Kunicki discovered a water leak before racing even began and had a DNS (did not start), Edelstein blew a rear end in the morning session, which he had to replace before we went out at 2:50 and had a DNF (did not finish). So two of the fastest drivers on the grid had to start at the back of the pack when the afternoon race started.
Rick Stark was on the pole, Randy Dunphy next to him, John Goodman and I were third and fourth, with Kallberg behind me. When the green flag came down, monster V-8s howled down the straight, through Turn 1 and into the wide sweeper, Turn 2, nicknamed “Big Indy.” Kallberg moved by me as I moved past Goodman.
Stark and Dunphy, fighting for the lead, had contact. Dunphy’s red Falcon went into a slow spin in the middle of traffic. Somehow, we all avoided him, and his job then became cutting through the rest of the pack along with Kunicki and Edelstein.
It’s easy to build a Corvette into a competitive race car, half the work is alrady done. It is harder to do a Camaro, and much, much harder to do a Falcon. But Dunphy and his mechanic have a very fast Falcon that consistently places near the top of the field, despite the fact that it is essentialy a brick.
Watching Dunphy come through Turn 9, whether from a race car behind him or from the stands, is breathtaking. The car lurches and hops and moves the very outside. I’ve always been afraid the loose gravel and dirt on the outside of that turn would grab him.
Like in the first race this morning. He didn’t miss a beat as he raised a cloud of dust.
“It was out there for 50 feet or so, but I just rode it out,” Randy said to his mechanic, or something similar. I got it second hand, and it was noisy when I heard it.
“Ride it out.” At 100, maybe 110 miles an hour, in a turn, “riding it out” is not the first thing one feels like doing. But doing anything else is far, far worse. It used to be said of Porsches that you never, ever, “lift,” or take your foot off the gas in a turn. That is a recipe for a spin.
So is touching your brakes when half of them are on hard pavement, the other half in loose dirt. That is the number one cause of fatal accidents on the highway, and it would have put Randy nose first into the concrete wall in front of the stands. So, he “rode it out.”
Randy is quiet in that sometimes intense way of Viet Nam Vets, willing to take responsibility (he wondered aloud if he had caused the contact, until reassured by others he did not) and very reluctant to blame, he usually wears a smile. He drives well, is very predictable, and in our sport, that means a lot.
“He’s a real ‘shoe.’ If people knew what it takes to drive that car that fast, they would be amazed,” said his mechanic.
A “shoe,” in our world, is someone who wears a racing shoe to do the best that can be done with whatever he has, does it very well, does it better than most.
Randy didn’t win the race this afternoon. I finally got past Rick Stark, who has been driving the wheels off his small block Corvette in this event, and I took first. But my vote for “Shoe,” of this weekend in Seattle, goes to Randy Dunphy in his red Ford Falcon.
