I’ve been in some pretty hairy scenarios in a race car. I got in a wreck once during testing at Road Atlanta — an extreme, high-impact wreck that I could see coming for maybe one or two seconds — and I broke my ankle. There was another wreck, also at Atlanta, where I flipped through the air, and that was pretty bad.
But the most scared I’ve ever been was when I raced in the rain.
HISTORY IN MONTREAL
Rain has played a fairly big role in the season so far, doing everything from delaying and stopping races to postponing them, as was the case last weekend in Texas. So it’s probably unsurprising that a lot of fans have asked me this: “Why don’t you just throw rain tires on the cars, and go race?”
After all, in F1, they race in the rain, and all of us drive our day-to-day cars in the rain.
The 2008 and 2009 Napa Auto Parts 200 Nationwide races were run at Montreal, Canada, at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. It’s a road course, an F1 track, primarily. It rained both times, and they were the only times that NASCAR ran races in the rain.
One thing about racing in a foreign country is that it’s hard to delay a race. You’re traveling with passports and visas. You’re limited for a certain amount of days that you can be there, and you have to honor that. When you’re in an international event, that race needs to run — literally — rain or shine. So Goodyear built a special tire for the rain.
Here’s the thing: NASCAR guys don’t drive in the rain. The 2008 race had Joey Logano, Clint Bowyer, Carl Edwards, and some other NASCAR drivers in it. But a lot of the others were specialists. When you go to road courses, especially international road course races, you tend to get people who aren’t normally on your circuit. And those guys come from a road or even a sports car-type racing environment, so rain driving is in their wheelhouse.
Before the race started, I don’t think any of us took NASCAR seriously when they said they would race despite the rain. We really didn’t. Then once it started, it was like well, “We’re committed to it, so let’s make the most of it.”
From a driving standpoint, one of the only benefits of driving in the rain is that it helps keep your brakes cool. Aside from that, we had no idea what to expect, especially grip-wise. A lot of driving a race car is about building experiences, building a feel for the car in a corner. The best drivers in the world are the ones that can do that the quickest, who can get a feel for their car the quickest. Like I said, none of the NASCAR guys had ever raced in the rain before, and in the rain, the grip changes constantly. On a road course, you also wind up off the track — and in the dirt — quite a bit. When that dirt becomes mud, you bring a lot of it back onto the track with you. That creates its own set of issues.
The 2008 Napa Auto Parts 200 lasted 48 of a scheduled 74 laps.
It didn’t take long for me to figure out why racing a NASCAR race in the rain is different from an F1 race. The more cars there are on the track, the bigger the wheel spray is. There were 43 stock cars on the track at Montreal — a lot more than in F1 — and as each car went through the rain, it picked it up and shot around the back half of the car. Imagine a huge cloud of spray on top of the racetrack. That’s what it was like. It just killed your visibility. You couldn’t see a brake light.
Now imagine going down straightaways at about 180 mph when you can’t see more than 20 feet in front of you. You’re blind as can be. But here’s the thing: If you don’t go full speed, you’re going to get run over by someone who is.
At points, the visibility in front of me was so poor there was no point in looking out the front windshield. So I literally drove — and keep in mind, this is probably at 160 to 180 mph — looking out the side of the car. There were markers on the track telling you how far you were from the corner: 600 feet, 500 feet, 400 feet. By looking out the side window of the car, you could see where you were, and then hit the brakes, start slowing down and downshift through the corner.
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