2008-05-14 12:32:25
Weekends are long in racing. For example, I just spent a four- or five-day weekend working on the Bandit. There was a moment there, when Pat Boyle and I were working 12 hours a day to get the engine and transmission installed, that I thought: I haven’t had fun like this since high school. I was dead on my feet, living on triple shots of espresso and rocket chocolate, my knee ached ... but geez it was satisfying. It’s not something I could ever have done without a Pat Boyle (and there aren’t many like him).
(Rocket Chocolate: a single piece of tasty mint chocolate with supposedly a heavy dose of caffeine but I didn’t feel it, although I’m a bit on the extreme side; they cost $1 each, and the gal at the convenience-store chekout said, “Three dudes in a black van come by and say, ‘Hey, you want to sell this here?’” And I’m thinkin those three dudes be gettin rich. )
I just wrote a story for World War II magazine, about commander Luckey Fluckey, the war’s most daring and decorated submarine captain. He was a perpetual optimist. He sank 30 Japanese ships, including two aircraft carriers, on total faith that it was his destiny—and shucks, it’s not that hard, with immaculate preparation. He had a motto: “not problems, challenges.”
It’s easy to make clichés out of such expressions—in windsurfing, it’s “attitude is everything.” But approach is what it’s all about, almost always.
I tried to keep Lucky Fluckey in mind, when Pat and I came up against one of the many challenges we faced working from Friday, May 2 until Tuesday, May 6. The Bandit is basically a 1979 NASCAR chassis and a 2006 IROC Series engine, so it was not exactly a simple bolt-on affair.
Pat Boyle was one of my co-drivers last spring, in the 8-hour endurance race at Portland International Raceway, where with three others we finished 6th overall in Mike Helton’s BMW M3. In the fall, he and Wes Tipton won the 4-hour race at Pacific Raceways near Seattle, again in the M3 they call “Old Yeller.”
But Pat’s one of those old-school hot shoes, who has always worked on his own cars and motorcycles. He reminds me of the 20-year-old dirt track motorcycle racers I knew when I first started writing about racers, 35 years ago. He’s over 50 now, still wiry and hyper-energetic as ever—he’s also as fast as ever. He was a motocross champion back in the ‘70s, has raced sprint cars, and now he’s one of the best amateur road racers in the Northwest. Last weekend at Pacific Raceways, for example, he drove his Mazda RX7 from 52nd and dead last on the grid to 2nd overall, in the rain!
Pure. Optimistic. Lean, hungry and fast. Boyle is all of those things. A lot of his positive attitude comes from a brain aneurism he had a few years back, which kept him off the track for five years. He’s just happy to have gotten his driving skills back. The way he looks at it is: any day at the track is a good day. That’s good balance for me, the glass-half-empty guy.
Although the glass-half-empty attitude is good in racing, because it keeps you chasing speed, and more importantly reliability.
So Pat will be my crew chief for the new Bandit. He earned the job, the way he worked over those four days—not that I could afford to be picky, and man is that an understatement. Trouble is I am picky. A racer has to be.
I learned a lot about racing, in the years I covered motorsports for Sports Illustrated, closely watching and picking the brains of the best. Seeing what wins. I was on the inside of the best teams, including Penske Racing at the Indy 500, 16 times.
The thing about this Bandit project is there’s destiny in it. It’s become a spiritual trip. It’s about the right people, as much as it is about racing. But when we’re building the car, it’s ALL about racing. It’s gonna be great car, I can feel it. It already is.
P.S. Identify the black-and-white poster in the background, email me here at the bottom of this page, and I'll send the 10th correct description of the poster a free inscribed copy of "Fast Guys, Rich Guys, and Idiots"!
Sam Moses
Previous Blogs:
Challenges, not Problems
2008-05-13 12:59:39
Thanks mostly to Barbara Signore, the engine arrived in April, weighing 750 pounds in its crate. The car was in the trailer (moved from my yard to the driveway when the snow melted), and the engine was in the garage;...
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Scored an Engine!
2008-03-10 06:31:05
On Saturday morning March 8, I was in a hotel room in Laguna Beach with the ocean crashing just outside my third-floor balcony. I could see the horizon through the wide-open sliding-glass door, but my eyes were glued to my laptop screen. I was...
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The Latest Bandit Story
2008-02-16 18:22:52
This piece will appear in the April issue of BMW Roundel magazine, a sidebar to my story about driving a BMW M Coupe to sixth overall with Doug Mill and car owner Mike Helton, in the Four Hours of Pacific Raceways.
At 5:45 in...
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In Search of One Good Motor
2008-02-16 17:36:59
In the final chapter of “Fast Guys, Rich Guys, and Idiots,” the Bandit blows two engines in one day at Daytona. One of them was a 550-horsepower motor that came out of the shop of the legendary Junior Johnson, Tom Wolfe’s...
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