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NASA: Going Racing, At Last
As SPEEDtv.com Editor in Chief discovered, NASA makes it easy and fun to go road racing, they'll even turn the field upside down for the slow guys once in a while...
Joe Tripp  |  Posted May 20, 2008   Charlotte, NC
Buckling into my SpecE30 racer. Note the NASCAR style door bars which provided a bit more safety - and room for the author's girth. (Photo: Jason Tripp)

Editor’s Note: The following feature is the continuation of a series following the exploits of a middle aged road racing rookie (yours truly). We return to the story more than a year after graduating from the Panoz (now Skip Barber) Racing School at Road Atlanta. As fate would have it, my debut was set for a race weekend in Savannah, Georgia, where slow guys were actually invited to start at the front...

There’s one sure way for a new guy to get on pole in his maiden race; take it slow (check); be relatively inexperienced (check); bring an unsorted; down-on-power race car (check); and to debut in a race where the slowest of the field gets to start up front (double check).

I had received the call from Jim Pantas, Southeast Regional Director for the National Auto Sport Association (NASA), just a couple weeks before the event saying they were going to run me though an impromptu competition school on Saturday morning at Roebling Road in Savannah, GA, and provided I didn’t make an ass of myself, they would let me race in the second annual “Inverted Field Unlimited” race, IFU-2. Though I wanted to believe they thought I was ready, I also knew that getting 30 cars on the grid for the event would look pretty good as well and that they needed every swinging key chain to reach that number.

What started out as a relatively iffy scenario of whether or not I’d even make it to the May NASA round due to a conflict with the NASCAR All-Star race (all hands on deck here at SPEED), had suddenly turned into a mad dash to get my recently-built and freshly-painted 1987 BMW 325is up to “spec” and come up with an acceptable excuse as to why I would be absent from the biggest event of the year for SPEED.

It was a culmination of several month’s worth of weekends building the car in Jim’s shop, and several more weeks in my own garage applying the final bits of gear and splats of paint to get it ready to race. There had certainly been rough moments along the way - I was ready to give up more than once. My aching back and mounting “honey-do” list told me I should have just bought a ready to race car. But as my son and I pulled the last strip of masking tape from the windows to reveal the gleaming Bright Red Valspar Rust Proof Enamel, I was proud of the little Bimmer that, along with a lot of help and support along the way, we had managed to cobble together in our spare time.

Now I sat next to the hotshoes of the NASA SpecE30 series waiting for the wave from the official and the start of my own personal IFU adventure.

As circumstance would have it, and despite pretty well establishing an utter lack of talent, my pole strategy backfired. The inverted field only applied to those who had participated in the sprint race earlier in the day. Since I was still a student at that point, this didn’t apply to me. I was relegated to the back of the field, alongside the fast guys. My first shot at a pole position was foiled!
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