Lucky Dogs at Sears Point 2024
Lucky our 37 year old BMW is still running like a champ!
All the juicy details for the race weekend drivers, crew and spectators of our team.
In case you haven’t heard of this track….
Look it up. :-)
We will have large Detmers Design flag above trailer
Schedule:
Thursday - 7:00 - 9:00 PM Find paddock spot and get wrist bands for drivers on Friday practice
Friday - 8:00 AM Drivers meeting (all team is supposed to be present or risk 5 min start penalty)
9:00 AM - 12:00 PM Open practice
1:00 PM - 5:00 PM Open practice
9:00 AM - 5:00 PM Tech Inspection, Gear Inspection & Registration
Saturday - 8:00 AM Drivers Meeting
8:45 AM Cars to grid
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM Qualifying
10:30 AM - 5:30 PM Racing
Sunday - 8:30 AM Drivers Meeting
8:45 AM Cars to grid
9:00 AM - 5:00 PM Racing
Drivers
Michael, Zaid, Greg, Ben
Crew
Colleen, Greg, Cam, Mark and others!
Pit stop at paddock spot
Event Information -> Text "Sonoma24" to 844-695-0009 for all the latest event information from Lucky Dog.
Friday Practice
Saturday
Driver Order -> Greg, Michael, Zaid, and (Ben)
Overall the day was a success for our team in terms of car handling and drivers. Good lap times for Greg (1:59), me (1:57) and Zaid (2:01). Unfortunately during our final pit stop to put Ben in the car… the fire system was accidentally discharged leaving us with a choice. Continue without fire system against spirit of safety or park it until we can recharge or replace.
Learning experience about our fire system from ESS. Our nozzles were completely inadequate in terms of engine bay coverage and overall volume of fluid was very small. Truly only going to gain seconds during a fire and not likely to extinquish even small ones. Gratefully we had assistance from garage #20 team, Old Dogs Rule, for having spare fluids to recharge the bottle. Greg ran into town for another CO2 cartridge and we are back in business for Sunday.
I do plan to replace the ESS system with something that has a better pull design and charge indiction instead of assuming our CO2 cartridge is still good. More things to deal with after the race. Also plan to test the system using compressed air/water for nozzle alignment.
Unfortunately a large chunk of time was lost under a red flag. From what we could gather it was a shunt to the inside of Turn 8, hard enough to knock over one of the K walls. Driver was out of car and okay, but taken to hospital. Hopefully they recover fully from whatever injuries were sustained and we can battle with them in a future race.
Thanks to all the friends/family that visited us!
Sunday
Driver Order -> Ben, Zaid, Michael, Greg
The day started off great, car was ready, Ben was ready and the green flag dropped. Then all hell broke loose and people were trying to win the race from the first laps. Very shortly into the session Ben was caught up in a red flag caused by carnage between T3a and T4. After chatting with various other people it sounds like someone spin or had contact, causing a local yellow. From which another group of cars ignored yellow flags and sent it full speed to the scene of accident causing multiple crunched cars.
Few things I noticed from out in-car footage during the red flag. You can see T3 flagger showing yellow, then after Ben crests the hill there is a red at T4. This created a bunch of extra confusion for drivers trying to stop and also stay away from carnage. It would have been much better to have T4 flagger hold yellow until T3 was able to stop all cars coming up hill with their red. Keeping the crash area cleaner.
***insert video ****
Various Analysis/Videos
I’ll post comments/improvements into the Racing Knowledge Database for our future quick reference.
A high level take away for our lap analysis leads me to a few conclusions:
This is one of our best driver line ups with overall times very consistent
Opportunities to speed up Ben and Zaid’s times with more set time and confidence passing slower cars
Unrelated to us there were far too many double yellow and red flags
For anyone interested in running the same analysis on data from MyLaps, below is the Python script developed with help of ChatGPT.
Driver: Greg
Saturday Statistics:
Average Lap Time: 2:03.7
Fastest Lap Time: 1:59.3
Slowest Lap Time: 2:25.7
Number of Laps: 31
Sunday Statistics:
Average Lap Time: 2:04.6
Fastest Lap Time: 1:59.3
Slowest Lap Time: 2:16.7
Number of Laps: 15
Total Laps Across Both Days: 48
Driver: Michael
Saturday Statistics:
Average Lap Time: 2:06.1
Fastest Lap Time: 1:57.9
Slowest Lap Time: 2:48.9
Number of Laps: 24
Sunday Statistics:
Average Lap Time: 2:02.9
Fastest Lap Time: 1:58.1
Slowest Lap Time: 2:18.9
Number of Laps: 40
Total Laps Across Both Days: 73
Driver: Zaid
Saturday Statistics:
Average Lap Time: 2:07.0
Fastest Lap Time: 1:59.6
Slowest Lap Time: 2:36.7
Number of Laps: 36
Sunday Statistics:
Average Lap Time: 2:07.6
Fastest Lap Time: 2:01.9
Slowest Lap Time: 2:18.0
Number of Laps: 22
Total Laps Across Both Days: 60
Driver: Ben
No data available for Saturday
Sunday Statistics:
Average Lap Time: 2:10.8
Fastest Lap Time: 2:01.1
Slowest Lap Time: 2:52.1
Number of Laps: 25
Total Laps Across Both Days: 27
