OTA School and Event #2

Moving my publication day to Wednesday was definitely the right call. I might need to start taking the Monday after these double event weekends off, since it usually takes me a day to catch up on the sleep I lose camping at the track in freezing temperatures. Hopefully the nights finally start to warm up soon!

Last weekend, Ontario Time Attack hosted their second school on Saturday, and their second competition event on Sunday. This time, at the Grand Prix track at Canadian Tire Motorsports Park (We'll just call it GP.) While similar to the last OTA double header in the sense that one day was completely chaotic, and the other was mostly drama free. The difference for this event though, is that the school was mostly drama free, and the competition day was the chaotic one this time.

School Day

What sets GP apart from all the other tracks on the OTA calendar is that it's a full sized track, as opposed to a smaller club track. You might recognize the GP track at CTMP from the IMSA calendar, if you follow that. This distinction comes with a lot more risk, considering the speed of GP is significantly higher than any other track on the calender. For this reason, we consider GP to be a "high consequence" track, and OTA competitors need a separate sign off for GP than they do with the small tracks on the calendar. OTA typically hosts one small track school at DDT, and one to two GP schools so drivers have ample opportunity to get signed off.

I was lucky this time around, as I was paired with a student who was an experienced driver. Funny enough, my student was actually the one running the classroom portion of the day, and then lapping in the student group with me as an instructor. He had just finished building his gen 1 MX-5 and was looking to get some pointers on rear wheel drive, since all of his experience had been with a front wheel drive Honda Fit. This is an interesting combination because, while obviously experienced, there may be some confidence issues with the new car.

While issues with confidence were definitely present, my student was adept at driving within his limit. This is a trait that will always put me at ease as an instructor. If a student has the sense to slow down after making a minor mistake, it's highly unlikely that they will make a larger mistake and wind up the subject of an incident report. But, this time around, the school was drama free, my student said he learned a lot, and we had a lot of fun. The day was not completely devoid of incidents though, we did lose a very new looking M4 in turn 9. He wound up in the tire barrier on the outside. Unfortunately I don't have any more information than that, but the driver was able to bring the car back in under it's own power so I'm assuming no permanent damage to the car or the driver.

During the school day, I also got the opportunity to lap my own car in the instructor group. Despite the weather conditions being sub optimal, I still thoroughly enjoyed this experience. After what happened at the last school I was eager to finally get the car on track. With the oil leak fixed, the car ran drama free all weekend. I also managed to collect some data from the laps I did, which I will share in the coming weeks as I write the next entry to my Driver Journal.

Campfire Time

I sat down just now to continue writing, and at first wrote "Competition Day." This seemed like the logical next section, considering it was the day after the school. As soon as I wrote that, I realized that doing so would overlook one of the best parts of OTA. It's one thing to show up to an event and go back to a hotel room at the end of the day. But camping at the track is a whole other event in itself. You get to know your competitors a lot better, and will form long lasting friendships. And probably argue about tire sizes or something like that.

This weekend was a challenging camp, however. Friday night, we were hit by a heavy rainstorm which shook the walls of my tent loudly for most of the night. Despite my earplugs, I struggled to sleep, which was a driving factor in me skipping the last two instructor lapping sessions on Saturday. Saturday night was significantly better, although still cold and windy. We took refuge around a charcoal grill to partake in some grilled meats. and then quickly moved to the campfire to keep warm. There was sleep to be had that night, but not enough to catch up on what was lost the night before.

Competition Day

Unlike Event #1 a few weeks ago, the competition did not go as smoothly as I would have hoped. I believe this to be largely my fault for having jinxed it in the morning by commenting how well registration was going. It could be due to the conditions, or how early it is in the season still, but the drivers were up to much mischief, causing multiple incidents even before lunch. Luckily none of these incidents were enough to derail the morning. GP track being a high consequence track, there's always a tinge of dread that a car might be written off during competition runs.

Lunch came and went, and we started to get in to the timed runs. OTA is very good at gridding cars by lap times captured in practice to avoid traffic during competition runs. Things went mostly according to plan for the first few groups, until something I have never experienced before at an OTA event happened. The timing system failed catastrophically, and put the whole day on hold.

On the timing team, we'd experienced software crashes before, but in all cases simply turning it off and on again brought the event back up and running. In this case, when the system came back online, many of the cars that were out on track at the time were not showing any recorded laps, and the transponders attached to those cars were no longer registering at the timing loop. This caused a lot of friction for those who set fast laps during that session, only to be told that those laps wouldn't count towards competition due to a timing malfunction.

I was on the grid for this event, helping organize cars lining up to go for their hot laps. Troubleshooting the timing issue was a bit more physically demanding than I expected. I was "selected" to hop over the barrier and run back and forth across the timing loop with a transponder in my hand in an attempt to trigger the timing system. This eventually worked and we were able to confirm that timing was back up and running. While we formed a plan to deal with the cars who were missing laps, we got the event moving again and released the next competition group. We tracked down the transponders, and got to switching out the transponders on the cars that weren't working. After tracking the transponders down, we got a radio call from the tower that no one ever wants to hear.

"there's a car in the wall.."

I looked up and caught the glance of another grid worker who heard the call. We silently agreed that we should start walking up and down the grid letting the drivers who had already been patient through the timing issues, that there was another delay.

The safety trucks went out.

Many of the drivers I spoke to asked me questions about the incident that I didn't, and still don't actually know the answers to. I don't know where or how the wreck happened, and I'd like to protect their privacy by not releasing their name. The driver, thankfully, was unharmed. We were even privileged enough to have a doctor on the grid, who volunteered to look over the driver when he returned to the paddock. I spotted him packing up his tent at the end of the day, and breathed a sigh of relief that no one was hurt.

After some diligent work from the safety team, we got the event up and running again. Despite the difficulties we faced, we managed to get all of the expected competition runs in with 10 minutes to spare at the end of the day. This included an extra make up session for those who lost laps in the morning.

With the event now closing, by some miracle, all of the missing laps had somehow returned to the timing system. At the time of writing this, official results have still not been released because of all the work the timing crew has been doing manually fixing what was broken. I can't comment on the awards ceremony since I spent that packing my car back up as quickly as possible so I might arrive home at a somewhat reasonable hour.

Home Sweet Home

I got home that night around 10:30 pm, after a 3 and a half hour drive which gave me a lot of time to reflect on the weekend. I like to go back through it and think about all the things that I might have needed and not had, like a wind breaker for example. Although I was luckily enough to have been given one from a box of outdated sponsor swag. So that was cool.

Being at an event where a car is written off serves as a reality check for most drivers, I would think. It puts the sport in to perspective, and makes you reevaluate the risk your taking when you throw your car in to a corner at speeds you'd never reach on the road. I've heard that in most cases, people don't come back. It's easy to see how a high speed collision would be enough of a mental, not to mention financial wight that you might take an extended break. The drive who crashed that day was one that I recognized from many, if not all the OTA events I've been at, and I wonder if I will see him there again this year, or the next year, or the year after that. I wonder what kind of person I would be if it happened to me. Would I be able to get back in the saddle, or would I give up this passion of mine that brings me so much joy?

Probably best not to overthink it.

I left the car packed in the driveway, and went upstairs to bed. I barely remember putting my head down before falling asleep. The next morning I added "book off mondays for OTA weekend recovery" to my track weekend must-have list.

Cat Tax