Prototype Development Group achieves big gains with RSRT & Ridetech

[Ron Sutton]

Great report & update True!

[Damn True]

Back to endurance racing….yippee!



This last weekend we had round three of the NASA Western Endurance Racing Championship at Buttonwillow. If you aren’t familiar, Buttonwillow is located in California’s central valley about 30mi West of Bakersfield and 50mi North of the I-5 “Grapevine”. It’s a challenging track to go fast on due to the surface and the technical nature of many of it’s critical corners. It also has many different configurations, some advantageous to our car, some advantageous to others. This race would use the #13 CCW configuration which works pretty well for us, but it also has a few elements that play into TruSpeed’s strengths. We are really well matched with TruSpeed, and their brand new, factory Porsche 911 GT3 and as usual, we are battling them for the championship.

We are however playing from behind on this season as we had a gearbox mainshaft bearing failure in the season opener. We were awarded only 43 points based on the amount of laps completed in that round so we have a lot of catching up to do and need a bit of luck in order to close the gap to TruSpeed who has one win and two second place finishes coming into this round compared to our two wins and a 43pt DNF.

We unloaded the car on Saturday morning and jumped right into installing a hub upgrade on the front of the car that Mike Holland brought with him from San Diego. We’d been using MyRaceShop.com’s (Mike’s company) up-leveled hubs in the rear for a few years now, but we suspect that the increased cornering loads we are seeing with our current setup combined with the additional downforce have accelerated the wear on the fronts as well. Hence the recent front hub failure at Auto Club Speedway. That and a recheck of the alignment completed we hit the track for practice/qualifying.



On a normal weekend, Carl Rydquist would have taken the car out for this session, put a time on the books so we’d be in the show and then we’d concentrate on fine tuning the package for the race. This time ‘round things necessarily had to run differently….

Buttonwillow can be, and often is an utterly miserable place in the summer and this weekend lived up to that reputation with the temp at sunrise at 75deg and mid day at 110. The forecast was for 108deg and 1-2kt winds when the green flag was scheduled to drop at 6pm….aaaaaand Carl was recovering from a bout of illness.

In 3hr races we try to run solo to reduce the time in the pits associated with a driver change so we wanted to maximize the odds that Carl, in his diminished state, could go the distance and to facilitate that we had Mike Holland qualify the car. Normally not a big deal, but he’s had some profound business commitments this season that have kept him out of the car since last years 25hr.


A Norma M20 in case you were curious....they're quick. Essentially the previous generation of LMP3.

Mike did fine though and got up to speed reasonably quickly qualifying the car in P3 behind a Norma M20 and TruSpeed. Mainly because of how easily and predictably the car can be tuned to a given track now that we are running the ridetech/RSRT shock package. In just over a month we’ve gone from a rough but very fast “Roval” at Fontana, to the super smooth and technical Sears Pt. to the very rough and technical Buttonwillow. Very different tracks with huge differences in the amount of available grip combined with very different aero influence and at each we were either the fastest car on track or within a couple of ticks. All because we have developed a “book” of what the car needs from the shocks at each of these tracks and the simplicity and predictability of putting the required changes into the car. It just works the way you want and works well.



Our strategy for this race was to bank time against the slower of TruSpeeds two drivers as we had in the past which would allow Carl to dial things back to manage the gap in the second half of the race hopefully preserving his strength in the event he had to battle for position close to the end.

Mike Tyson once said that everyone goes into a fight with a plan and that doing so works….right up until the first time you get punched in the mouth.

If you’ve watched the previous videos of our races I’m sure you’ve noticed the heart rate monitor display in the data. Carl runs around 170-178 bpm while driving and at this race he would be running at that level of intensity, in 108deg temps…all while inside an already hot car while wearing a 3-layer nomex fire suit….for three hours…while sick.

So our punch in the mouth came in the form of Carl being physically limited and unable to drive (for long) at the usual “qualifying lap” pace we like to use early in races. Subsequently, the 1+ lap advantage we are used to putting on TruSpeed early on turned a close battle in the 1st ½ of the race. At one point Jim Slavik in the Porsche got by us but Carl regained the position when Slavik lost the back end briefly in the penultimate corner of the track. All told we wound up less than 10 seconds ahead. That’s all we could do w/o risk of burning up Carls diminished energy.


At lap 62, roughly 1.25hrs into the race TruSpeed made their first stop. Full service, four tires, fuel and a driver change. Worryingly, Slavik was noticeably wobbly when he exited the car. Note here that their car has center-drive hubs and they use a gravity refueling rig like you see at IMSA races so their total time from pit-in to pit-out was dead-on 3 minutes. At this point they were now 1 lap +40sec behind us with their faster driver (Tom Hacker) in the car, fresh Michellins and a full bag of gas. We had another 45min before our first stop.

Within that time TruSpeed was able to claw back roughly 30 seconds before we made our stop wherein we fueled the car with no tire change, poured some cold water into Carl and got back after it. Our total time in the pits was 2.4min so a great pit-stop but, TruSpeed was now on the same lap as us.

Carl was feeling pretty good at this point having managed his level of effort in the 1st ½ of the race so the race was on!



A bit less than 1.5 hrs remaining and TruSpeed charging hard with a fresh driver and fresh tires.

The heat was taking it’s toll on tires, cars and drivers alike. Honda Research popped a motor on one of its Civic Si’s in a lower class than ours. Another competitor in our class had to pit when his engine just quit due to vapor lock with his fuel tank in excess of 185 degrees. A number of competitors failed to modify their pace to preserve tires in the heat and were seeing earlier than predicted drop-offs in grip and occasional tire failures as well. The drivers were suffering too. Significantly higher incidence of off-track excursions in general and even some from teams that rarely if ever make mistakes led to a number of broken cars and local yellows.


Carl passing slower traffic while someone wrecks in the background....

And Carl continued on…never missing a braking point, nailing every apex and getting as much as possible out of himself while preserving the car against the elements…and Tom Hacker continued his charge as well.

The local yellows conspired to condense the field aiding Hacker in pulling us back in to the point at which we were within 3-5sec of each other on track with ~30min remaining.

At this pace, we calculated that neither us nor TruSpeed would be able to make it to the finish w/o a splash & go stop. The race result would come down to a matter of execution and whomever made the fewest mistakes in the closing hour would likely come out on top.

As if on queue, TruSpeed entered the pits and went….to the penalty box?

Apparently, during the aforementioned flurry of yellow flags Hacker had overtaken someone in a yellow zone earning a “time-out”. This would provide for an anticlimactic finish as once both us added the required fuel to make it to the end we had a full lap advantage. There was still necessity to make it to the end in conditions that were conspiring to break both driver and car.



All told, Carl drove for 3hrs in a period that began at 108deg and ended at 95deg. He never dropped further back in the race than P2 in class or P3 overall. We finished P1 in class and P2 overall behind, but on the same lap with the Norma M20 that qualified on pole.


A totally knackered Carl Rydquist with Car owner Rich Migliore


L-R Sean Sampson & Troy Lindstrom of Coldcock Whiskey Racing (Troy drives for us at the 25hr), Carl Rydquist, Tom Hacker & Jim Slavik of TruSpeed Autosport


Thanks Bret & Ron for the amazing shocks...these wins are yours!

We remain in 2nd position in the points battle with a 37pt deficit to TruSpeed and two races remaining. On August 5th we will race a 6hr event at Miller Motorsports Park near Salt Lake City, UT and on October 28th we’ll have a 3.5hr race at Sears Pt. in Sonoma.

I honestly don’t blame anyone for having not come to visit us at Buttonwillow…it was miserably hot and it’s a long drive from anywhere. Please do consider coming out to either of the two remaining events. Both are at great tracks and there will be tons of other action beyond just our races.

Video to come....takes a while for the guys to edit it up when also dealing with jobs, wives, kids etc.....

[bearden4242]

I dont have any technical questions, at the moment atleast, but i have bought into the Ron Sutton way both litterally and figuratively, although i havent had a chance to apply it yet (soon). One of the things that peaked my interest in rsrt, along with all the people i know that have attended his workshops or run his rsrt valving all ready, was the story i heard from Ron about the lap time your car picked up when testing ride tech shocks with "secret sauce." Now reading of your teams performance in this forum makes the decision i made all the more promising. Congrates, and Looking forward to reading about your teams continued success.

[bret]

Thanks for the detailed and informative update True...it continues to be an honor to be associated with your team. Keep up the GREAT work!

[Damn True]

The honor is ours Bret. In the 5yrs I've been working with Prototype Development Group the addition of your product is the the single greatest performance upgrade made to this car. Not engines, not aero, not professional drivers, not tires.......shocks....your shocks and Ron's tuning. Those other things are important too, but the shocks are what have taken us to the next level.

They have literally transformed the car from "also-ran" home-built racer to a legitimate competitor (on pace alone) with factory GT3 race cars.

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ugh....what happened to my photo links?