The Dirt on Dirt, Part 1: Breaking Bad (Habits)

For my second chance at starting a dirt oval career, I decided to start with the basics and learn the correct way to drive — and race — on dirt tracks in the street stock car.

My education began decidedly off-track, watching videos ranging from onboard camera angles to driving tutorials to tips from real-world drivers about finding speed on a changing track surface.

With that knowledge fresh on my mind, I hit the track for testing and tried to steer clear of the bad habits I developed during my first attempt at dirt racing last spring.  Namely, I tended to overdrive the corners by using too much throttle on entry, then scrub off speed mid-corner and not straighten up soon enough to set up for a fast corner exit.

The street stock was ideal for practicing each of those.  As a big, heavy car with no downforce to speak of, it punished overdriving by plowing on entry, and without much torque to compensate for a bad exit, it forced me to keep up my momentum to get a good run off the corners.

The circuit — Williams Grove Speedway — was also a good one for gaining experience.  Its paperclip-like layout with long straightaways and tight turns required mastering the driving line and approach to run consistent quick laps.

With at least a working grasp of the basics, I hit the track in the class C street stock series.  I wasn’t eligible for the rookie street stock series because of my A-class dirt oval license, bestowed upon me after running enough dirt races when they were sanctioned under the regular oval license.

Instead, I settled for the street stock’s upper-class counterpart.  Like the rookie series, it uses a fixed setup, which helped diminish any doubts in the mind of this dirt racing beginner about lacking pace due to having a lesser setup.

The main difference from the rookie series is that the class C version uses iRacing’s new heat racing feature, which splits the grid into two heats before a consolation and feature race.  For me, that was a good thing since it meant twice as many chances per event to practice my starts and close racing around other cars.

As I soon discovered, I definitely needed that practice.  No video or explanation can prepare you for just how frantic it is racing wheel-to-wheel while sliding sideways in a corner, or how to react with traffic ahead and a track covered in dust and rubber.

Those lessons had to be learned first-hand behind the steering wheel, and in my first race of the week, I had to learn them the hard way.

Rookie Mistakes

In my first qualifying attempt, I was 3rd out of 10 cars — a nice change of pace from the dirt late model races in which I struggled to make it out of the bottom half of the grid.

However, I found my familiar mid-field home early in my chaotic heat race.  On the first lap, two cars ahead of me spun and while slowing to avoid them, I got a tap from behind that spun me out.  After the dust had settled, I was in fifth place. It was enough to transfer to the main event, but once again, I’d be right in the middle of the action in the feature.

The start of that race was cleaner and I even gained a couple of positions.  However, on lap 3 while following another car down the backstretch, I clipped the opening in the outside wall, which damaged my suspension and ricocheted me into the path of the car behind me, who received collateral damage from my crash.

To make matters worse, while limping back to the pits, I stopped on track and unwittingly brought out a caution.  To make matters worse still, I crashed again at the pit entrance.

While the chances of getting my car repaired enough to continue were slim, it added insult to injury and made me wonder whether I should have left my dirt career buried in the mud and shame where I left it almost a year ago.

A One-Eighty

I decided to soldier on, and I’m glad I did, because my next race later that night included one of my best battles ever on iRacing.

That event started with another improvement, posting the top time in qualifying and snagging pole position for my heat.  At the start, I lost a position to the car on my outside, but in the eight laps that followed, we had the sort of race that might make even professional dirt drivers jealous.

Lap after lap, we raced side by side, with my car hugging the bottom and his running a groove higher.  One lap, I would edge ahead, and the next, he would have the advantage. Our cars were rarely more than a few feet apart but never touched, even while sliding through the turns.

On the last lap, he entered the final corner a bit high and left me plenty of room on the inside.  However, the back end of my car slid a bit too much and I lost my momentum, costing me the victory.

It was a problem that I also faced in the feature.  After running in third place for most of the race, on a late restart, I nearly spun while pinned on the bottom and lost a position.

While this event proved that I had found some pace and skill at battling on dirt, I still had a ways to go at mastering basics like the ideal driving line and the technique through the corners.

Eureka Moment

The next day, my goal was to figure out what I was doing wrong, and I got my first clue during my first heat race of the day.  I had no issues in qualifying, posting the second-fastest time. However, even in leading my heat from start to finish, I found that my performance started to slip during that eight-lap race.

I chalked it up to the jitters of competition and proceeded to start from the front row of the feature race.  After losing a position early on, I couldn’t seem to match the pace of the two leaders. I knew my qualifying pace wasn’t that far off, so I had to be doing something wrong.

I learned by literally following the tire tracks of the cars ahead, and the answer hit me like a clod of dirt in the visor.  As the track rubbered in, my right-side tires were running on the slickest part of the surface.

By moving my line just half a groove higher, the car became much more stable on entry, less likely to slide mid-corner, and easier to set up for a fast, straight exit.  My old, stubborn habits were indeed dying hard, and the street stock was exposing each of them.

In the final laps of the race, I closed in on the two leaders and made it a three-way battle for the win.  While none of us could pass, it was a fun end to the race, undoubtedly because I had uncovered a secret to dirt driving by studying what had been right in front of me all along.

Making Moves

Just when I felt like I was in control on dirt, my final race of the week challenged that notion and tested everything I had learned so far.  For starters, it was the largest and most competitive field I raced against all week, so nothing came easily.

In qualifying, I managed the 3rd-fastest lap time in the 21-car field, which put me starting 2nd in my heat race.  Early on, I was in a close three-car battle that ended in a crash. The car behind me turned into my right rear exiting a corner, which hooked my car into the one beside me and sent him into the wall.

Even though that incident wasn’t my fault, as I drove around to finish my heat in 3rd place, I was haunted by flashbacks to my first dirt experience, when I rear-ended several cars and got called out over the radio for my reckless driving.

In this case, I was surprised that the driver I dominoed into had no ill feelings about the crash.  He was understanding and even admitted that he had bumped me in the previous corner, so it was all part of dirt racing in his mind.

With the dust settled from the heat, I watched the consolation race, and it was a doozy.  From the outset, cars were crashing and flipping all over the track, and only one survived to finish without damage.  Knowing that I’d be starting fifth in the feature race, I worried that it could play out the same way, and if it did, I’d be lucky to make it through unscathed.

The majority of that 50-lap race was indeed plagued by cautions, although the first few were for crashes behind me. After falling back to sixth on the start, though, I was eager for some green-flag racing so I could work on passing the cars ahead of me — something I hadn’t been successful at all week.

By mid-race, I started working a higher groove and even got alongside the fourth-place car, but a caution fell before I had a nose ahead.  On the following restart, I made my move, this time dropping back to the bottom to make the pass. As I went by, the car to my outside impaled himself on the backstretch wall — a move I knew all too well, and thankfully avoided in this race.

After that crash was cleaned up, the race restarted again and I set up another outside pass on the third-place car.  I was nearly clear exiting the corner when the car I was battling bounced off the inside wall and into me, sending me sidelong into the outer armco barrier.

As the caution flew once again, I surveyed the damage.  My steering wheel was clearly 20 or 30 degrees off-center, but I didn’t seem to be down on top speed.  In the final 10 laps on a rubbered-in track where passing was becoming increasingly difficult, I expected that I could at least hold my position.

To my surprise, instead of playing defense on the final two restarts, I was able to go on the attack, taking a peek inside the second-place car.  While I could have bumped him out of the way — he made a similarly aggressive move on me in our heat race — I kept it clean and settled for third, which was still an improvement over where I started.

For the first time all week, I was able to run multiple lines and make some passes.  While I did suffer a small hit to my safety rating, the confidence I gained more than made up for it.  And after losing 50 iRating in my embarrassing first outing, I recovered by gaining almost 200 in my final three races of the week.

While I certainly can’t consider myself a dirt expert after driving just one car and track, in my first week back on dirt, I think I met my goal of re-learning the basics and putting them into practice.

And compared to my previous dirt debut last year, just keeping my name off of any wanted posters around Williams Grove Speedway would have been a welcome improvement.