DALZIEL: This One Is For Gran'

GRAND-AM

DALZIEL: This One Is For Gran’

I want to start by dedicating this column to my Grandmother, Roberta McKenzie Dalziel who passed away Thursday July, 15th.

Ryan Dalziel | Posted July 21, 2010

Dalziel's toasty time at New Jersey last weekend was filled with challenges, but the Scot and teammate Mike Forest persevered in their Corsa Car Care Riley-BMW. (Marshall Pruett)

(I want to start by dedicating this column to my Grandmother, Roberta McKenzie Dalziel who passed away Thursday July, 15th. She was 89 years old and an amazing lady. I was proud to be her Grandson. She has been sick with senile dementia for many years. My family and I are at peace knowing she is at her final resting place, in heaven with my Grandfather. Gran, you will be sadly missed, but never forgotten for being the class of a Ruby. I especially want to let me father know that I am thinking of him in this time and he did everything he possibly could to make a difficult time in her life as comfortable as possible. Nobody could have done more than you did, dad.)

A lot has happened in the past month starting with a well needed podium at the Daytona Rolex Series race on July 3rd for Starworks and the No. 8 Corsa Car Care entry. We had two rough races in Grand Am, with Watkins Glen and Mid Ohio. Having such a fast car at both, yet bad a touch of bad luck, recorded us a 7th and 13th. When fighting against the likes of Ganassi, SunTrust and GAINSCO, those results won’t cut it so we knew we had to score big at Daytona.

We were handed a 75lbs weight penalty literally days before Daytona for an issue with the DINAN power plant from the Ganassi car, (which was pulled from their chassis at the previous race and tested by the series). Obviously they have to show consistency across the board so we were dealt the same penalty as them. We were under the impression from DINAN that this would be rectified after Daytona, so we were relieved that it was meant to be a one race penalty. Of all the tracks we race on Daytona is the place we would lose the least amount of performance with a weight ban, and so we were frustrated but focused on the job ahead.

Alas, Daytona was not smooth sailing for Starworks. First practice saw the Rolex cars take to the track in wet conditions. Our car was very fast and every time we were time on course we could get the car into the top-3 in lap times. With approximately 20 minutes to go we blew a tire at 176mph exiting the NASCAR 4 turn onto the tri-oval. The tire disintegrated and caused fairly major damage to our car. Enough to have us miss second practice and qualifying. This proved to be costly as qualifying was dry and teams got that opportunity to run dry set-ups prior to race day. To make matters worse. minutes after our tire failure the No. 7 Flex-Box Starworks entry driven by Bill Lester suffered a similar tire fate, with even more extensive damage to their car. Both cars would miss the remainder of practice and qualifying.

With only a 15-minute warm up to tune our car and with my co-driver Mike Forest not having turned a lap at the event, we opted to run him the entire session. Mike, as always, did a solid job and we made the necessary changes based on his excellent feedback. With all the setbacks I’ve mentioned, in race trim, the car was actually very good. We managed to power our way up front and led for many laps. Unfortunately the one thing we missed on was gearing. The added weight affected us more than we projected and we really messed up on our gear drops for maximum speed on the banking. We were easily losing 0.2-0.3 seconds per lap. I think if had we had the time to change them after warm up and maybe a small rear spring change I could’ve got my second win at Daytona in 2010. Second was a great result and although I lost some points to the 01 car, I moved back into second in the standings.

Salt Lake City was up next in the JaguarRSR XKR. Last time out in Le Mans we battled some frustrating electrical issues and we were confident going into Utah we had made progress. Seems the gremlins won’t leave us alone and we had some electrical problems early in the weekend. Good news was we seemed to make progress by race day. Unfortunately on the start the front runners made some aggressive brake checking moves going to the green flag and like a snowball that kind of sudden braking gets worse the further to the rear of the pack you are. I saw the Ford GT40 brake and swerve in front of me to avoid hitting the Porsche in front of him. It was bad luck for me that by the time I got to react there was 3 cars wide on the brakes and my only option was to hit someone. I followed the Ford as he looked like he was in the least amount of danger to hit anyone. For some reason even though he was in a clear lane he continued to brake and we touched. If he had released the brake we would have been fine. The bump, although I considered very light was enough to loosen the Jag’s hood and, across the start line at around 145mph, the hood flew off and up into the air in spectacular fashion.

I hoped to make an impact on the race start but not like that! I felt like a total a-hole for ruining the day, but after a couple of laps I felt the car was ok and let the team know we were going to be alright. We got a yellow shortly after that, allowing us to perform the necessary repairs under yellow and stay on the lead lap. There was some damage on the fasteners that gave the RSR crew some issues but they got the new hood on and ready to send me out In front of the pace car, still under yellow on the lead lap. I was ready to redeem myself.

When my engineer Burke Harrison told me to fire it up……..IT WAS DEAD, no starter motor. I couldn’t believe it. We lost two laps looking at the problem before surrendering to a stop and go penalty by bump starting the car. We got the car fired up and hoped the problem was voltage rather than something worse. We knew a drive through penalty was going to be enforced but gambled that we could build up some voltage in my one lap before returning to pit road for my penalty. As soon as I released the pit lane speed limiter I realized we had an even bigger problem: no power steering. Trust me, driving with power steering a front-engined GT car is not fun and you need to have arms like Shaq to be able to run at any kind of speed.

I knew we had something fairly large wrong somewhere. We returned slowly to pit lane and the crew had me drive the car back to the garage to allow more crew to work on the car. I’m still not 100% what actually happened with the power steering but we suspect it over heated waiting in pit lane trying to start the car. Power steering can stay active if the ignition is turned on, which it was. The starter motor unfortunately was not as easy a fix. We had a wire from the starter motor that had broken off and the crew did a great job -- as always – in replacing it. We got back in the race but lost a lot of time. I really hope we can get the JaguarRSR where the brand knows it can be -- fighting it out with Ferrari, Porsche and BMW. We are working hard to turn things around. Lime Rock is this weekend and we have hundreds of Jaguar guests, so I look forward to that being our turning point.

On to this past weekend at New Jersey Motorsports Park in Millville, NJ. I had never driven there so I always look forward to new adventures, and the thrill of learning a new track. I remember seeing Scott Pruett’s huge crash there so I think I arrived with some added adrenalin thinking about that. It’s a cool track, but not on a temperature scale. Without a doubt it was the wrong time of the year to be going to NJ for a car race. I really think the series should consult drivers more when making decisions about the correct time of year to go to a track, especially when you are talking about driver safety in cockpits upwards of 140 degrees Fahrenheit, although it felt like 140 Celsius!

We actually had a really awesome car in the race but we had a power steering glitch about an hour into Mike’s stint and caused an early unscheduled pit stop. It honestly didn’t cost us too much time. We had a fantastic stop from the Corsa Car Care crew (even though one of our tire guys had poison ivy and had swollen limbs like tree trunks!) We fell into a good rhythm and to be honest the power steering issue took my mind off of the heat. It was not completely broken, just working at about 50%; still a tough one. We went a lap down under green but I managed to un-lap myself and pass the No. 01 car to get on the tail end of the lead lap. We held him off and got our yellow at the perfect time. After making our final stop I was really confident about going forward. Restarting in 9th yet I had already passed many of the cars in front to un-lap myself previously so I know we had speed.

At one point, my race engineer Bill Riley told me that Pruett and I were running a second faster than the field, yet when I got behind these guys for the second time, life wasn’t so easy for me. We soon realized we had something majorly wrong with the car. I diagnosed it as perhaps a differential going bad and causing the diff to be very open. Turns out with a little further investigation from the Starworks crew back in South Florida, we broke the front anti-roll bar. I know for sure that without this incident we had a podium worthy car. That’s life, and this year I have learnt how to be more patient than ever.

We fought extremely hard and had some intensely close moments of complete disaster avoiding other idiot drivers, most notably the TRG GT cars, and especially the #67. We finished 5th and with a fairly beat up race car, so we will accept that and move on to the next one.

After the race I flew Sunday night back to Orlando to grab my black suit and head off on a plane to Scotland Monday evening for my Grandmother’s funeral Tuesday morning, then back for Lime Rock this weekend. Life will throw its challenges at you, but as a racing driver or as in any other profession, you must keep focused and going forward.

~Ryan

Ryan Dalziel is a sportscar and open-wheel veteran, having raced in GRAND-AM, ChampCar, the ALMS and the Atlantic Championship.

Prior to his win at the 2010 Rolex 24, Dalziel’s most notable victory came at the 2008 Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca GRAND-AM round behind the wheel of the SAMAX Riley-BMW. The native of Glasgow, Scotland, will drive for Action Express Racing and Starworks Motorsports in 2010, and lives in Orlando, Florida, with his wife.

Learn more about Ryan at http://www.ryandalziel.com, and about his efforts to aid the Haitian Earthquake Relief at http://www.race4haiti.com.

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The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED

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Ryan Dalziel

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