After a very long, 2 month hiatus from the Jetta cup, it was time to go racing again. The original schedule would’ve included a street race in downtown Toronto with Champ Car, but seeing as they went bankrupt earlier in the year, that wasn’t happening. The decision was between a race at Miller Motorsports Park outside of Salt Lake City, Utah, or run during the all Mazda weekend at Portland Int’l Raceway. SCCA/VW chose the latter and after visiting and checking out Portland, I’m glad they did. Portland was actually a perfect venue for the Jetta TDI Cup as Portland is a very ‘green’ and environmentally conscious city. Everyone bikes everywhere and the public transportation is great.
For this race, my sister insisted on coming out and checking out Portland, as well as my race. We both met up in Atlanta’s Hartsfield Int’l Airport and arrived 5 hours later on the opposite coast, arriving around 7pm (10pm EST). After getting screwed over by a taxi driver to our hotel, we finally settled in. I have to thank my iPhone for being so resourceful this past weekend. It was so damn useful as neither of us brought our laptops. I used it for booking hotels online, using GPS to see where the hell we were at, using it to search for food, etc. What surprised me and amazed me at the same time was finding out how close everything was in Portland. It is unheard of for a race track to be so close to downtown of a city as it is in Portland. Without traffic, you could literally go from the track to downtown in about 7 minutes. The hotel from the track was about 3 or 4 miles, and same for the airport. I was impressed and wished that everything was as close on the East coast.
After walking around North Portland through the night on Thursday, we finally were able to get an awesome rate from Enterprise rent-a-car for their weekend special. 50% off sounded sweet. We picked up the car at noon on Friday and immediately went into downtown. What a fantastic city, not only from the mountains and city skyline, but how the vibe is throughout the city. We met up with my sister’s friend from Boston, Jon. Since my sister and Jon are into biking and it was the last Friday of the month, turns out there would be a Critical Mass ride. Jon insisted we go to the track first to check-in. After running into traffic on the I-5 (which was only about 20 minutes), we got to the track to find out that they weren’t doing check-in until Saturday morning. We headed back to downtown and did the Critical Mass ride. Even though it wasn’t a huge turn-out like in Boston or Chicago, we had our fun rolling through the city as well as riding down some awesome trails. After the ride, we headed to another hotel for the night in Vancouver, WA (just over the bridge from Oregon).
Saturday
Saturday morning we had to get to the track real early since they would be cramming in a track walk session at 7:15 am. We got in the golf carts as usual and hit the track at PIR. Portland is definitely a change from what I’m used to. PIR is very flat and pretty short at 1.9 miles. After studying the track with Jan, Mark and Ryan, we headed back to the hospitality tent. This weekend presented a change in the driver line-up. Not
Anywho, the practice session around 9:45 came up so we all got suited up and into the cup cars. I was
After walking around the pit, watching all the different Mazda series run and cleaning my new painted helmet, it was around 4pm, time for qualifying. Qualifying went terrible for me. After talking with Matthew, he told me to do a few laps, come into pits to check times and to let the tires cool down. I ended up overdriving the car. I did a few hotlaps like he insisted and went into pits. I told the techs to check tire pressures and Matthew told me the top time was high 1:29’s. I saw on the AIM datalogger my best was a 1:30.03. After a few minutes in the pit, I headed out to chase after 1:29’s. I ended up missing my braking zones, understeering like mad trying to fight the car into a corner and once I came out of T12, I ran too wide, ran past the rumble strip and hit a nice, deep rut. Later what I found out would be a flat tire, I was wondering why the car was handling horribly. I would turn hard into a right hand corner and all it wanted to do was hop or understeer like crazy. It made sense later as the flat tire was essentially rolling over itself. I said screw it and finished the whole session instead of coming in early. Surprisingly, I was still able to stay in the mid 1:30’s, even with a flat front left tire. I had been chasing after 1:29’s so hard that I ended up overdriving to a 21st qualifying position. Ouch. Full qualifying results here.
Sunday
Sunday morning, we didn’t have to arrive at the track until 10 am. I got lots of sleep as there were all kinds of festivals and pretty much every hotel in the Portland/Vancouver area was sold out. We lucked out and found 1 room available in Vancouver at the Phoenix Inn. We went over media training with Shand Spencer and Maria Burkel (VW public relations people). Turns out whoever receives the must publicity wins a free trip to Germany and possibly 1 race in the German Polo Cup series! After the presentation, I immediately showed them my pic and insert in the September issue of Diesel World Magazine (thanks Chris Neprasch!) about the Jetta TDI Cup. Todd Steen, a marketing consultant, gave us a very informative slideshow presentation about brand identity, marketing, sponsorship, etc. Like I had experienced with corporate businesses, 6 figure deals take atleast 12-18 months while $5-15,000 deals take 3-6 months. I finally received a reply to my sponsorship request emails from a few corporate companies the other day, which I had originally sent out in March. Todd also explained, don’t look to companies who are already sponsoring another race team or sponsoring some motorsports event. Sponsorship is strictly a business deal and the sponsor must see benefits. It is not a charity. An executive from ViON (one of our series sponsors) explained that their logo on the side of the car means nothing and that it does them no good. He explained the real benefit of being a sponsor is the business deals that happen in the background and connections you make at race weekends. Most of this was information that I had already learned from Mike Levitas of TPC Racing.
You have excellent analysis. thanks for writting