Driving Lessons: One Lap of America
Learning vs performance mode in 3 laps.
Last weekend, I finished one of the craziest driving events I’ve ever participated in, the One Lap of America. My co-driver Ed Gliss, a former test driver for Michelin and now in product marketing for Michelin and BFGoodrich, and I drove a Honda Civic Type R on the new BFGoodrich g-Force Phenom T/A tires in ten events over eight days, and through nine states. (And, we even drove eleven hours from Greenville, SC to South Bend, IN before we got to the start of the event).
This was the forty-first running of the One Lap, an event created by the late Brock Yates as a more legal version of his Cannonball Run, and now run by his son, Brock Jr.
The basic format is that you show up at a track, unpack your car, do three time trial-style laps in the morning, another three in the afternoon, pack up and drive to the next city, where you do it all again at the next track, the next day. Rinse, repeat. Those first three laps are both your practice and timed laps—there is no actual practice time.
Each year, the venues change, other than the start and finish locations (Tire Rack’s head office and test facility where we did a wet skid pad on the first morning, and dry skid pad on the last day). From South Bend, we went to Grissom Air Force base in Indiana for an autocross, then on to St. Louis (actually, Madison, IL) to run Worldwide Technology Raceway, Hedge Hollow (near Kansas City), NCM in Bowling Green, Virginia International Raceway in (you guessed it) Virginia, PittRace (Pennsylvania) and Quaker City Motorsports Park (in Ohio for a drag race), Grattan (Michigan), and back to South Bend.
The transits between events are stories in themselves, with some competitors facing even more challenges (mechanical and hitting deer, for instance). Sleep is not something any of us got much of (four nights in a row of between 4 and 6 hours was typical; some competitors, due to various mishaps and challenges, had completely sleepless nights). Road cuisine, for us, consisted of a lot of squirrel food—trail mix was our friend—and Buccee’s brisket sandwiches eaten off our mobile dining “table” (the rear wing of our Civic).
Packing and unpacking was both art and science, resembling a game of Tetris. We loaded two spare wheel/tires (one for us, one for our teammates in the Michelin Corvette), two folding bicycles (to make morning track “walks” quicker), a basic tool kit, tire pressure gauges, folding chairs (which we used for approximately a total of 8.78 minutes over the eight days), a cooler, three helmets (Ed’s, mine, one for the Corvette drivers), two Hybrid head and neck restraints, driving suits and shoes, two backpacks for our laptops, and two small bags for our very limited clothing. Our record time to pack all of that was under seven minutes. Every minute counted, as that was one more minute of sleep.
I mentioned spare tires… those are only for an emergency, as the rules state you have to run the entire event—tracks and road transits—on the same set of tires. A tire with any sign of its innards showing leads to a disqualification.
The ideal tire for One Lap has great grip in both wet and dry, doesn’t wear out, and can be driven at the limit in a predictable way. In other words, this was the perfect test for the new g-Force Phenom tire. Practically every car was using a 200TW (tread wear rating) tire, and our BFG’s were 380TW, so we knew it would be a huge challenge to keep up in the grip department. After the first morning when Ed finished twelfth overall on the wet skid pad, we did rain dances every day because we knew we had a killer wet weather tire.
We never saw a drop of rain on a race track throughout the rest of the event. Darn! Still, as we gridded by previous lap times amongst Porsches, Corvettes, Mustangs, Camaros, and BMWs with their 200TW tires, many drivers of these other cars came up to ask us, “What have you done to mod that Civic?” “Just tires and brake pads—other than that, it’s dead stock,” was our response. (Spoiler alert: we took home the first place trophy for the Stock Touring class, and third in Mid-priced Sedan).
More than once I was asked what advice I’d give someone looking to do One Lap. I’m almost a rookie, as this was only the second time I’d done it (this was the fifth time for Ed; many have done it a dozen or so times, and one driver told me this was year number 31 for him), so my opinion is short on experience, but I’m confident my “rule #1” is valid: have a great co-driver.
By great, I mean you need someone who is fun and interesting to spend a LOT of time with (Ed and I spent almost 72 hours together), and can seriously drive. I’ve been very fortunate both times I’ve done One Lap. My first year, I met my co-driver Mike Martin in South Bend the day before the event started. I’d heard stories of drivers wanting to kill each other half-way through the event, but Mike could not have been better company to spend all that time with.
Ed was exactly the same: fun, interesting, and wow, can he drive! Of course, having spent more than a decade testing and developing tires for BFGoodrich and Michelin (and racing karts and cars in his spare time), that’s not really surprising. In fact, he played a big role in the development of the very tire we ran on.