MONROE – An overjoyed Shane Sawin took the checkered flag in a figure-eight race and wanted to put on an added show for the Evergreen Speedway fans.
What’s more fun than the traditional burnout, smoking your tires and squealing in circles in front of thousands of cheering fans?
The problem: Rain. The pavement was soaked.
And as Sawin found out, water and rubber just don’t produce the desired effect.
“You can’t keep it going,” Sawin said. “The car just kept wanting to stall out on me. I must have killed it three times. It just wasn’t going to happen.”
And that was AFTER the race. The real cursing happens during.
The problem is that water is … well … wet.
It doesn’t mix well with rubber. And when rubber is in the form of a tire that supports a race car, one built for speed, it just isn’t good for anyone.
Especially the driver.
Evergreen Speedway is one of the only tracks in the nation that puts on race shows rain or shine. It even proudly says so in its promotional material. Bombers, mini-sprints and both branches of figure eight divisions race in the rain. Only the late models, because of their speed and the amount of investment race teams have in them, escape the wet pavement.
For some, it’s akin to driving during high tide.
“I don’t enjoy it,” figure-eight driver Steve Peters said. “Through the intersection we have a puddle. We almost hydroplane through there at times. There’s standing water through the intersection, so if you’re side by side with somebody, you get a wave coming right in your window.
“There’s so much water down there. It’s terrible.”
Because of the configuration of the track, figure-eight drivers might have it worse that anyone, not that any class escapes unaffected.
The figure-eight track lies in the infield of the three-eighths-mile oval that the late models, bombers and mini-stocks run. Because the outer track is banked, water and oil spill off onto the figure-eight track, leaving it waterlogged, slick and interesting.
“We’re racing on slicks in the rain,” Peters said. “It’s kind of strange that we can even go out there without spinning like a bunch of tops.”
Rain and splashing water also cause vision problems, which does little good during a race.
“The windshield fogs up and you can’t see, especially if you’re following other cars,” said bombers driver Jim Foti, who has won the last two races in the rain. “You get the spray off the other cars. We do have wipers, but 99 percent of us have plastic windows. The oil from the racetrack gets thrown up off your tires and just starts smearing on your windshield.”
Fog on the windshield comes from the heat from the motor mixed, with the moisture from the water. To help combat it, cars are required to have a wiper, a small fan and a defroster.
One problem.
“They don’t work,” Foti said. “You have to have a windshield wiper and a defroster. But it’s almost like you don’t have them. It’s bad. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but I carry a stick in my car with a bunch of rags wrapped around the end. When they throw a yellow flag, you can reach the windshield and wipe it off.”
Not surprisingly, drivers are forced to cut their speed by as much as half during a race. It’s survival mode. It’s almost a gentleman’s agreement to just get through the evening in one piece.
“Some of our motors out there are 400 to 500 horsepower,” Sawin said. “We’re maybe using 100. We’re just tooling around, trying to find a dry spot. It’s hard.”
Figure eight drivers also have the added thrill of driving toward the speedway’s lights on top of the grandstands while trying to peer through oil-smeared windshields. In fact, they encounter the problem twice per lap.
“You can hardly see when it’s raining,” Peters said. “I’m looking out my side glass going through the left-hand corner because we’re coming toward the grandstands. When we get through the right-hander, we’re going toward the lights and going back toward the intersection. We get that glare whenever there are stains on the windshield and the wipers aren’t wiping it. It’s pretty challenging.”
In terms of getting any kind of grip on the racetrack surface, some drivers take air out of the tires. Some groove their own rain tires. Some soften their shocks. Most add weight in the back of the car.
But really, the answer is to simply crawl along and hope you finish in one piece.
Or you could get lucky, as Duane Schosboek did once.
Seems Schosboek was leading a race years ago in a rainstorm. He lost control on the slick surface and ended up, as he tells it, “in the bushes.”
Local rules state that, for safety reasons, drivers can’t race back to the finish line under caution. Scorers refer back to the last lap under green and realign the field accordingly.
The only reason Schosboek didn’t lose the lead that night was that someone else, on the other side of the track, also lost control and crashed in plain view of race officials. Therefore, Schosboek kept the lead and went on to with the race, undetected.
“They threw the yellow at the same time for the other accident,” Schosboek said. “I kept going, coming out of the weeds. They ended up putting me back in front. I was trying to figure out why they put me there.
“I wasn’t asking any questions.”
That’s good. Because racing in the rain yields few answers.
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