ON
TRACK WITH RICK PEARSON - ISSUE TWO
By Rick Pearson
After last week's column detailing my somewhat entertaining time at race school, this week I will take a more serious look at the lessons I learnt the hard way in my first full year of racing in the Caterham K-series Championship or 'How to finance a car company with a race series'!
Spurred on by my reasonable
turn of speed in the controlled environment of the race school, I took
the plunge and committed myself to a full seasons racing with a team (who
will remain nameless) in the junior Caterham series.
As many of you
will know, Caterhams are lovely to drive, the Rover K-series engine is
a beauty, parts are sensible prices and the team were prepared to hire
me a car for the season at what seemed to me to be a reasonable rate.
I was wrong.
One of the biggest perils of racing that is not immediately obvious to the outsider (or often the insider) is that there are a significant number of teams who are incompetent, crooks or worst of all, both. They work on the theory that there are an unlimited number of people they can ensnare if they keep the visible costs low and then they rip them off with unforeseen items.
I'd signed a contract
with one of these teams. Their famous quote that was to come back to haunt
us throughout the season was "It is virtually impossible to do more than
£5,000 worth of damage to a Caterham". We were to prove this statement
very wrong indeed. The biggest problem initially though was the almost
daily arrival of new invoices.
After the first race at Silverstone, (I qualified badly as my newly built
Caterham didn't appear to have second gear fitted...), my windscreen was
cracked and was replaced at my cost before the next round. Fair enough
until you realise the crack in question was only one cm long and was in
the very bottom corner of the passenger side of the screen.
They also decided that they were having trouble telling each drivers wheels apart so offered to spray all ten that I owned before the next round. I didn't object so they sprayed them a nice shade of yellow, I was a little surprised however when they sent me the £400 bill for doing this...
If I thought I was having it tough though, my teammate had let slip that he owned a Lear Jet. He was to rue this mistake as after four rounds (admittedly after he'd been involved in a couple of "coming togethers") his bill had reached £35,000, a fraction above the expected £3,000!
The team aside, Caterham
racers are a great fraternity.
The racing is extremely close and since the cars have the aerodynamics
of a house brick, it is very difficult for a leader to make a break as
just as in NASCAR in the USA, a pair of cars can usually run quicker than
one alone.
By securing television coverage, which tends to encourage drivers to get to the front at all costs and by cleverly equipping the cars with easily dislodged fiberglass wings and nosecones, Caterham have ensured a roaring sale of parts to the race series. My racing team, who had some road car operations as well, used to boast they were responsible for 50% of Caterham world-wide part sales. The majority of them going into the race series and almost single- handedly keeping Caterham solvent over the years.
The racing was huge fun, but my season petered out after my two team mates narrowly avoided killing each other at Castle Combe. Touching wheels coming over Avon Rise, one car was launched into a terrifying series of rolls and cartwheels, the other spun into the middle of the pack where it was collected several times. Although the driver who flew into the wall walked out of hospital with me later that night, his hired car was destroyed and he had to write the team a cheque for £22,000! The other guy suffered from concussion for several months and to my knowledge has never raced again.
Both for my health
and that of my wallet, I decided that Caterhams were an unacceptable risk
and I saw out the rest of my contract being decidedly non-combative, ending
eleventh in the Championship and second rookie.
Returning to the series a year later, I did however finally discover why
I'd never made a decent start relative to the opposition during my racing
career. Bumping into a private investigator I recognised in the paddock,
he took me to the far end of Brands where we stood and watched one of
my rival teams calibrating their somewhat illicit traction control system...