Guests & Interviews

Race Review of the Thompson 2021

Part Duex

GHIT 0227: Our Race Review of the Thompson 2021 – Part Deux

We finally have the whole El Jeffe team together to discuss the Race Review Thompson 2021 with all the ladies drivers. Elizabeth and Audra joined Jennifer and Vicki to talk about the race, how things went over the weekend and if/when the ladies will be returning to the track together. The results of the race were exceptional. The only issues we had that were racing related were due to the initial issue we fixed on Saturday. Considering that this was Audra’s first ever wheel to wheel race and Elizabeth had only entered two prior events, we are viewing this as a great win for the team. Hear all the details, even some of the super secret ones. All in all, each of them grew as drivers and learned a ton this weekend!

Still waiting for Alan’s SpiderStang update but there was something shiny near his house so, …….

Still Shiny Squirrel Free Unfortunately

PS If you can’t tell, Vicki was very excited to have the team back together to discuss the race.

If you would like to help the podcast,

You can subscribe to our podcast on the podcast provider of your choice. This includes the Apple podcast app, Google music, Amazon, and YouTube etc. Also, if you could give our podcast a (5-star?) rating. Even better, a podcast review. We would greatly appreciate it and it would help us to grow the passion and sport of high performance driving.

For instance, leaving an Apple Podcast rating is very easy. If you go to your podcast library, under shows and click on the podcast. There you can leave a (5?) star rating and enter your review.

We hope you enjoy this episode!

PS Please don’t forget that if you are looking to add an Apex Pro to your driving telemetry system, don’t forget to use our discount code for all Apex Pro systems you will receive a free Windshield Suction Cup Mount for the system, a savings of $40. Just enter the code “ghitlikesapex!” when you order. They are a great system and truly invaluable in safely increasing your speed on track and/or autocross etc. The recently released second generation systems and app increases the capability of the system greatly.

Best regards,

Vicki, Jennifer, Alan, and Bill

Hosts of the Garage Heroes In Training Podcast and Garage Heroes In Training racing team drivers

Highlights from this Race Review Thompson 2021 episode include:

1) Some of the shocking differences that Audra experienced in her first wheel to wheel race.

2) Elizabeth and the team discuss some of the unforeseen benefits of having the seat adjusted for their size and not making due.

3) Audra goes over our race strategy for her first stint on Saturday, as well as getting to practice on Friday before the event started with a much lower car count on the track.

4) Elizabeth (and everyone) also found the practice helpful but really got a lot out of the (amazing) track walk with our friends at the Three Pedal Mafia.

5) Find out if we have grabbed Audra from autocross? We hope not. We love both.

6) The ladies discuss how important vision and spatial awareness is, especially as the speed increases or the traffic increases.

7) We also address how each driver is a member of the team and how each car is really also part of the team and (usually) work together on track.

8) The entire team began to see the benefits of having spotters on the track for each other, as well as the race craft.

9) Audra tries to convey the chaos of a race weekend. We have done so many events that we don’t even notice anymore.

10) The team discusses several ways of managing traffic, as well as passing and being passed on a fairly crowded track.

11) How the ladies did in the paddock and garage prep by the team. We were a bit out of our normal groove with all the unintended changes to our team pre-race, but everything went really well even though we had 3-4 different issues this weekend, one was for the last 5 or so races.

12) Audra and Elizabeth also pointed out hat we missed a few opportunities to refine our tire pressures through the weekend. Added to our list. Along with a few other items we learned or noticed this race.

13) Pit Stops. We did a few, lol. Black flags, not so much.

14) Apparently, Audra is also part of the Connecticut tourism board and they were having a meeting in our paddock. Who knew?

15) It looks like Bill is going to have to find someone to drive with him (if the ladies have anything to say about it).

Don’t forget that you can follow Audra and her co-hosts on the Shifting Points Podcast.

GHIT 0227: Our Race Review of the Thompson 2021 – Part Deux

Samir Abid from Your Data Driven

GHIT 0225: Samir Abid from Your Data Driven

Samir Abid has been a vehicle dynamics engineer for road and racing car suspensions for over ten years. He then created a sports engineering business to help pro and Olympic teams and athletes to optimize their performance. In addition, Samir is also competing himself in club level racing. So he understands the needs and dynamics of racing at all levels.

In an effort to help fellow amateur drivers, Samir created his podcast “Your Data Driven” and website. Both are aimed at sharing what he has learned on the top levels of sports. His focus is on improving your race car setup, collection, interpretation, and use of data, and your driving skills and approach. There is a ton of great information on each episode of the podcast. In addition, Samir also shares away a ton of useful tools on the Your Data Driven website, many for free. Some of our favorites are the “Complete Beginners Guide to Motorsports Data Analysis and his Ultimate Tire Guide. Samir is constantly generating new content and you can keep up with his work on his free weekly(ish) newsletter.

If you would like to help the podcast,

For instance, leaving an Apple Podcast rating is very easy. If you go to your podcast library, under shows and click on the podcast. There you can leave a (5?) star rating and enter your review.

A link to the episode is: https://tinyurl.com/ThompsonPart1

We hope you enjoy this episode!

Best regards,

Vicki, Jennifer, Alan, and Bill

Hosts of the Garage Heroes In Training Podcast and Garage Heroes In Training racing team drivers

Highlights from this episode with Samir Abid include:

1) We cover a bit of his work on the team trying to break the 2 hour barrier in the marathon and how the treadmill can be used to eject most runners when set to this pace. A great video (with over 17 million views) on trying to keep the record marathon pace is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRYtn0j5ccAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRYtn0j5ccA

2) Samir’s experiences when first going to race on track. As always his “natural driving ability” was in for a shock once he competed with other racing drivers.

3) What information is fundamental to having good quality information including video and what data to review at the track between sessions when time is usually limited.

4) Setting goals vs analyzing results in racing and defining what a win is for each event you enter.

5) We go into the differences between our local (US) resources to learn at an HPDE vs the race training resources more common in the UK.

6) Samir is surprised at the concentration of cars that can be involved with budget endurance racing in many of the series in the US. Who knows, once the pandemic is behind us, Samir may be racing with us at an event. We hope.

7) Bill has a great question about racing car setup priorities but fails to actually ask it in a way that any human would understand. (Although Samir does provide an excellent answer to a horribly worded question) We will try again when we have Samir back on. lol.

8) The complexities involved with sharing a single car in our endurance racing series.

9) Several of the highlights and great information that Samir has had within his podcast to this point and several of the other resources he has available on his website.

Handy Links:

https://www.yourdatadriven.com – For the newsletter

https://www.yourdatadriven.com/the-complete-beginners-guide-to-motorsports-data-analysis/ – For the course

https://www.yourdatadriven.com/the-motorsports-playbook/ – For the book

https://www.yourdatadriven.com/your-data-driven-podcast/ – For the podcast

GHIT 0225: Samir Abid from Your Data Driven

Our Race Review of Thompson 2021

Part 1

GHIT 0224: Our Race Review of Thompson 2021 – Part 1

Our ladies team came to Thompson and even though the entire prep week blew up in our face, the weekend as a whole went fantastically. Vicki and Jen go over some of the highs and lows of the race on this episode. We are hopeful for a part 2 with Audra and Elizabeth, and perhaps even Alan, to go over their thoughts on the weekend. The El Jeffe race truck stumbled a bit at the beginning of the weekend, but we were able to work through the problem eventually with a bit of help from our friends in the paddock and we may have solved the intermittent electrical problems that have popped up over this entire season. More to follow next week.

If you would like to help the podcast,

For instance, leaving an Apple Podcast rating is very easy. If you go to your podcast library, under shows and click on the podcast. There you can leave a (5?) star rating and enter your review.

A link to the episode is: https://tinyurl.com/ThompsonPart1

We hope you enjoy this episode!

Best regards,

Vicki, Jennifer, Alan, and Bill

Hosts of the Garage Heroes In Training Podcast and Garage Heroes In Training racing team drivers

Highlights from Thompson 2021 Episode include:

1) We started with several of the prep debacles, for once they did not involve prepping the car, but unfortunately it involved just about everything else.

2) Since it was Audra’s first time racing wheel to wheel and Elizabeth’s first time in the truck, they thought it would be a good idea to get acclimated on the Friday practice.

3) Thankfully, this allowed us to start to work on the engine bogging issue. We go through the symptoms and what we tried to solve the issue. We may actually have found the true problem and we also ended up with a lot of spare parts.

4) Our generator issue continues and we aren’t sure if it is us or the rental RV’s. Do electrical problems only occur to teams that aren’t electrically literate? Asking for a friend.

5) We try to cover how the SpiderStang team of Alan, Bennet, Quinn, and Elazar went, but left a lot of the details out for a future episode with them.

6) Thoughts on the track walk and the track in general. The data shows that both Vicki and Jennifer made great strides during the race, each setting personal bests by several seconds. Jennifer may have even conquered her issues on the long straights. We will confirm at our next event.

7) Any guesses on how many black flags for the ladies?

GHIT 0224: Our Race Review of Thompson 2021 – Part 1

Ryan Power – Life as a New Racing Driver

GHIT 0222: Ryan Power – Life as a New Racing Driver

Ryan Power recently graduated from comp school with his racing license. He primarily competes in wheel to wheel sprint races in his 2019 ND2 Miata. Bill had met Ryan and been driving at HPDE’s with Ryan for the past few seasons. While still relatively new at racing, Ryan’s results are very good for his rookie season with several podium finishes and race wins. Unfortunately, Ryan has also experienced a significant incident on track and seen the inherent risk in racing wheel to wheel. We wanted to cover Ryan’s recent transition from HPDE to Comp School to racing wheel to wheel, as well as what it is like to get back on track after a significant accident.

If you would like to help the podcast:

You can subscribe to our podcast on the podcast provider of your choice. This includes the Apple podcast app, Google music, Amazon, and YouTube etc. Also, if you could give our podcast a (5-star?) rating, that would be great. Even better is a podcast review. We would greatly appreciate it and it would help us to grow the passion and sport of high performance driving.

For instance, leaving an Apple Podcast rating is very easy. If you go to your podcast library, look under shows. Then click on the podcast you can leave a (5?) star rating and enter your review.

A link to the episode is: https://tinyurl.com/RyanPowerOnGHiT

We hope you enjoy this episode!

Best regards,

Vicki, Jennifer, Alan, and Bill

Hosts of the Garage Heroes In Training Podcast and Garage Heroes In Training racing team drivers

Highlights from this episode include:

1) Getting his car and supplies organized for racing his car as his one person team and some of the challenges of racing solo.

2) Tips on how to get started and what to focus on when learning to drive on track

3) Ryan also goes into some examples of how his learning progression was non linear and where he gained some of his most valuable experience and skill gains.

4) Plusses and minuses of racing/HPDE’ing in a single car versus multiple cars

5) What it was like getting back into the race car after the accident, both for prepping the car and Ryan.

GHIT 0222: Ryan Power – Life as a New Racing Driver

Thompson 2021 Prep

For Our All Ladies Race Team

The Ladies at Thompson 2021 — **Elizabeth, Vicki, Jennifer, and Audra**

GHIT 0221 Our All Female 24 Hours of Lemons Racing Team for Thompson 2021 Prep

We are planning for our first ever All Ladies 24 Hours of Lemons racing entry at the upcoming Thompson event. Vicki and Jennifer will be racing in the 2003 Chevy S-10/Isuzu Hombre race truck. They will be joined by past podcast guests Elizabeth and Audra, for her first wheel to wheel racing event. Alan will be racing in the 1984 Mustang GT Turbo with his sons Bennett and Quinn. Quinn is joining us for his first race, and Elazar with Bill as a backup.

We go through our Thompson 2021 prep of the drivers and cars. Next, we also discuss our team and personal goals going into the event. We started our team with a goal of eventually having an all female team entry. Now we are finally able to do so at this event. Elizabeth has raced in Lemons several times before. But this will be Audra’s first ever wheel to wheel race, although she has tons of experience in autocross. The race is coming up this weekend. We will try to keep you posted.

GHIT 0221 Our All Female 24 Hours of Lemons Racing Team for Thompson 2021

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