Chump Car World Series

No matter what anyone might tell you, we go racing because it’s fun. There’s no other reason that would get us to spend the time and money and effort to do this. Sure, there’s a sense of achievement and we get a practical understanding of the mechanics and principles we use to fix cars five days a week, but really, it all comes down to having fun and indulging our passion for cars.



One way we bring the AR Auto Service team together is by competing in the Chump Car World Series. The name is a play on the now-defunct Champ Car World Series, but Chump Car is a completely different animal. Like its related race, the 24 Hours of Lemons, Chump Car has a rule that you must buy and prepare your race car for less than $500.  There are some exceptions to that rule, such as tires and brakes and other safety items like your roll cage, but the overall idea is that this is a series for low budget “crap can” race cars. And you know what? It’s just as much fun as racing an expensive sports car!




The AR Auto Service team fielded a 1996 Mazda Miata at last year’s inaugural event here in Portland.  Because of our skills in the garage, headed up by AR mechanics Brian Marsteller and Ian Clinkinbeard, our car was considered one of the best-prepared cars on the grid. With a good car to race, our drivers Ryan Douthit, Mike Wann, Adam Griffith, Cameron Benner, and Paul Klas put the car into first place at the 6 hour mark of the race.
But being in the lead in the middle of a race doesn’t mean much. And that 6-hour mark was when one of our drivers crashed into an artificial barrier designed to slow cars down on Portland International Raceway’s superfast back straight.  The Chump Car officials saw fit to penalize us by taking us off track for 2 hours, and our team dropped all the way back to 24th place.  Most teams would call that a death sentence, but we don’t quit at AR. Our crew chief, Brian Marsteller, said “We can still finish this race and make a good showing!”  and we decided to climb as far back up the standings as possible. Through excellent pit strategy and work by Ian Clinkinbeard and Aaron hambleton, and some blistering fast driving by Cameron Benner and Brian Marsteller, we were able to come back to 8th place before the checkered flag flew.

This past summer, we fielded the same car a second time at another Chump Car race in Spokane, Washington. We were hoping to come back with more experience and win the whole dang thing.  To get the win, we had made numerous changes to our race strategy. Now, you might not think that racing requires much strategic thinking, but you might be surprised how much depends on small decisions. For example, we decided to make pit stops just once every 2 hours. That’s the longest that Chump Car will let you go between driver changes, and we had a strong driving roster, including Rich Cohn-Lee, Cameron Benner, Kim Taylor, Joseph Gilmore, Jared Boone and our secret weapon, Joe Casey.  All of us came in with the expectation that the AR Auto Service team was going to finish on the podium, but we wanted first place overall.

The car and the team performed great in practice.  All our mechanical issues were sorted out and all the drivers were comfortable with the car, so we were ready to race for the win.  The crew consisting of Billy Seroyer, Ian Clinkinbeard, Eddie Nakato, Shane Curtis and Sonja Cecil were ready as well.
The race started at noon on Saturday and was scheduled to end at noon on Sunday.  While our car wasn’t the fastest car on track, we were able to stay within a few laps of the lead car throughout the first half of the race. 

Another part of our strategy to win was that we decided to drive conservatively and wait until the fast cars had gotten mechanically tired before we turned up the heat.  In racing, we call that not “using up” the car before the end. In a 24-hour race, you just need to stay in the game until the last hour, and that’s when the serious racing starts.

This was a smart strategy, but you still have to account for accidents. In the small hours of the morning Kim Taylor made a tiny racing mistake and crashed the car into a concrete barrier.  The car was still drivable so she drove the car back into the pits where Eddie Nakato, Brian Marsteller, Shane Curtis, Bill Seroyer and Ian Clinkinbeard made emergency repairs and sent the car back out (without a hood) in just 15 minutes.  We were all quite impressed with ourselves until an hour later when Cameron Benner crashed the car into another concrete barrier even harder.  He was sent to the hospital for a precautionary checkup (thankfully he was ok) but the car was really mangled. 





When it’s the middle of the night and your car is wrecked, you’ve got some decisions to make – cut your losses and go home, or try to salvage the car and keep going? For us, it wasn’t even a question. We held a brief team meeting and every person voted to resurrect the car. With nothing more than our skills and some spare parts borrowed from the neighbors, we started work.  Only two hours later the car was on its feet, with no front bumper, rear bumper,  hood, or fenders.  We were down to just the bare skeleton of a car, with doors and a trunklid! But we were ready to race again.
Amazingly, the car ran flawlessly and managed to turn some of the fastest times of any of the cars in the race in it’s stripped-down state.  Unfortunately, we had one more human error coming our way. Joseph Gilmore missed a shift and grabbed the wrong gear on his last lap before coming into the pits.  Spinning any engine too high can have disastrous consequences, and as tough as our little Miata was, the engine was now running on 2 cylinders.  Team manager Eddie Nakato made the executive decision to park the car until the checkered flag came out, so the team could at least drive the car to the finish line.

At Noon on Sunday the entire team came out and pushed the car to the hot pit and driver Joe Casey drove the car, sputtering on 2 cylinders, past the checkered flag. That action earned us an official “finish” in this 24-hour race.

The heroic AR Auto Service Chump Car Miata is now officially dead.  Despite our best-laid plans, we used the car up before the end. That’s the challenge of a 24-hour race – just to stay on track to the end. But this team is far from done. A new old junker Miata was brought the shop and prepped for the 2010 Halloween event at Portland International Raceway. You can find the story of that event here on the website.