Garage Heroes In Training

Bill reviews how his first day with NASA Great Lakes went at Pitt Race. It was hot, but the instruction in the car and in the classroom was excellent. Chris was able to be his instructor. The day ended with another few laps on the kart track. An excellent day one. Really looking forward to day 2.

Bill is going solo this weekend but going to cover what he is expecting at the HPDE event with NASA Great Lakes at Pitt Race. Having raced here earlier this year, it may have helped, but we shall see. Hopefully the brakes will not catch on fire this time. Bill is driving a 2017 Toyota 86 TRD this weekend for the third time ever on a track. And hopefully home after Sunday, lol.

On this episode, Benny and Bill review the most recent Superhero movie Spiderman Far From Home. We also cover the entire Spiderman movie history including the three Spiderman movies, the two Amazing Spiderman movies, the most recent two Spiderman "Home" movies, as well as Venom and Into the Spiderverse. Our discussion also includes a deep dive into both end credit scenes and their implications moving forward.

Randy Pobst is a well known professional racing driver for many series, organizations, and manufacturers including the testing driver for Motor Trend on the endlessly entertaining "Head to Head series" for many years. During this interview, we cover a good amount of Randy's extensive racing history as well as many other topics including our Lucky Dog Honda race car and front wheel drive car setups in general.

Unfortunately, we missed a great discussion on the importance of tires due to a microphone failure. Tires are the first thing Randy recommends toward improving your track performance, followed by brakes, then reliability improvements. We also took this opportunity to discuss with Randy what he would recommend in terms of driver improvement, including key driving skills, weight transfer, and controlling the weight management. He offered many insights during our talk, but one we had not applied yet was to "Think power out of a corner, brake into a corner and then roll onto the power to go fast".

We were in the pit area with a lot of background noises, as well as one microphone failure until about 24 minutes in, when we were able to fix one of the microphones so please bear with us, some of this information is incredibly valuable. We apologize for the higher background/hiss than we would have liked. We hope you enjoy the episode. Randy is a great driver, but an even better person. We would love to have him on again at any point.

Alan, Jennifer, Vicki, and Bill with a few drop ins cover our race weekend with the Lucky Dog Series at Portland International Raceway. It starts with a review of practice Saturday morning, then our 7-hour endurance race Saturday and our work to get back out late Sunday.

We compare Lucky Dog to our home series the 24 Hours of Lemons. While similar, there are differences, pluses and minuses for each, so we compare the two in the continual pursuit of the perfect low budget amateur endurance car racing.

There were a ton of great teams there, most of which passed us on Saturday as we were towards the slower end of the field.

We recorded this shortly after we completed Sunday so there is a bit of echo since we were in the pit. However, we did manage to give out our team awards for the weekend.

Racing Results for those who are keeping track at home:

Saturday: We were in 37th place when our engine went away Saturday and ended up at 41st for the day. We did not get to participate in the 2 Saturday endures due to the engine issue. Our fastest lap was 1:38.664 by our guest driver Randy Pobst, but we managed to 1:45.870 as our internal team best. (Randy was able to get to 48th fastest lap of the day and Alan's time would have placed us as the second slowest car in the 60 car field that ran a lap Saturday )

Sunday: We ended up getting on track after a long day of engine swapping and rebuilding and finished 3 laps and ended up finishing around 48th out of the 64 cars this weekend and 48th fastest of the 48 cars that ran on Sunday.

Fastest lap of the race weekend was 1:29.932 by Blue Bayou for reference to the relative performance to the field.

We came, we saw, we were conquered.