This episode is brought to you by our friends at FB Autosport. There's nothing worse than spending your race weekend under your car missing sessions because you were too swamped to get everything done in time. Whether it's car prep, new car builds, or arrive and drive, FB Autosport has you covered for Time Attack, GLTC, or WRL. They even have cars you can rent now while you put the finishing touches on your latest race car project. Reach out to Rob at FB Autosport now and tell him that Slip Angle sent you to get your project car finished and get back on track. Man, it's wet. It's so sloppy. Holy crap. My tools are inside of the trailer and they got more wet inside of the trailer than I did inside of the trailer.
Freaking humidity, man. There's like the air is all water. Yeah, everything was wet today. I noticed that in the men's room yesterday here at Watkins Glen, the towels in the, like, after you wash your hands, the towels were so wet that they ripped when you tried to dispense them. I had the same thing. What is wrong with these towels? How humid does it get in here? This all sounds like a great weekend to do some racing. Yeah. Might as well have the largest GLTC field of all time. How about that? So we got Jason and Eric from Yaw Speed. We're at Watkins Glen, as we said.
Jason, your car spent a lot of time on the dyno this weekend. It sounded sick, though. What was up with that? It did. Well, if you remember back to Heartland, we struggled with getting the thing tuned right. Did you have an OM ECU at Heartland? We did. And we actually did here as well. Oh, really? That wasn't the plan. Yeah, that wasn't the plan. So we've got this really whiz-bang Cybex ECU that we're just having trouble finding the right personnel because it's not a more widely used ECU. And the reason we got it is it's plug-and-play for 987.2.
you know, has some really great strategies inside of it for, you know, holding power flat. So we're excited about using it, but we still haven't been able to get it dialed in. So we went with Akab. We actually had Graham with boosted performance tuning helping us all weekend. Yeah, it was amazing. Yeah, and Graham really saved us this weekend because we thought we were going to be on the Cybex. We actually had a guy out in Portland, Ben Calibration, is going to be helping us with it, but we just couldn't get it running well enough to even get logs and get, you know, to get it. So, you know, we're going to go back to square one and get that system up and working.
Graham came through with a Cobb, and then we had to get it dialed in this weekend. And that's why we were on there a lot. And, you know, we just wanted to be as competitive as we could. And, of course, that would have probably been the easiest thing to do there would have been to change the tires. Yeah. You got the power pretty dialed, right? Yeah, we're pretty happy with it. It's super flat. Graham did a great job. I mean, we have like 4,500 to 7,500. Dude, it sounds so gnarly. Nothing sounds good. I love uncorked Porsche. Dude, they're the best. They are the best with the right exhaust. It sounds really good. It came with, that was an old Interseries, came in an Interseries car, and they have an M&M.
exhaust like long tube headers like really nice exhaust tiny mufflers um but it's a really great system and really those things are really sensitive to the headers how they sound and yeah these things make it sound sweet before we dive in too far We're starting a forum. It started. Hey, where is it? Forum.tracktuned.com. Yep. We just launched it. It's live, right? We haven't talked about it except for on Patreon. But if somebody were to search it out. Right now? Yeah. Let's get a thousand people on their chat. I am going to put a link or make it a topic header on the Tracktuned website. Got a lot of ideas, things that I think are relevant to go on Tracktuned. Yep. And a lot of things, discussion things to go on forums as well. Yeah, I'm stoked about it. It was fun starting a build thread the other day.
That's like the main reason I wanted to have more. Did you feel like a kid again? Yeah, I felt like I was 21 again. Back to 1998, the forum days. Everybody that registered so far messaged me and was like, this is awesome. I can't wait for more people to be here. You've got to talk about it. A few people mentioned it to me, too. Scott Malloy, he's all excited about it. On the Patreon show, we said as soon as we talk about it, Scott Malloy will be the first person to register. Because he must listen to the Patreon like second Safer comes out.
We definitely were correct. It was the first one. Bring it back to forums. I mean, that's awesome, right? I mean, Facebook and all that crap is taking the wind out of... Super, super useful. But think about if someone asks now on Facebook, hey, does anyone know the blah-ba-de-blah? If you just have a link to the forum, you go, here you go. It's there for all times. So let's put all the blah-ba-de-blahs there. Can you write an article listening? Can you write an article or a thread or something that you think would be useful for the community? If we have a hundred of those, instantly we have a thousand more. Yeah, exactly. Great. Let's do it. I can't remember if I talked about this on the show.
We haven't recorded since, what, Monday? So I don't think I had the idea at the time. I had an idea for an article on TrackTune. The four of us sitting here have kind of agreed that we want to make both TrackTune and its forum just a place where information lives. It's not meant to get, you know, a million clicks this week. It's not designed necessarily for ad revenue. It's just a place for information for people. Resource, you know, there's, you know, one of the great things about Gridlife is the community and, like, it's a place, you know, there's little pockets of community online, but it can be really a central hub for the community online. I would love for it to be a repository for it.
Like, oh, I really know about Camaros. Like, here's how I did my Camaro, and here's why it's rad. Yeah, exactly. You can't find that on Facebook. No, you can't. You find one recommended spec, and then you can't find it again. What I plan to do, and it could take a little while to do it in a manner that I think is satisfactory, but I messaged Adam after we launched the forum the other night, and I said...
I bet there's no one on the planet who has been to more time attack events than Adam and I. Because I was thinking about it. There are other people that have been doing time attack longer. Yeah, that's true. We do more events per year than anyone. That's true. And so Adam and I have, I think, some expertise and perspective on how to be a time attack competitor. And there are 500 things, for example, that should be communicated to a new to time attack driver that sometimes just gets assumed. And we try to talk about the big things in the driver's meeting. But people are like glossing their eyes over it. I'm even trying to be funny and concise and quick. But people don't always listen.
We're only talking about a couple big things. Sure. So, like, there was an interesting issue this weekend about kind of a car being scrutinized and protested, and it was a question about legality on an OEM replica lip. And the driver was basically told, like, hey, you need to verify or prove to us that this is legal. They didn't do that, and they also didn't modify their car or change their class. And as a consequence, when we said, hey, okay, the sprints are now, your car's not eligible to run, even though they were in the sprint, they were upset. And in the discussion, it was like, okay, well,
did you make your car compliant? And the answer was no. And the expectation was the motorsports organization should scrutinize every single car at all events to make sure that they're legal. That was the expectation. He was like, why don't you do that? And they were like, oh, I was just hanging out in my car all day. Why didn't you come find me? What? We can find you when people start protesting you, man.
And then we did a giant deep dive, found every BMW expert we could here, FCP Euro, a couple of shops, and they all found us all the OEM parts and catalogs and everything, and it just doesn't exist. So it's not a replica thing. And I'm sorry, but you could have helped this. The guy eventually was like, yeah, I'm coming to the next event. I'll be at RevUp. Great driver. I coached him on what should you do to make this car compliant. I don't think the changes are that big, but for this event, the car's not compliant. And so putting together an article... It is a dope car. I wouldn't want to mess with it either. But still, if you want to win, just check all the boxes. He just didn't check all the boxes.
telling a driver in general how a transponder works and what the process is to get one at registration. It's not specific to grid life, but how do you know that you need a transponder? If you've never been to an event like that, you might not know. How would you put it there? What do you need to look for? I think one of the great things about the forum format, too, is that you can have the stickies at the top and with the basic information, you're starting out, start here. You have all those things there. Some of the best forums back in the day, after a few years, they would build the sticky with all the links to the best thing.
keys to success on track, and then you click on it, and it's a thread you can't comment on, but it's got 50 things. One thing, too, is somebody mentioned the assumption that people are starting from the same level. This organization is so active, and there's been so many people involved. You just assume that everybody's kind of there. Every event, somebody walks up to me, and they don't really even know how to get started. One of my personal biggest fears is looking like a dummy. If I go to an event like this, if someone has my similar anxiety,
They might not ask. They might not speak. And they're going to have a bad time because of it. And they might not have the best time. If a resource existed where I could go learn in advance to like, how does all this stuff actually work? What can I do in advance to make sure I'm ready? I would read. And it would not be as intimidating and my weekend would be better. Looking like a dummy is totally fine. You just got to be accepted. You just got to accept it. Hey, look, I'm an expert at it. I can tell you. I feel like I always look at that.
So speaking of looking like a dummy, I was watching Speed Vision from the 90s the other day, or early 2000s. Best TV ever. And then this big old dummy right here with way less hair shows up, and he just won his rookie race or something? Did you say you were at Car Club? Yeah, I was at the office with Chris at midnight, and Chris had been watching just old Speed Vision all day. The Grand Rapids Grand Prix of, I don't know, 96, 98 was up. And then it rolled into, I think it was your rookie year. Was it World Challenge Touring, or was it? Yeah, I mean, it was your rookie something. Yeah, so it probably was Utah.
Maybe. Yeah, that was my first win in World Challenge was Utah. It was actually my third race in World Challenge. I had done the MX-5 Cup and won the championship there, and Mazda had their ladder system where they would promote the driver that won the championship to the next rung on the ladder. So I started out with TriPoint and World Challenge, and third race in, we had a win, and that was a very memorable weekend, for sure. That just randomly was up on the screen. Chris just had a playlist of Speed Vision or whatever. That's funny. Yeah, it was cool. I feel like that character in...
Of course, I'm the worst with names. I can't think of the movie. But Napoleon Dynamite, the guy that is regaling his old football days. That's me right there. That football over the mountains. That's right. Uncle Rico. Uncle Rico. That's me watching those old races. Yeah, I can't wait to be Uncle Rico. I'll be like, hey, I remember when we did that. That was awesome. That's right. No, I was fortunate to have some really great times and had a great little career in motorsports. And it's great to be back. I mean, I've been wanting to do this for a while. You've been track dormant for a while. Yeah, yeah. It was like six or seven years, give or take, where I didn't do anything. And, you know, the itch was there.
Thankfully, we had a great group that came together, Eric, the professional awesome guys, Devin Giles, just a great group. Hayden Lowe has been helping us out a lot. Just a great group, and then all this kind of came to fruition, and the next thing you know, we're starting to shop together in the car club space. Pretty bizarre. You said you started to get the itch again. What was the catalyst for being like, I'm not on track to being like, I'm going wheel to wheel again. I mean, honestly, I was watching GLTC for the most part. I mean, I had wanted to, you know, I'd wanted to for a while get back into, you know, World Challenge SRO because it felt like, you know, my second year in World Challenge was my final year in that series. And I came in second in the championship. I led the championship all year. And then the final race, I lost it by just a handful of points because of the finishing position, the way it all worked out. And, you know, so I felt like there was like that unfinished business in World Challenge.
I kind of got to the point where it's like, you know what, that ship has sailed. It's way more expensive to run out there now. It's so different than it was 20 years ago. It's so much different, yeah, absolutely. Then watching GLTC, it's like, this is what that was. It really sparked the interest for me again, so I want to come out and do it. That's wild to hear.
I can't say the people, especially in the rain today, the people that are running at the front are absolute slayers. Unreal, dude. Just crazy. True story. It's really hard to do that, man. Yeah, I mean, I've been in IMSA races, World Challenge races, other races in the rain where there was not nearly the level of just close racing skill, keep it on the track, no mistakes. There were some bumps and bruises. Unfortunately, a couple of cars got rearranged. Yeah, there were a few people that just literally put themselves off track. But the racing side of things, people were...
Super clean and really, really paying close attention and just really high level of driving. It was great to be a part of it. For how terrible even the best race conditions were, I was starting race one. I chose to be in the start basket all weekend because it's typically Giles or myself that's up there. And it was such terrible conditions up there. I was like, I don't want to put him up here. And I kind of like the adrenaline rush from waving the flag. And as soon as I got up there, I was like, wow, it was cold. The wind just came right down the front straight. And it was everything. Cold, wind, rain. Seeing it, I think we did one pace lap the first time and then two for every other race just to get heat in the tires because it was colder today than yesterday.
seeing the cars coming down the front straight and just like the pit in my stomach being like, What are we doing? I wish we had an option to not do this. Can we just postpone this for four days? It's dry. It's not just Armco. There's five levels of Armco in some places. It's not just a wall. It's a tall wall. This would be great weather for a Gingerman event that nobody cared about in October. Do you remember Fall Special? This is the weather of Fall Special every year. It was just the most anxiety. Seeing the cars, the pace car peels off, and I'm just like...
Can I just not throw it? I just really wish I didn't have to do this. It was a real late green on that last race. I'm just trying to keep the speed down going into one, man. I know. Yeah, I know. I hear you. And early checker, too, right? Did you guys call it? We had to because they literally had to get up to somebody else. There was a funeral procession memorial thing happening at a certain time. And they needed to start using a certain part of the track for photos at a certain time. So we're done. They gave us 10 extra minutes. That's all they could give us. We had a big cleanup after race three. Somebody screwed up a piece of arm code bad. Yeah, that was a rough one. I heard the car's not even totaled, though. Really? It looked pretty bad, but I'm going to, you know.
Who was involved in that? I think it was Fiona, wasn't it? Fiona Pappas? Yep. I don't even know what happened. I haven't asked her that. I don't know either. I drove by it on the in-lap. It was on the last lap. Yeah, it was the last lap, definitely. It was coming out of the boot. Yep.
Not fun. I hate when that happens. When we woke up and looked at the radar and it all moved away, we were high-fiving each other. They were the only fools with only drag tires. Down in the town, it didn't rain all day. Up here, we're just in the cloud. It was just like the air was wet. It was just water. I did get from Gary that a storm is coming through and it's supposed to be rainier tomorrow. It was rainy all day today. I don't know if he's right, though. Looking at radar, I don't know if he's right.
But I also don't know. We looked at the radar and there's like an inland hurricane up in like, where was it? Like upper Michigan or something? Yeah, it's whipping past Cincinnati and kind of up towards Toronto. I don't know. Maybe there's another one then. Half of the country sucks right now.
And it sucked the most here. Yeah, I mean, you know, this is just such an iconic track, and it was amazing to be here. I'm glad we got some dry sessions. Yeah, definitely. We got dry at practice and qualifying in, and that was a blast. I mean, driving this place is just so much fun. How was that car in the dry? Oh, it was a blast. I mean, we did a bunch of changes. One of the reasons we were ironically too late to Tiger Rack to pick up our rain tires on the way is that we put all new SPL control arms on the car prior to this race, and it really woke the car up. I mean, it really fixed a lot of problems with the suspension, and we have the thing dialed in.
really well now so yeah it was the thing was absolutely absolutely stuck in the dry so yeah we're excited about it you know we've got the tune right now we've got the suspension in place and i think if we'd had if we'd had the rain tires this weekend we would have definitely been you know up near you know up in the top five more solidly this weekend cool yeah it's a great it's a great sounding car i love caymans it's a stick too it is yeah yeah we haven't had a lot of mango caymans yeah honestly i think it's helped us in the tuning with the at least at least with the stock ecu um because you know the pdk like throws all kinds of stuff off when you're trying to tune it so it's been it's rock solid and and you know i've i'm i guess you know i'm a I'm an aging Gen Xer, like pre-boomer, I guess. So I grew up driving manuals, and I'm cool with it. Race cars are kind of fun with manuals. Yeah, I dig it. I can see the allure of a PDK. They're cool, too. I mean, the car, we actually helped a customer build up a car. He was going to run GLTC, and they ended up doing a Porsche Club with it. But it was a PDK car, and I did some testing. And they're fun, absolutely. But actually, I have a little bit more fun driving our manual. That's cool. Now, I know I'm a little biased, but it's hard for me to imagine a decision where I was like, man, should I run Porsche Club or GLTC? And I'd be like.
He did do time tag with us. Yeah, he did. I think he emailed at one point and he was disappointed in how hard it was to get tickets. I think that was part of it. If I'm remembering correctly, I don't know. January was a long time ago. They don't have tickets for Porsche Club, so maybe that was part of his decision. Whip out your checkbook and they let you in? Just show up. They got plenty of slots. What are you doing tonight? What's your plan? What do you do around Watkins Glen? Oh man, it's a great town for having a couple of drinks and we'll probably find a beer somewhere.
have a nice dinner. Eric actually found this great Airbnb that's in the side of the hill overlooking the lake. It probably looks like it had maybe 10 additions throughout the last 120 years. The crew's over there getting cleaned up and then we're going to meet him up for dinner. That sounds great. What are you guys doing tonight? Probably another podcast and then just be wet, drink some whiskey and go to bed. Fight about ticketing problems and get yelled at by the racetrack. Eric, today, we're rolling out a new ticketing system.
It has a lot of really awesome potential. We've been using it this year. Parts of the process are challenging and make it really difficult for our timing and scoring people. Today, I sat down and I did a five-wide style cause map for the things that went wrong this weekend and traced them all the way back to, well, why did this exactly happen? And some of those issues were like, well, the wrong people at Gridlife were working on this. Or at least they didn't have the right project owner. And so I showed Chris, here's how you do a cause map. Here's how you map out exactly what went wrong and why.
And he's like, no, I've got to do more of this. He's like, I'm not good at it. You're good at it. But, like, I've got to do more of this. Yeah, it was really cool. When I saw the email, I was like, oh, that makes sense. That's a good way to solve problems. That's why you have scientists on your team. Yeah, just hire people with PhDs. It is a skill that, like, I was, like, doing that process was something that I was aware of before my current job. My current job, I run that team. That's how you solve problems. I run that team. I run, like, anything bad that happens, we do an investigation like that. Abe only does the bad things. Well, like, recently, a piece of equipment failed.
And it was a sizable failure of a large piece of machinery. And what we found was, well, the equipment had been modified in such a way that the electric motor with the torque multiplier, it was a gear reduction, was supposed to have a shear pin in it. That way, if something seized up, the shear pin would break first before anything valuable broke or anything exploded. Super normal, yeah. Especially metal gears. The shear pin had been replaced by something that was hardened steel. Ouch. Oh, yeah. Oops. Probably because they needed to solve the problem right now, but didn't care about the problem down the road. It reminds me of that story with the horseshoe nail that lost the war or whatever.
Oh, yeah? Yeah. Have you ever heard that one? I don't remember the specifics, but it reminds me of Cosmap stuff. It goes back to something super simple. My boss at my regular job is really, really sharp, and I get the chance to learn a lot from him about being a really critical thinker and thinking deeply about something before you do something. That's a talent I want to have. There is a...
unbelievably detailed cause map for why the Titanic sank. There are thousands of boxes with evidence and information. One of the root causes for why the Titanic sank was that, as silly as it sounds, they decided to launch a boat into the water. If you don't launch the Titanic into the water at the port, it cannot sink. That's definitely a root cause. It sure is. You don't run Watkins Glen, you don't get cold and wet. But it's an emphasis on you should be specific about why things happen.
you can articulate it. Everything is causing something else. I'm kind of fascinated by Cosmaps. We need to do a Cosmap on how we ended up here with no rain tires on the rainiest weekend. Actually, if you did a Cosmap for how you ended up here on no rain tires, I bet it'd be funny. Yeah. Oh, it would be funny. Yeah, maybe I'll write a forum post. You gotta do it. There we go. Do a forum post. Cosmap of why we showed up to the wettest weekend of the year with only dry tires. I'm picturing it in my head already. I'm not working there. So somebody was like, well, is that like a fishbone diagram? And I was like, yeah, but fishbones aren't as good. Yeah, they are. What's a fishbone diagram? It's like, it's a trail of causes maybe.
But each cause maybe has like four or five factors. But if you deal with a complicated problem, a single issue could be caused by, I don't know, a half dozen issues. So for example, registration was difficult and time consuming. Well, what are the factors that contributed to that? There were a bunch. And so you can map each one of those factors into this was caused by this one thing. You're making me think about how to change my entire life and solve my problems differently. I normally solve my problems by...
All right, I'll just fix it myself. And then, like, get more tired and hit things with hammers until they're fixed. Yeah, that's just how I've always fixed problems. And it generally works, but it's exhausting. Blunt force way. I mean, for me, one of the issues, you know, I think that once solved is really going to make things great from the GLTC perspective is, you know, being able to resubmit your comp form. The portal. You know, throughout the weekend. Portal aspect rules. You know, being able to, like, you know, just do that. Like, there's no paperwork. It's all real time. You know, it kind of exists in the system. You guys can see it whenever it's updated. We had a bit of a beta of that last year with Gridlife.club.
um which like worked better in some ways and didn't work at all in other ways like selling ticket ways and like this was Like what I'm told is this was first designed to sell tickets and then the rest of it followed. The other one was first designed to make clean, easy data and ticketing was a problem. I don't know what any of that means, but that was my explanation. I want to make one more point on cause mapping because car failures or mechanical failures happen all the time in a motorsports paddock, right? Like if, if you break one axle during a race and you're, you might just like shrug that off as a fluke, but like if you break axles two or three times over the course of a few weekends, you might do a cause map to say, why is this actually happening?
And what am I doing to fix it? Because if I don't understand why it's happening, it'll keep happening. It's a good way to kind of open your mind to, you know, cause it to factor. I mean, you know, step back a little bit, look at the bigger picture. It's your point, right? Because like the first response is just to change it. Like, oh, it just failed. Just change it. When you look at it in a car perspective, that's how my brain thinks, in a car perspective. So maybe my brain does think that way. Yeah, you'd probably be pretty well suited. My first reaction is, why did this happen? Yeah.
Instead of just throwing parts at you. Yeah, I never take any axles to the racetrack because they never break. But if I had to take two axles to the racetrack, I'd be like, all right, what's the axle angle problem? Are we getting compression on these CVs? Are they extending? Why is it popping under the diff? All these things, you know? Listen, thank you guys. Thank you so much for reminding me because lowered caimans, especially, we're lower now with our SPL arms. Shred axles? They shred axles, so it's time to inspect ours now. Do they compress or come apart? They compress. Okay. I'm sorry, they come apart. They come apart. Oh, so it's stretching. Yeah, so there's spacers you can get for them, you know, just to space them out just a little bit. Kind of amazing how much actually slip you do need in some CVs and how, like...
We're running the car drastically low compared to stock right now. It's pretty slammed. Yeah, like you can't even put a tire strap on top of the tire through the... You're definitely tucking. Yeah, it's tucking. I mean, you have to. It's DLTC. It's like you get kicked off the grid if you're not tucking. It's pretty cool. It's amazing how much, like, even with OEM travel, like, at some points, the axle's inadequate. So you're wondering, did they just not even consider this? Yeah, that isn't a good point. Well, I guess it's just... It just spends so little time in that range, and then now you're putting it where it's in that range all the time. So they're probably just buying it off the shelf.
CV that they already make for something else. Thinking about Cosmaps, I'm thinking back. I don't know if you guys ever saw the article in Grassroots about the fire that we had way back when at Thunderhill, the 25-hour, with Charles Espinelow driving the car that we built. I was just going to say, with Chip Espinelow? Yeah. We engineered this car to have two fuel cells. Yeah, I helped us engineer that car. It was two fuel cells. We were carrying all total. It was a stock fuel tank plus a fuel cell. We were carrying like 60 gallons of fuel in that car. That sounds like a...
Yeah, and that's exactly what happened. But, you know, the Cosmap, it's so crazy what the Cosmap was, you know, looking back at the chain of events. But, you know, to make a long story short, what ended up causing the fire was the, well, many causes, as you know, with Cosmap. But there's a sound requirement there. So we had to modify the exhaust and it ended up blowing in the wrong spot and overheating some components, which then shrunk a fuel tube and started a slow fuel leak. And, you know, Charles radioed in, you know, we were probably about five, six hours into the race. Charles radioed in and said, you know, I'm smelling a little bit of fire.
Or a burning smell. And then half a lap later, it exploded. And Charles is so fortunate to have gotten out. He was pretty severely burned. The Aftermath article was multiple pages of like, here's how you don't die. You should buy this. Here's what happened to him. Making no comment about any series. But an other issue on such a Cosmap would be, well, the series didn't disallow.
fuel capacity beyond a certain amount. Yeah. Absolutely. Or maybe didn't talk about exhaust directional. I mean, there's just so many things like you're saying. All these, all these things, they kind of like there was, you can talk about the rules too and not catch them. Yeah. It's amazing how different things interact. And yeah, I think there's a show on, it may not be on the TV anymore. I think it was called seconds from disaster. And they take like these, take like big industrial accidents and stuff. And they like trace it back to all these things that went wrong, all this chain along the way. And that sounds like.
Awesome entertainment to me. I would watch so much of that. You've got to look up Seconds from Disaster. It's great. It really is. It's good TV. That's how I felt throwing the green flag. Seconds from Disaster. We're talking, I think, just a little bit about safety now. I got some safety training at work in a program called Safe Start. And part of the exercise was there are certain situations that create an environment for you as a worker or as a person where you're more prone to doing accidents, whether you're rushing or you're fatigued or you're distracted or whatever else. Interestingly, part of the thought exercises was every one of us.
undoubtedly has done something that we look back on and say, that was really unsafe. Really unsafe. I mean like daily for me. Interesting that the majority of accidents that cause people injuries, at least at work, is not any of those things. It's on the slips, trips and falls and any of the stuff that you're not paying attention to. Those are the things that actually hurt people. Yeah, dumb use of everyday products like puts probably more people in the ER than like surfing on top of a golf cart at Road Atlanta down the hill. That was really dangerous. That was the most dangerous thing I think I've ever done.
I've had some golf cart injuries. The golf cart next to me, Steph Papadakis was doing the same thing. We're like racing. I think I heard the story. I wasn't at that. That was probably the craziest good life. The very first Road Atlanta. Okay, so that wasn't the last Road Atlanta. The last Road Atlanta was pretty chill. I thought the last Road Atlanta was pretty chill. Yeah. The second to last Road Atlanta was pretty crazy. But the first and second were gnarly.
I mean, it was wild. Well, you guys were a lot younger back then. Yeah, man. We've been doing this a long time. That was 2016, 2017, 18 and 19. So wait, I have been affiliated with Red Life in at least some capacity since 2016. Yeah. That's what, seven or eight years ago? A long time ago. What? My kid was like, we were talking about the other day, my kid was like a newborn when we like got to know each other. She was like one. Do you know that my first episode was episode 100? Yeah. And we're on episode like 500. I don't know what we talked about for the first 100. I don't remember any of that shit.
Those were hilarious episodes. It was very fresh and fun. Yeah, it was. I think my outlook on life was maybe more fun back then. Probably. Probably. Wet weekends at Watkins Glen have sucked the life. Well, when we first did it, we had literally hosted two Great Life events. Midwest Festival 1 and Midwest Festival 2. And then we started doing like three events a year, four events a year, five events a year. And now you're doing a million events a year. Sixteen. That's crazy. Yeah, I was on, I think, one of those first 100 with Austin. Yeah, and even then I was like...
I've got to get to one of these. We were talking about one of our three events we'd ever hosted, four events at the time. Austin picked up this brown VW Dasher that we had around the shop. He drove it over there. Greenwood Motorsports. The wagon super sports. GMS Wagons. That's what it's called. It sure was. Just aren't enough wagons in the States to make a whole business out of it, it turns out. Wait, who was GMS Wagons? Me. No shit? Yeah, absolutely. Really? Yeah, you didn't know that. I didn't know that. I actually Googled GMS Wagons like a week ago. I was like...
Is that still a company? I told the story to everyone on Slip Angle, but I'm going to buy a Volvo V60 plug-in hybrid. Is that a definite deal now? The dealer will call me as soon as I can place an order for the next month. So that's like in a couple weeks. I want to do the Euro delivery. I'm going to go to Sweden. I've always wanted to do one of those Euro deliveries. Does Lotus do the Euro deliveries? Yeah, Lotus does it. Porsche does it. Do they pay for your plane tickets? No, but they do...
give you some, you know, I don't know. Yeah, you know, they don't pay for your tickets. I didn't know that. But, you know, like the shipping back for the cars. It's like a free vacation. It's a free vacation. I didn't know that Eric Streeter was allowed to buy a Lotus that was not disassembled because I thought that's the only way he did it. Wait, what do you think about the Lotus Amira? I love that car. Do you have one on order? Well, I don't, but I've sat in one. Have you really? I have not driven one because it was the first one that was actually in the country of all things. It was actually the press car that was going around. Okay. How did you sit in it? How did you sit in it?
It was at Auto Europe in Birmingham, Michigan. Kind of my buddies, right? I've been running with them for a long time. The guy that buys all the Lotuses, they call him when they get one. When they have another Lotus, yeah. Yeah, actually, I was just chatting with one of the owners. He's like, hey, we have one. You want to stop buying? I needed to go pick up something from it anyway. Naturally. Because you're building a couple Lotuses right now. Yeah, exactly. They let me sit in it. They couldn't drive it because it was a non-licensed car. Yeah, they're not allowed to drive it. That sounds kind of like an excuse. I would slap the plate on that thing. I haven't spent much time thinking about this. So if the question is stupid, just make fun of me. Is there a Lotus...
that has been produced that would be a reasonable GLTC vehicle that wouldn't be prohibitively expensive to maintain? I think all the lease. Well, like, fender work and stuff like that on the Elyse. People are always like, oh, those kind of jobs are trash. You're not going to get away from that. You buy a salvage one. Yeah. And you just deal with cracked fiberglass? Yeah, unless you have, like, a Motorsports Edition. You just deal with it, you know? Yeah, I mean, fiberglass, I mean, who hasn't repaired fiberglass? Yeah, there's a lot of salvage ones. Yeah, there are. And the crazy thing is, like, insurance companies will write them off for the littlest thing, right? Because they're crazy expensive to fix. To properly fix. Yeah, and the tubs are all aluminum. You know, so you're not supposed to weld aluminum. You know, all these things, right? So they'll...
So as far as, like, caging the car and, like, making a GLTC car out of a Lotus, that would be a reasonable thing? It's a pretty popular car in SCCA, STU. Yeah, I can't remember which class is it. STU, it wasn't allowed in STL. Can you imagine the memes if there were one of those things out there? Oh, yeah. The size differential? Versus the Odyssey? Yeah, where Emile's car was... Emile's car was photoshopped even smaller. I've raced against them in SCCA. They do, like, a ship-in-a-bottle bolt-in cage, kind of like they do in NSXs and some of the landscape insights. Yeah, there's a lot of guys that have worked...
pretty heavily on making sure that they're safe. I know the guy that's done all the cages for Alex Krugman, Krugspeed, who campaigns like half a dozen of them. Yeah, he does, yeah. He was on the committee for SCC, SDAC with me. Yeah, I consider, you know, I mean, obviously it's not... We have a slight penalty for it because of literally the underbody aero. Right, yeah. I think it's a 2% penalty right now, but... It's funny, I was talking about... Earlier, he actually raced one in World Challenge GT of all places. They had one with like some giant turbo and it was an Exige, not in the least, but, you know, the same chassis and it was...
Yeah, that car was an amazing race car. So, yeah, you can definitely turn one of those into it. Yeah, good suspension geometry, light. Yeah, super light. I just think, you know, the way that it's kind of shaking out, and I'm still learning about it, you know, it's only my second GLTC race, but, you know, it feels like if you go the super light route, it's a bit of a challenge, you know? It's a bit of a challenge, and especially just from a racing perspective, because, you know, it's hard to get overlap. You know, you may be, there were times, you know, in the dry sessions that we did have here, you know, there's times where I'm...
you know, plus 10 on min speed over a car. And then you get on the straightaway and there's nothing, you can't get overlap because, you know, they just can walk you a little bit. I think the biggest thing, regardless of horsepower, is getting right to the limit of your power to weight. Yeah. Because we've had, we've looked at a lot of data of like 170 to 180 horsepower cars versus the 220, 230, 240. Which kind of, that's kind of like the big.
average. It's pretty close. The thing that we did try to solve a little bit is it seems like tires fall off worse when you're 200 tread wearers, when you have 15 inch tires because you've got less meat to absorb the heat. And I think Emil did pretty well. He was top five, top six most of the weekend. And he was pretty quick if I remember right in the drive session. Pretty solid in qualifying. Do you see much of a difference in top speed on the light cars versus the heavy cars? A few wheel horsepower. A few wheel horsepower. Yeah, because that's a limitation too, right? I mean, if you're going to have a small car, it better be efficient aero-wise. Really efficient. Especially above 100 miles per hour.
That's the barrier you're trying to knock down. And that's the key because, again, just from a racing perspective, you know, lap time, all day long, you can make the lap time, but it's just getting around. That's the challenge. Or defending against someone because, you know, it's really if you're in that car that does have a little bit more power, you know, based on how you're working that, you know, the formula, you know, that person can get a run on you and get overlap a lot easier. Yeah, but you're talking about that a bunch with the Corvettes today, right? Yeah, definitely.
Yeah, it was just, well, obviously also because it was a one-lane racetrack, so it's hard to pass when there's only one. And it wasn't even a dry line. It's just the less wet line. But, yeah, no, it was hard to get overlap. I was plenty of in speed, and I could be right on the back, and then it's just like two, three, four car lengths. It's not much, but it's just then how do you make the pass? Yeah, it gets hard. Well, do we need to send you guys to dinner? Yeah, I'm getting a little hungry. How about you? By the time we get there, I'll be hungry. All right. Yeah, we're going to go. Right on, guys. Oh, you don't know?
Yeah, actually, you kind of knew where we were going to go for dinner. You did say something. Yeah, didn't we say something already? We're so tired, I don't know. I don't know. They moved. I haven't been there since. It's a root pod. Somebody else went there yesterday or told me about it. I heard the name. Yeah. It seems like there's a lot of cool places to hang out here. Yeah, there are. Well, we appreciate you guys coming. Yeah, thanks for having us. Everybody needs to go to the forums. Forum.tractune.com. Let's start a forum. All right. Let's do it. Cool, buddies. Have a good drive home. Yeah, appreciate it. I appreciate you coming out. Thanks for having us.
Slip Angle was created by Austin Cabot and Adam Jubey, co-hosted by Derek Yarbrough and production by Abram Schmucker, who mixes all of our terrible audio. If you like the show, please rate us and review us on iTunes and come and find us in the Pits of Gridline to say hello.