Carl Rydquist 25 Hours of Thunderhill race recap
Redondo Beach, CA, Dec 7th, 2015.

Family, Fans and Friends!

Last weekend I raced in the NASA 25 Hours of Thunderhill presented by Hawk Performance. I was driving the #33 CA Sport Nissan Nismo 370Z with co-drivers Vesko Kozarov, Lara Tallman, Ray Mason and Byron Smith. Our expectation was to fight for a class win, and to at least capture a class podium.

We got off to a clean start and as we were cycling through the driver line-up everyone was doing a great job and we held P3 several times and we ran as high as P11 overall out of 57 racecars.

The actual end result was P5 in class and P19 overall after a couple of mishaps, with 572 laps on the ticker.

We had everything in place for a great race but suffered a couple of early setbacks in the race related to fuel spills from a leaky gasket on the refueling vent system that incurred time penalties.

Later during the night one of the guys suffered a racing incident with another car that required a repair visit to the paddock to replace a wheel and steering tie-rod. As if that was not enough, on the soaked Sunday morning track, and after having caught up through the night another co-driver had a minor off-track excursion that unfortunately required a tow since the car got stuck in the muddy grass, only feet off the track.

In total the penalties and mishaps cost approximately 75 minutes of downtime which corresponds to appr 35 laps in the rain and we could not recover from that. Usually some of those things happen distributed between several teams and even though those issues didn’t put us out of the race, if you want to be sure of a podium result or win a race, you really can’t have that happen.

My main role in the 2015 edition of the 25 Hours of Thunderhill was to be a night and rain relief driver and I put in more than three hours on Saturday night between appr 8 – 11 pm, and just by running clean we progressed to reclaim P3 in our class after the early fuel spill penalties.

Later in the night I got back in the car during the dark graveyard shift hours around 4 – 6 am. We were P6 then following the above mentioned tie-rod replacement. I enjoyed those stints a lot, it was relatively quiet around the track apart from racecars screaming through the night. It was a nice time to just have the concise reporting on the car and track conditions through the intercom, and a little banter with crew chiefs Cody and Zack. I was pushing hard to get every ounce of grip out of the Pirelli rain tires to reclaim 4th in class, all the while passing slower cars and keeping an eye on the prototypes that came through every now and then.

I wasn’t hallucinating, eventually some light started to appear in the sky and it was cool to experience the transition from pitch black to the dawn of a new day over only a few quick laps. It was absolutely great to be out there at full throttle and dice through the traffic. Personally this was very refreshing to fully be back racing after two seasons in pro drifting, since racing is truly my passion and I love to be out there driving my heart out and pushing the limits.

As I was racing I realized that my comfort with the rain had reached the next level thanks to said drifting, since that has left an important sense of giving zero care about whether the car points backwards or sideways, I’ve been there and done that so many times that it has become second nature to sort that out. I’ve always done well in the rain but having that additional experience was a nice add-on.

At the end of the day, 5th is a good result in light of strong competition, but of course if you don’t get the reward that you fought hard for together as a team you always wish for more.

I’d like to give credit to the National Auto Sport Association (NASA) and the Thunderhill Raceway staff for putting on a great race, the track workers were very attentive to indicate any hazards, and I was really impressed with the driver speeds and driving styles of the rest of the field, there were relatively few contacts between cars and not too many cars went off track in the extreme conditions. My best wishes for a speedy recovery to the Ryno Racing driver who was the unfortunate exception with a bad wreck.

Thank you CA Sport, crew and co-drivers for the opportunity to race together, it was an absolute pleasure despite the instances of bad luck we had. We’ll get it next time. Also I’d like to congratulate the Flying Lizard team on the overall win.
Finally my long-time sponsors Berk Technology, Champion Sparkplugs and Nissan RaceShop deserve a very special thank you! Your support in every aspect means the world and it helped make this season finale a great one!
The 2015 season is now over but 2016 is already around the corner, so stay tuned for updates.
On the next several pages you can view additional photos and race notes, enjoy the extra holiday reading material!

At the wheel,
Carl Rydquist

Armed with stickers prepared and printed by 5dsignworks I arrived to the track early Thursday morning. Gray skies and expectations of rain were prominent. The two Nismo-kitted 370Z’s prepared by CA Sport were neatly parked up under the canopy, the #33 car on the way up on the setup table. On a detail level, the build quality by CA Sport gave instant excitement and the graphics theme on both cars made by Vistral Creative looked awesome!

For this endurance race the cars are closely matched to world Challenge GTS spec, but without the super tuned GTS engines. Instead the cars have Nismo tuned stock 370Z engines that are freed up with Berk Technology downpipes and that setup provides a really wide powerband with gobs of torque and power screaming all the way to the rev-limiter.

The cars handle great thanks to specific CA Sport suspension mods, aided by APR GTC300 World Challenge wings and splitters, and Pirelli slicks on wide and lightweight Enkei wheels. OS Giken limited slip differentials help put the power down and Nismo track brakes help us drivers brake late with excellent precision.

The Australian drivers who were assigned to the black #43 car started off as early as possible to familiarize themselves with the three mile long Thunderhill Raceway. That car finished on the podium in last year’s 25 hour race and was setup and ready to go. They ended up with a 10th in class and 31st overall finish. On the #33 side under the canopy we used Thu-Fri to get this brand new car sorted before putting any notable mileage on it.

One of the #43 Aussie drivers, Steve, and yours truly. Turned out Steve and I have a shared interest and mutual friends in the Creventic 24 Hour FIA Series which includes the 24 Hours of Barcelona, 24 Hours of Dubai, etc.

Once we began to put laps on the car I worked on re-familiarizing myself with the different lines around Thunderhill and finding the fastest “economical” driving style. That means using different shift points and different gears for different turns, and then reviewing lap times and sector times to identify gains and losses per sector and then evaluate risk of car abuse vs speed. 25 hours is a very long race for any car so you want to be fast also without being too hard to the car. We sat down with the Motec data on Fri night for a good while to analyze the data of each driver and I spent a lot of time to look at the difference between hard driving vs “car saving” driving.

Cockpit of #33, this was a brand new racecar when we started the race.

Team owner and driver Lara rolling out the car onto the pre-grid show here. One hour before the race all the cars line up based on the qualifying laptime. For 25H it’s not too important to qualify high but the further up the grid you are, the less the risk to be caught up in a first lap incident.

Green flag! A record number of propotype sports cars, incl a beautiful and quick Ginetta LMP3 car was on the grid this year. Usually there are a handful of them, this time there was a dozen. They add the challenge of being extremely fast and low therefore hard to see and they come up quickly behind you. This requires heightened level of attention in the mirrors to not get misaligned into turns which could increase the risk for contact.

Our team’s race control. Monitors for each car and pit stop strategy, as well as race director screen showing track cautions etc, then live timing for entire field and class, so we could always keep an eye on competitors as well, you see all of their pit stop times, current pace etc. Cody and Zack were basically on duty for 25 hours straight.

Our fuel guys were also busy working on both the #33 and #43 cars all 25 hours – no sleep! On average these guys had to refuel roughly once every 25 minutes, 50 minutes runtime per car between refueling due to NASA’s special 10 gallon limit.

Brakes take a beating but with the right pads and driving technique you can make them last the full 25 hours. Rain can extend brake life since track friction is lower, which requires less brake torque, but on the flipside too much use of ABS can make the pads wear out really fast so you need to use good braking habits.

Can’t beat racing a well setup racecar on a challenging racetrack. CA Sport’s Vesko Kozarov applied a lot of his World Challenge and Thunderhill expertise to the prep for this race and the setup was a really good middle ground for running both in dry, cold, and wet conditions.