-60 after their very first issue, which featured an article about Colin McRae. Scotto had visited the ex-WRC driver, taken a ride in the infamous helicopter and spent a terrific evening listening to the Scot's tales of the WRC. The resulting story starts with how the photographer was so nervous to get into a heli with McCrash, and the photo that goes with it was Colin in his helicopter. It was all in good fun, but one month after the issue hit the streets Colin was killed. It was a tough situation: "Those who knew the issue had been out already saw it as the last ever story on McRae, but others who didn't thought we were just sick. The cover line was 'Crashing at McRae's' because we stayed the night there but the British media were furious because they didn't realize the timeline. It was a dark cloud on the first issue, but looking back now we just think about how special it was that we got to hang out with him."

It's nice to hear the editor of a US-based car magazine talk with such respect and reverence about someone so valued in the world of motorsport, and is further evidence that 0-60 is something that those of us who are in the USA and into racing would want to read religiously. If you need any other reason to dash down to Borders to pick it up, know that their upcoming occasional series of articles on homologation specials (think Porsche 959, Escort Cosworth, M3 etc.) is titled "Omologato Mr. Rubato"! Classic...

0-60, the savior of the US car magazine

I love Evo magazine. I've mentioned it before, and I'll mention it again and I don't apologize for it, because it's been my go-to car magazine for years. Its photography and design work, along with the high-quality paper it arrives on make it a pleasant thing to behold, and the journalism contained within is always interesting, irreverent and compelling. Plus they only write about performance cars which, let's face it, is what we all love. After all, who wants to read about the entry-level model in the Chevy Cobalt range?

The main problem with Evo is getting your hands on it. I still haven't figured what time each month to go to Fog City News, our excellent downtown newsagent that carries a myriad of international magazines, to pick it up. On one recent exploratory trip I was searching the stands in vain for Evo, but instead came across a magazine called "0-60". It was as big and glossy as any of the British car magazines but I noticed the word "hoonage" on the cover in reference to an article about the new Subaru STi. I'm pretty sure hoonage is not a term used in England, so I was now very intrigued about this journal. I flicked through the pages and noted similar production values to Evo, but this was clearly coming from the USA. There was an article about driving the new Lexus IS-F from San Francisco to Las Vegas, another about basic mods for a bugeye WRX, the cover story featuring the exact same Nissan GT-R that Evo had driven in their last issue and most fascinating of all, a terrific feature about driving the STi from Seattle up to the Arctic circle on one of Canada's legendary ice roads.

SOLD! I dashed back to office and whiled away the afternoon with actual work awaiting my chance to go home and actually read the magazine. After gobbling up the content from cover to cover, I sent the magazine's editor Brian Scotto an email asking if I could interview him for the blog. He agreed, and earlier this week I gave Brian a call to find out a bit more about the story behind this exciting new addition to the world of automotive media, an interview which I'll post tomorrow...

Shuntorama

What a weekend for big accidents. We saw two entirely different yet highly disturbing crashes, both of which illustrated the potential danger of the sport, as well as the incredible ability of modern race cars to protect its occupant when things go wrong.

Here's exhibit A. Stephane Ortelli's LMP1 class prototype experienced some kind of mechanical failure during the Monza 1000km and veered abruptly to the right. At this point the aerodynamics, which are designed to prevent a car getting air (like the Mercedes CLRs at Le Mans in '99) took over because the car was sideways, and aero is not designed for sideways travel. The car launched into a massive barrel roll. As with most accidents of this type, they look far worse than they are - the gradual release of energy throughout the crash ensured that Ortelli never experienced life-threatening G-loading. The scariest thing about this one is how close the flying Oreca came to decapitating Allan McNish in the Audi:



Onto Exhibit B. In the Spanish Formula 1 Grand Prix, McLaren's Heikki Kovalainen also experienced a mechanical failure that forced the car to go somewhere it shouldn't. In his case, the car speared off the track and he made contact with the tyre wall at an angle of about 30 degrees whilst doing 137mph. Unlike Ortelli's crash, Kovalainen DID experience massive G-loads, perhaps equalling Robert Kubica's record-setting 75G load during his accident in Canada last year. It's worth noting that 100G is enough to kill most people. An additional aspect of this shunt that was scary was the fact that the car dived UNDER the tyre barrier, and no matter how low down the driver sits, his head is very much at risk in that kind of situation.


I'm not that surprised that Ortelli was relatively unharmed (save for a broken ankle) but the fact that Kovalainen survived with nothing more than concussion and some bumps and bruises is incredible. I have no doubt that the HANS device played a key role in his survival.

The gains in safety since the Imola '94 have been remarkable and it's weekends like this, where we could easily have been mourning the loss of one, perhaps even two, professional racing drivers, that are testament to the work put in by many on this critical issue.

The value of grassroots

I attended my first race event of 2008 today, the second round of the AFM season. AFM is the main sanctioning body for motorcycle circuit racing in Northern California, and they race at Infineon (that's Sears Point to most of us), Buttonwillow and Thunderhill. I had a vested interest in going: the guy who I sold my dirtbike to last week was racing, and I needed to give him the title for that bike, so I was able to do that and get to see some racing.

There were 12 races in total for the more than 20 classes of bikes, ensuring massive grids of between 50 and 65 bikes. Needless to say that there was plenty of action, but I was pleasantly surprised to not see a single crash all day long. The jewel in the crown of the AFM is Formula Pacific, a class reserved for only the fastest riders, in which any AFM-legal bike can be entered. The field is much smaller, something like 28 riders, and the racing is as fierce as you'll find in any national superbike race.

It was a great day of racing in beautiful, sunny 80 degree California weather and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. The most significant aspect of the day for me was confirmation of something I've always assumed to be true but never really thought about: motorsport would be nothing without the thousands and thousands of amateur and semi-pro racers like you find in the AFM and other grassroots organizations around the world. There would be no top-level motorsport because there would be nowhere for racers to learn their craft and it's the entrants that are the core of any successful grassroots racing group. I spent a lot of time wandering around the paddock today and was amazed at the amount of money people spend on what is basically a hobby. There's very little income at this level, and racers are lucky to be able to get their consumables and some parts paid for via generous local sponsors. But despite this, they spend huge amounts of their own money on their racebikes or racecars, as well trailers, RVs, trucks, tools, safety gear and other necessary infrastructure. What's more, they spend countless hours prepping for races, as well as entire weekends racing. From their passion springs forth strong local racing organizations where the best and brightest young racers can build their careers and go on to be part of the more widely-recognized professional side of the sport.

I'm fully aware that no-one is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts - racers race because they love to race. But I think it's worthwhile every now and then to recognize the important role that they play in this sport.

Dakar sans duneage

Those of us who are dyed-in-the-wool fans of Dakar (and who felt truly gutted by the cancellation of this year's event) have something to cling to, as right now the Central European Rally is in full swing. Imagine all the usual Dakar cast members throwing their multi-million dollar toys around forests in Romania and Hungary for seven whole days and you'll get the idea.

I've been remiss in talking about this event, simply because a) I forgot about it; and b) they (the organizers) didn't seem to do very much to make sure that racing nuts like me don't forget about it.

All is not lost! I have gotten my hands on the Eurosport coverage of the first four stages and plan on writing about it as soon I've watched them all.

Just to whet your appetite, I've seen two photos, one of a VW Touraeg race vehicle about 15 feet in the air coming off a jump and the other of a Mitsubishi Pajero and another Touraeg duelling side by side on a stage. This bodes rather well, even if an inspection of the route maps indicates a lot of liaison for very little actual racing.