You also realize that the brakes need to be treated with more care and attention than you may think. There's a reason you see people sawing at the wheel on old race cars. Scrub speed using the steering wheel and gearbox, slide the car around, don't rely on the pedal alone to slow you down. But compared to modern cars, it still didn't really have "brakes." It makes you realize that you need to combine your braking with other inputs to get the best out of it. The pedal was firm and the car actually slowed down when I pushed it. Compared to what I had just experienced, it was a world of difference. When I pulled into the pits, friend and car owner Efrain Olivares discovered that the adjuster screws in the rear drums had backed out, which meant I literally didn't have any brakes.Įfrain fixed the issue and sent me back out. "Old cars really don't have brakes," I shouted to myself through my helmet, as I hurtled towards a corner with the Sprite barely slowing. I thought they were just cold, so I started pumping them and working to bring them up to temp. My first time out was met with a long pedal that seems to be connected to nothing, a lot of swearing, and me terrified that I was about to spend a day making an ass of myself behind the wheel.Īs I understand it, brakes are applied in order reduce forward motion. The Sprite falls somewhere on the pre-chrysalis end of the spectrum. Without a doubt, braking has undergone the biggest transformation, starting as a hideous caterpillar and emerging from its chrysalis decades years later a beautiful butterfly of speed reduction. The good news is that there isn't really anything to hit, which makes it the perfect place to learn a new car, or, in this case, an old one. It's a fast place, most turns are quicker than you'd expect and there's a lot of waiting for a late apex. The area is featureless, no natural markers for turn-in or braking, and the silt that surrounds the track turns into sci-fi grade quicksand when wet. It's an evolution marked with leaps forward and steps backward in terms of technology and driver involvement.īuttonwillow, like many tracks in California, is in the middle of nowhere. Each car is the essence of its decade, a representation of the development of trackable street cars for nearly 60 years. In order to get that vintage experience, we lined up four cars: a 1962 Austin Healey Sprite, a 1971 Lotus Europa, a 1989 BMW E30 M3, and a brand-new Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio. Then he suggested I join him at Buttonwillow Raceway for a test day along with Southern California's Vintage Auto Racing Association, or VARA, for short, before its annual VARA University, a driving school for novices and experienced racers alike. When I said something along the lines of "driving a vintage car looks easy" to editor-at-large Sam Smith, he made some grandiose hand gestures, said something about bias ply tires, and mimicked going around a corner with body english that would make a pro bowler jealous. That vintage racers bragging about catching big slides and griping about tires sound like fishermen claiming to have had the most difficult day reeling in the biggest catch this hemisphere had ever seen. Being fast in a car like that makes you think that the rest of racing history was a bit of a dawdle. Cars of that vintage and newer share more than you might expect. I've been racing for years, but the oldest thing I've driven on track is a 1987 BMW 325iS. A vintage race car is, for all intents and purposes, just a car.īut if you're used to modern metal, you're in for a shock. Seatbelts that fasten like, well, seatbelts. There are wheels at each corner, all of them round. The steering wheel, pedals, and gearshift are the same.
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