We Talk Cars with Honda Racer Tom O’Gorman
Thunderhill is a 25-hour race. How does it change strategy compared to a 24?
Ultimately the difference between a 24 and 25 hour race wasn’t that big of a deal, at least not compared to something like an 8 hour race. The biggest thing about the Thunderhill race is that it is held in December when everyone has pretty much finished racing for the season. Yet they are now going to be in the longest race of the whole year. As well, it is almost always freezing cold, or snowing, or raining, or some combination of those things together. But that’s just the nature of the track. So to add that extra bit of poor climate to the endurance aspect makes this a particularly grueling race, rather than the extra hour.
How will the data and information gathered from this event be used by Honda?
I know that most of the team – the drivers and the crew – they are designers and engineers and even testing people who work within Honda, but not necessarily directly work with the Type R. There’s a chance that the knowledge and function of the Type R components could lead to changes and technology advanced on other cars within the brand.
For next year though, they are talking about modifying the Type R race car to showcase what the cars can do when prepped to the limit of the class rules. They can start off on a strong note by saying they they finished with 100% reliability as a fairly stock vehicle run at 8/10th’s, but they would then see if they could actually try and get a class win.
How did the other team car do?
They had one unscheduled stop, which had nothing to do with the car. One of the bolts holding in the racing seat had somehow worked its way loose. That put them down about two laps and ultimately they finished 10th in class where we finished 8th. But they had the same strategy of aiming for a particular lap time. To help with timing, they took an identical tire and fuel strategy as us, but purposely pitted about 10 minutes after the start of the race. We have the same crew for both cars, so we alternated when the cars came in.
Of the crew we had everyone got rotated in and out for plenty of down time to stay refreshed with fuelers doing 12.5 hours and other crew every six.
You mentioned only changing one tire at a time. Was that a NASA pit use rule?
Correct. You could only change one tire in the hot pit at a time. You could go into the paddock and change all four, but that would take a bit of extra time, and our pace was not putting much wear on the tires anyway.
They also have fuel restrictions with only two 5-gallon jugs of fuel allowed into the car on the hot pit lane. Unlike tire changes, you are only allowed to add fuel in the hot-pit lane. So even though we had a large capacity 32 gallon fuel tank, we could only add so much per stop. As well, you have to start the race with the capacity of the stock fuel tank, which was 16 gallons. Those are rules in place for some of the slower classes.
