Pirate Racing 20 Years Ago

[Hib Halverson]

[COLOR=Blue][FONT=Arial]Hi Zroners-
Earlier this week, I was over in Nevada at Spring Mountain taking their C7 ZR1 class. It was the first time in 20 years that I'd been back to Spring Mountain and OMG has that place changed.

I was there in early November of 1999 to test Jim Van Dorn's, Pirate Racing SCCA World Challenger cars, the famed "Phoenix" C4 ZR1 and the team's C5. At the time the facility was owned by Rupert Bragg-Smith and consisted of one track, two white quonset huts and a dozen or so C5s.

As it's been 20 years since Pirate Racing ran the World Challenge and 4 1/2 years since Jim's death, I thought you all would get a kick out of reading the article I wrote about my test of the "Phoenix". A shorter, somewhat different version of this ran in Vette Magazine, the following year.

Apparently, this article is too long to put in one post so I'll divide it in half.

Without further adieu...

Flooring-it down a track's longest straight could be the most fun you can have driving a ZR-1, other than maybe giving a ride to some babilicious hearthrob like, Jennifer Lopez. But if the ZR-1 is a race car weighing only 2800 lbs, having about 520hp, a 7500 rpm rev limit and no passenger seat; who needs Jennifer Lopez?

Needing to test this, coming off a turn my boot was flat on the floor. It wasn't until about 4000 when stuff really began to happen, but after that–whoa, people! My head snapped back. The car got a little loose with wheelspin. I straightened her out then watched the AutoMeter Monster Tach climb past 6000. The exhausts, two feet from my ear, began a roaring, 32-valve, howl. Just short of 7500, I shifted.

But, I'm ahead of the story.

Eight days before, Monday, Nov. 1, 1999: I got to work to find a voice mail from Pirate Racing's Jim Van Dorn, "Hey! You comin' next Sunday? If you are, you can drive 'em. Call me, dude."

I called back "Where at?"

"Rupert's, just outside of Pahrump. Shoot some photos for us then you can drive both."?
"You sure? I got no recent seat time in a race car and a lot of my driver's stuff got lost when I moved last year."
"Driving the 'Phoenix' really ain't that bad and the C5 is even easier. Rupert will be there to give you a few pointers. Jus' bring a helmet. You don't really need a suit for an 'informal magazine test', do ya?"

Pahrump, Nevada, 70 miles west of Las Vegas, is known for searing summer heat, as a tourist jump-off point for trips to Death Valley, farming, a casino or two, legal whorehouses and the Spring Mountain Motor Sports Park. In the winter the track is home to the Bragg-Smith Advanced Driving School and occasionally is a race car test track. In the summer, it's useless for anything other than car company, hot weather testing. Damn good thing I was there in November.

The Pirate Racing ZR-1, dirty, battle-scared and maybe a little tired after two seasons of racing, was sitting there waiting for me. She got right in my face with brilliant purple/yellow/white paint, two sewer-pipe exhausts under the driver's door and Goodrich g-Forces on A-Molds all around. On the way over from Vegas I'd had Hole's "Celebrity Skin" on the CD. I looked at this car and thought of Courtney Love snarling the title track, "I'm all I want to be! A walking study in demonology!"

But then, I opened the hood to a incredibly bright, yellow engine. "Fer crissakes, Van Dorn, you you guys really have an ‘attitude' problem," I giggled, taking-in the light-hearted sight of the screaming-yellow-zonker of a motor.
"That's us Pirates," "JVD" quipped as I squinted at the 5.7-liter, LT5, four-cam V8.

I was a little apprehensive. My study of this car's performance in two years of Sports Car Club of America Speedvision World Challenge GT Championship racing showed she could be fast, but also high-strung, temperamental and a little unreliable. Hearing crew members call her "the bitch" did me no good. If cars are females, this one was a riot grrrrl. "You wanna piece a me, sucker?" she (in a raspy, Courtney Love voice) seemed to ask.

Bad enough I'd never driven this car before, but I'd never seen the track on which I was going to test it, either. Now seemed like a great time for those "pointers" Van Dorn mentioned. Track owner Rupert Bragg-Smith was nearby talking to some of the Pirates. "Tell me about your track, Rupe?" I asked pensively. Bragg-Smith looked northeast to the farthest part of his facility. With the confidence owning your own race tack must bring, he said "Uh–it's pretty technical." and turned away. Guess that'd be all the "pointers" I was to get that day.

Van Dorn helped me strap into the Les Stanford Chevrolet/Pirate Racing Corvette ZR-1 then pointed out the master switch, the fire system button, the ignition, pumps and other important switches. He fastened the window net and quipped, "The rev limit's seventy-five hundred. Have a blast, dude."

I flicked on all those switches, pushed the starter button and the Skinner and VanDeventer-built LT5 roared to life. It settled to a 1000 rpm idle and I daydreamed as ten quarts of Red Line 40 Wt. Race Oil warmed-up.

Set the Way-Back Machine for 1992
Only two ZR-1s have been successful in professional racing. One is the Morrison Motorsports/EDS/Mobil1 World Record car currently in the National Corvette Museum. The other is the Speedvision World Challenge GT-class racer I was sitting in.

The #75 was built by Kim Baker for the final three races in the '92 World Challenge. It was one of the last in a line Bakeracing Corvettes done during the late-'80s and early-'90s and the only ZR-1 to ever win a professional road race. Mercruiser, which back then manufactured the LT5 engine for GM, sponsored the car and built its race engines. Baker, along with Jim Minneker, Don Knowles, Ray Kong and Peter Hanson drove the Bakeracing/Mercruiser Corvette to victory at the Mosport 24 Hours in Canada that year.

How about this curious twist of fate? The ZR-1's greatest achievements in motorsports came at 24 Hour events: the World Speed Record, set March 2, 1990 at Ft. Stockton, Texas, and that endurance race at Mosport near Bomanville, Ontario on August 16, 1992. Even more weird? Kim Baker, Jim Minneker and Don Knowles were all drivers in both events.

"I bought the car from an insurance company," Baker told me in a telephone interview. "It was a zero-miles, '92 ZR-1 that got torched at a Chevy dealer. We stripped it to the bare frame, then built a race car using all the stuff I'd learned from previous Corvettes. We finished it a week before Mosport. I set it up the way I did other cars, then we took it up to Canada. It was the best handling, best running car I ever built, right off the trailer. We qualified well and won by pretty good margin. We'd have won by even more, but late in the race, we had a fuel system problem that slowed us a bit."

After the season, Baker traced that to substandard materials used in the plastic duckbill on the end of the fuel pickup. Because the car's production-based fuel injection bypassed fuel back to the tank, the gas would get hot. The duckbill would soften from the heat, then slowly restrict as the pumps sucked hard on the fuel, causing the car to starve for gas. Fortunately, at Mosport, Bakeracing had a huge lead in the closing stages of the race. At the very end, Stu Hayner in a Morrison Corvette, was gaining seven seconds a lap but the Mercruiser ZR-1 still won by more than half-a-lap.

"A week after Mosport," Baker continued, "we ran Road America (Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin) and got the pole but had trouble again with the pickup. We finished second. Sears Point (Sonoma, California) was the last race of the season and I finished second there, too. Again, the fuel pump pickup got us."

Racing is full of shoulda-coulda-wouldas. Had that duckbill been made of the right material, the Bakeracing/Mercruiser ZR-1 woulda not only won Mosport, but shoulda won again at Road America and Sears and coulda ended the year as World Challenge Champion. After the '92 season sponsor interest in the World Challenge dropped for several years. Bakeracing did not enter the 1993 series. Over the next few years, Kim Baker rented the ZR-1 to different racers who ran it in various events.

Pirate Racing
Jim Van Dorn owns a Corvette service shop in Palm Desert, California and has been a hard-core "Zroner" since buying his first ZR-1 in 1990. His shop specializes in them and his office is a sort of ZR-1 shrine. His quasi-religious regard for the cars has driven him to own two streeters: a ‘91, 620hp hot rod he calls "The Weekender" and a 512-mile, 1993 "Ruby" 40th Anniversary Edition. Van Dorn had a key role in the two great ZR-1 enthusiast gatherings of the '90s, "Thunder at Stillwater", the October, 1993 event honoring the end of LT5 engine production at Mercruiser and "The Legend Lives," the May, 1995 happening at Bowling Green, Kentucky which marked production of the last ZR-1.

Later in '95, Van Dorn crewed for Doug Rippie's attempt at running The 24 Hours of Le Mans with a ZR-1. Though Rippie's adventure came up short, Van Dorn was hooked. He and buddies on the "ZR-1 Net" email list barnstormed the unusual idea of a grass-roots-funded, volunteer-crewed race effort with a ZR-1 in the 1998 Speedvision World Challenge GT class. They called it "Pirate Racing," an appropriate name for a band of enthusiast/volunteers intent on hijacking the World Challenge with a three-year-old, out-of-production car that SCCA didn't even want in the series.

In 1997, Pirate Racing surprised the Corvette hobby by raising a significant amount of money in a short time via the Internet. Sources told us it was around $20,000.00. Not only were the Pirates able to raise that grass-roots investment but they secured corporate sponsorship enough to do a partial season of World Challenge. That fall, the Team bought the 75 from Kim Baker, gave it an overhaul and was ready for the season opener at Topeka, Kansas in May of 1998. In fact, Pirate Racing's major sponsor, Les Stanford Chevrolet in Michigan, funded two cars for Topeka: #76, powered by a small-block V8, driven by Bill Cooper and crewed by Doug Rippie Motorsports and the #75 ZR-1 with a Lingenfelter LT5, Scotty B. White at the wheel and crewed by the Pirates.

The Team's ‘98 World Challenge season began in two big ways. Cooper set the track record and won from the pole. Scotty B. White started fourth and wrecked late in the race. That earned him an ironic, 13th place finish. The team ran the rest of the year with just the 75. After Topeka, the Pirates' best finish was an eighth by Scotty B. White at Grand Rapids.

In another interesting twist, former owner, Kim Baker, was in the car for the Lime Rock event. He qualified third and was there when a rod bolt fell out. The car made it part-way down the next straight, then the rod cap tore off, the engine blew up and set the car on fire. No one will forget Speedvision cameras zooming-in on Baker as he bailed out of the still-rolling car's flaming cockpit. Fortunately, Kim was no worse for wear and finished 18th on that memorable day in Connecticut.

The Pirates missed the next two events rebuilding after the fire. Expectedly, the car's official nickname became "The Phoenix". The most famous driver in Corvette racing of the '80s and '90s, John Heinricy, was in the 75 at Watkins Glen and finished 22nd with engine problems. Scotty B. White was back in the car for the final '98 event at Colorado Springs and finished 15th.

The Pirates ended the season out of the top 10 in points. Naysayers looked at their performance as a money-pit failure caused by unreliable engines, inability to recover quickly after the Lime Rock fire and a team too inexperienced to prepare the car consistently. Optimists saw it as a challenging, first-year learning experience for an enthusiastic and promising race team. Realists saw the Team as lacking consistency but having learned a lot in its first season. More importantly, they got results for their sponsor. Stanford Chevrolet was pleased with the effect backing a race team had on its sales volume. In fact, the Stanfords were so happy, they increased their support for 1999. They purchased two of the 1998 C5 "kit cars" GM built for racing then sub'ed them out to Sports Fab in Milford, Michigan for preparation.

The 1999 World Challenge began at Mosport, same place the team's ZR-1 was victorious seven years before. Bill Cooper sat on the pole. He led most of the race, but six laps from the finish, faded to fourth when the throughout bearing came apart damaging both the clutch and the transmission. Until then, no one had anything for "Coop" that day. The 75 almost went two-for-two at Mosport.

Lime Rock, a week later: redemption after the disastrous fire the year before. Cooper qualifies fourth and finishes second. Mid-Ohio the next weekend: reliability once again eats the Pirates lunch. On start-up, before the first practice, a valve lifter breaks. The only lifters for LT5s come from GM and they have a history of reliability problems. The Pirates thrash to get their spare motor, a 40,000 mile modified streeter out of one of Van Dorn's hot rods, installed. Down 75hp compared to the first engine, Bill Cooper stuns observers when he qualifies second. In the race, he keeps the Stanford car in the top five for 21 laps. On lap 22 he goes to pass Bobby Archer's Viper for second and one of the secondary cam chains comes apart destroying the motor. The Pirates DNF in 21st place and Cooper goes from second to fourth in points. That had to hurt.

Six weeks later, the World Challenge moved to Road Atlanta near Braselton Georgia, one of the fastest tracks on the circuit. The "Southern Dash Weekend" was a GT class double-header with two qualifying races on Saturday morning, a race on Saturday afternoon and a second on Sunday. Pirate Racing kicked a** that weekend. Coop qualified on the Saturday pole and second for the Sunday race. He finished second on Saturday and third on Sunday. The team's best race weekend since Topeka in '98 ended with Bill Cooper regaining second place in points.

If the Pirates were heroes in Hotlanta, they were near-zeros back in Canada a week later. At Trois-Rivieres, Quebec during practice, their only engine, which had already run four races at Atlanta, broke (what else?) its cam chain. Desperate for points and refusing to give up, the Team "modified" the engine to run on five cylinders. Posting no qualifying time, they started 16th. The engine barely ran and Cooper finished next to last. He took a points hit again, ending up back in fourth.

In an interview last winter, we asked Pirate Racing Owner, Jim Van Dorn, about the Team's engine program. He answered, "Yeah, we had troubles with the LT5. Some think it's inherently unreliable, but that's not the full story. Last year, World Challenge officials allowed Dodge and Porsche engines to be more powerful, compared to the Corvettes. We had to do a wild motor to be competitive. We had go with way high compression, wild cams and a rev limit right at the edge of the cam chains' reliability. We qualified in the top four in all but one race last year. With 2 poles and two outside poles in just the first five races, I think the LT5 is one heck of an engine. We just were asking more than the cam chains could deliver sometimes."

A footnote to the above: some observers of the '99 World Challenge believe SCCA's Technical Administrator for the series, Mitch Wright, was biased in his decisions as to power output of various engines used in competition. It has been rumored that SCCA felt the out-of-production C4 body style was a threat to win when run with an LT5. For that reason, Wright was easy on Dodge and Porsche engine configurations, but was tough on C4 Corvettes.

After Trois-Rivieres, the 75 was mothballed when the first of the team's two C5s finally debuted at Grand Rapids. The most successful ZR-1 in road racing would appear in competition one final time at Monterey, California. It was the last race of 1999 and the only time that year the Pirates fielded two cars: Bill Cooper in the C5 and Rupert Bragg-Smith in the veteran ZR-1 with a freshly overhauled engine detuned with production camshafts rather than the radical, full-race grinds run previously. Bragg-Smith, running with 520 hp rather than the usual 580, managed the 16th qualifying spot and finished 14th.

The '99 Speedvision World Challenge season ended with Cooper fifth in points. The Pirates were the best of the Corvette teams, but a Viper, a pair of Porsches and a Toyota Supra did better. More coulda-woulda-shoulda? Cooper's fifth place points finish came in-part because that tough old, #75 ZR-1 took him to a pair of seconds, a third and a fourth. Had it not been for over-stressed, stock cam chains, the outcome woulda surely been different.

Driving the Phoenix
When the oil temperature reached 150°F, I whacked the throttle a couple times.

Whummba! Whaauuummmmmbababa!

Oh, I'm gonna like this a lot, I thought. I pushed the ZF S6-40 six-speed into first, gave the motor some gas and let out the clutch.

For my test, Phoenix was still running the not-so-radical cams installed for the Monterey event. Two Mercruiser employees, Scott Skinner and Greg VanDeventer, both of whom once worked on the LT5 program and now moonlight doing racing LT5s, built this engine and the "full-out" motor that did so well at Atlanta. The stock LT5 camshafts was forced on the team by a lack of LT5 cam "blanks" on which racing cam profiles can be ground. The last of the Pirates' good cams were in the engine they broke at Trois-Rivieres.

"Only" 520hp would still be more than adequate, considering the car's weight and my lack of experience driving it. The 75's engine with stock cams was only a little more powerful than the LT5 in this magazine's "Purple Project" car which, coincidentally, was also done by Skinner and VanDeventer. That realization comforted me a bit as I entered the front straight and went up, through the gears.

"Technical" describes Rupert Bragg-Smith's 13-turn track perfectly. Typical of school-tracks, it was a bit narrow in spots because, with no regular car-to-car competition, it doesn't need width for passing. It had every kind of turn you could imagine: fast sweepers, decreasing radius, esses and tight first gear corners. At the east end of the facility is a fairly long, downhill straight that ends in a sweeping right hander followed by a slow, 90° left–done right, it's a sphincter-tightening combination, indeed.

Stopping power is something the Pirate Racing ZR-1 does not lack. Less weight than a stocker along with Brembo 4-piston calipers and 13-inch, cross-drilled rotors up front and production '96 Grand Sport front brakes on the rear means, when you stomp on the brakes; you slow down, right now.

Even with 25 more horsepower, 4.09 gears and 2800 lbs, below 4000 rpm this car didn't feel much quicker than our project ZR-1 perhaps because 1) the race motor has no secondary port throttles which reduces torque below 3500 rpm and 2) its heads are ported to beat hell. The solution? Well, duh–don't run the engine down low.

No port throttles, radical heads, headers and no catalytic converters make the power disparity between the 75 and our project car quite noticeable above 5000 rpm. Not only is there more power, but the race engine peaks near 7000 rpm where as the motor in the project car peaks at 6500. In first and second gear the 75 blows the tires away easily.

Tires proved to be the Phoenix's weakness in my brief drive. While the car's handling was pretty good considering it was set up for another track, the set of Goodrich g-Forces on the car were a little used up. That had me sliding around a bit out there.

The creature comforts in the Pirate Corvette, even for a race car, were pretty crude. No wonder it's called the "Bitch". The pedals were angled to the driver wrong, were too close together and there was no dead pedal. Fixing that stuff would make the car easier to drive, but, as JVD told us, "That kind of thing isn't high on our priority list. Also, Coop doesn't care much about creature comforts. He just wants to win."

Maybe so, but we think it's a good thing the '99 World Challenge had no endurance races.

Another race car quirk was the Lexan windshield. Lexan is great for light weight and to meet safety rules, but man, talk about waves and distortion. That coupled with the front sections of the roll cage restricting the driver's view, made vision to the sides of the track difficult. Again, this is a case where the car's regular driver would have an edge though experience, whereas I had trouble picking out apexes through the distorted Lexan. So, not only must Bill Cooper never suffer back pain or leg cramps during a race, but he turns-in by ESP because he sure as hell can't see stuff through that blurry Lexan.

With less overall weight, less weight on the front, a racing suspension configuration that uses coil springs over specially-valved Bilstein shocks and fabricated stabilizer bars, the Phoenix turns better than any ZR-1 I'd ever driven and seems adequately damped. The only time the car became a handful was in low speed turns. Then, the car seemed a bit loose. It might have been the trashed tires, but for whatever reason, she was loose. When you are aware of it, loose can be fun–not the fastest way around a race track, but always plenty of fun.

Off the 13th turn, one of the really tight ones, is where we began this story. That downhill straight is long. On it hard, I went to just before the 7500 rpm limiter in second and third gears and was WFO in fourth until I backed-off (ok–it was before Coop would have lifted), braked hard, then went into that last big sweeper. Near the end of the sweeper, I backshifted and was on the brakes again for the 90° left-hander. Through that, hard on the gas for a sec, then braking again for a sharp right that put me back on the front straight. Exiting that last turn, I had everything just right. I balanced the wheelspin and throttle so the car slid to the outside of the track then gave it wide-open-throttle, saw 7000 or so, shifted and was back on it again when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the Pirates waving me in. My half-dozen laps or so of fun was over.

I exited the track, pulled up next to the Pirate Racing trailer and let the motor idle a minute while I pulled off my Bell Mag 4 and my bubble goggles. I cut the engine as JVD undid the window net. My pulse was still racing. What a blast that last lap was! The noise of a 32-valve V8 at 7500 rpm, the acceleration, the lateral gs in turns–I was pumped. I climbed out of the car and Van Dorn handed me a cold Pepsi, looked me in the eye a second, then nodded his head and said. "Well–not bad for a magazine hack, but I don't think Cooper's going to be worrying about his job."

"Well...how 'bout me as your test driver?" I deadpanned.

We both busted-up laughing.

Continued below.