This is the place where you will find quick reports directly from my race weekends, plus a lot of other fun stuff going on, not always about racing.
Cheers! /Carl
Pic of the week
Me in the Karousel, Nordschleife 2007.
Songs to check out
1. Foo Fighters - Let it die
2. Foo Fighters - The Pretender
3. Adam Tensta - My Cool
4. Outkast - Take Off Your Cool
5. Sia - Breathe Me
Food and Drinks
1. Vino Pasta, Gothenburg, SWE
2. The Standard, Hollywood, CA
3. Barney's Beanery, Santa Monica, CA
4. Le Clafoutis, Sunset Strip, CA
5. Heaven 23, Gothenburg, SWE
Other things
Spot to be filled with useful content.
Redline Time Attack at California Speedway
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
After returning to LA after a successful job for Jaguar (more about that car later), Jennifer and I packed our stuff and moved down to Redondo Beach, definitely a place we like! The day after I went out to the Redline Time Attack event at Cali Speedway for some networking and sponsor talks. Met some nice people and I also got to know more about this type of event. It was definitely a nice enviroment for drivers and fans to see some cool cars close-up and it is also competitive enough to make it interesting for top drivers and sponsors, as well as "reachable" for the enthusiasts who want to drive their sportscars in the street car class.
Everyone doing their job - the Hankook misses representing, me chilling in the tent and miss City Tire Online greeting customers.
I am currently preparing for the Turnstyle/Drift Day Pro-Am qualifier event in Tucson Arizona, Aug 2. Will be pretty interesting to see if I have already learned enough to earn a spot in the Formula D licensing event later this year, or if I will be needing some more drift practice. Stay tuned!
Hello racerfans, after the driver's meeting this morning I started out with just warming up the tires on the GP-loop before going for a timed lap on the whole Nordschleife. All fast teams did this, since there was a 3 minute delay until the slower categories were let out.
I posted a 9.13 on the first lap, felt good!(video to show later) Two cars held me up a bit for some time, but the car is crazy fast so the time was quite good after all. The car didn't need any setup changes, the team did great setup work before the start.
On the second lap there were just too many slow cars in the way to do anything useful, same on the third although a little bit better.
After those laps, I went into the pits to hand over to Anders who had a lot of traffic. The 9.13 had put us just behind top 10 at the beginning of the session, but as the session went on we were eventually pushed down to 17th. There were a few cars that squeezed in on 9min 12s, but that we can easily beat on a free lap - or even just by getting to know the combination of tires and engine - after all this was the first lap of the whole weekend.
Within the top 20 is just what we want and we hope we can stay there until the race starts tomorrow.
Today's second practice starts at 19.30! Keep your fingers crossed! Carl
Decal work! That sort of sums it up... It is a cool livery that had to be mounted in place at the track. Luckily I have great team-mates who have helped a lot and once on the car, it looks great. A LOT of people who come by our pitbox take notice and ask questions. Will be fun to see the car out on the track tomorrow! (but even better driving it)
It wasn't all work... Borrowed a GT3 and spent half the day touristing, Jennifer and I went through the German villages and countryside to Cochem in the Mosel valley.
I don't have to mention that the car ran well on Autobahn as well, do I?
Just before the start last year, rain started POURING down. A speedboat would have done the lap faster than a car. Anyway, no matter what conditions there will be, we are prepared.
The ADAC 24 Hours of Nurburgring is something really special at night. The whole area is alive with people watching the and/or partying and with more than 200 teams racing there's always someone coming in for a pitstop. If you've never experienced racing at night before this is where you go (since you'll get full access all the way into the pits, which can be trickier at Le Mans if you're not with a team). The pitbox complex seen across the main straight. In the suites above the actual action, teams and sponsors have their parties and the VIP party in the Mercedes tribune is known to be 2nd best place to be if not actually taking part in the race. Photo: J. Christensen
This is from the passage over at the little town Adenau, the opposite part of the Nordschleife seen from the pits. Just where this safety car is passing by in the picture, we drivers get to relax for a second after a challenging downhill section. As you can see, they didn't care too much about run-off areas.
Just to the right out of the pic, there is a right-hander steep uphill (Exmuhle) and cars go into 2nd or 3rd to start accelerate hard all the way up to 5th before the Bergwerk-turn (another 3rd gear right-hander). One week until the race starts.
I'd like to post a note to welcome Kemostal Process Technology as my new feature sponsor! After no less than five(!) very successful years together with Champion, Kemostal has moved in to take their place. I can't relly explain in a brief manner how thankful I am to have had the support of Champion and how happy I am to have delivered some really good races and nice headlines while representing Champion. It has simply been a huge thing for me and my career.Champion was a Nurburgring sponsor 2006-2007. Photo: N. Huss
Now looking forward, I am really stoked over my business relation with Kemostal Process Technology, which has grown mature over the last couple of years. Kemostal is an industrial process design engineering company serving a global market, which suits very well with my international racing ventures.
Next weekend you will get to see first hand how this new busines partnership will show on the promotional side (car design etc).
I am also happy to introduce Endless USA as a new business supporter to my racing venues. Endless carries really serious brake hardware, brake pads and suspension kits. Check them out at Endless USA. More about Endless and their products during the summer.
With one week to go until the 2008 24 Hours of Nurburgring starts: This picture is from the 24 Hours of Nurburgring last year. This is an evening shot, the car in perfect pre-race condition. At this point of the race weekend, it is an incredible atmosphere around the whole paddock, all teams are charged and ready to go. Photo: N. Huss
Other than a nice enginge swap for this year's race, the car has a new rear wing to cohere with some new regulations, it has wider tires and the car has been painted to carry a completely new livery, to be revealed just before the race.
Stop by tomorrow for the next "inside" pic (there will be a new one posted every day up until the race).
Time IS really flying sometimes. Went to Irvine a week ago to drive for a some cool Acura photo shots, then spent much of the week doing prep for the 24 hours of Nurburgring as well as various errands like stopping by Brian, John and Auto at CityTireOnline, coolest tire shop in LA, to get for drift tires for the weekend, as well as rolling down to Santa Monica to pick up a set of 18" tires courtesy of German Auto Art.
On Saturday I got new adjustable Hotchkis swaybars on my 350Z "stock drifter" w the help of RMJ Motorsports, to prepare for drift practice Sunday (yesterday) at the Horse Thief Mile, Willow Springs, hosted by 626 drift.
HTM is a really crazy (fun) experience to drift on, I am bascially going through a "crash course" in drifting and it's really rewarding to find that my car seems to be up to the task most of the time, so I can drift like I want to. The HTM might be on the border of what this car can do without some more expensive mods, but we'll see... I really look forward to the 2nd round of Federal Top Drift Cup in three weeks.
I will be doing my 3rd consecutive ADAC-Zurich 24 Hours of Nurburgring Nordschleife driving a Porsche 996 GT3 RS with a Porsche Motorsport 3,9 litre engine, normally aspirated producing 520hp. This is the engine spec that two of the podium teams ran last year (Manthey Racing and Land Motorsport). The engine will give some extra push up the hills compared to last year's 454hp. I know the 77 bends and blind crests like my own pocket, can't wait to get back there.
This year's race will be held on May 24-25. The average number of spectators last three years are over 200.000, it's always a wild party going all around the track, all weekend, starting already the Wednesday before the race. It's like nothing else. Will you be there?
Had some productive meetings during this quick-trip to Sweden, got some very good racing news to be presented soon. My sponsors Kemostal Process Technology, Ackert (decals) and Billes (print work) are all inspired about upcoming challenges, more to follow I hope, spring is always a time packed with meetings and announcements.
The season feels very far off though in Sweden, right now I see a lot of snow outside the window, but on Sunday I'll be back again in sunny California where the motorsport season started a long time ago - on my end with the 2008 Federal Top Drift competition which went really good. Soon time for 2nd round, I hope to be able to repeat the achievement from first round. To share some inspiration, here's a photo of me drifting captured by a guy who really knows how to shoot great motorsports photos - Paul Lopez! Drifting my stock Nissan 350Z at the Federal Top Drift Battle, round 1. Photo: Paul Lopez
Happy Easter to you, take it easy on the eggs. /Carl
On Wednesday I was at Willow Springs with Markus Herm to assist with getting his German Auto Art Porsche 928 GTS Racing "Christine" up to speed. Using a GTech Pro data logger helps your case since you get accurate readings of both londitudinal and lateral G-forces plus rpms by just mounting the unit and connecting it so the car's 12-volt electrical system, without any additional sensors in the car. Reading this type of data lets you see almost as good as with a fullblown data logging system how the car and the driver is performing, and you can mount it in any car and have it up and running within just a few minutes. It also costs only $299. A really cool tool. Anyway, with this scientific approach it quickly became evident that some improvments had to be done to increase the overall grip levels. Also, studying the data and driving the car gave a very detailed picture of the car's more specific behaviour at different speeds and sections of the track, going into, through and exiting turns as well as changes at low, medium and high speed braking, turning and acceleration.
All in all a good day and next time out it will be very interesting to see the results of the ordinated improvements!
This is a video from about a year ago when I first tested the Porsche 997 GT3 Cup, a really nice development of the 911, especially regarding the chassis, handling and balance. Cheers!
DC Performance Inc, Los Angeles, a place where the ground rumbles. For real. When one of those race Vipers are tied with chains to the dyno and goes flat out, the engine sound is absolutely, totally awesome - walls are shaking!
Nice shop, specializing on race Vipers and street Vipers.
Talked to the director of motorsports whom I met already in Long Beach in April through a Swedish aquintance and it seems like the Viper scene has some fun options regarding motorsport activities. I´m working on putting pieces in the puzzle together regarding business and possibly racing in the US, let´s see where it all ends up. Not too sure about how the first part of 2008 is going to look like, but there are solid outlines for a plan - with details slowly getting there.
This film clip is from my first meet with the Viper Racing Coupe, this one just rebuilt for a driver with German heritage. Unfortunately timing was a little off to be able to help sort the car out that weekend since I was going back to Sweden again, but at least we know what´s doable for future meetings.
Check out the hot lines of a Viper racing coupe. Everybody´s saying Vipers are small inside, wasn´t a problem for me though and I´m 6'2". The HANS-device is always a hazzle to wear though when getting in and out of a racecar.
Want to end this with a thanks to Kim for a productive meeting in the middle of busy times for both of us; DC Performance getting ready for shake-down at Willow Springs and me heading for another very interesting meeting... (to be continued)
Two weeks ago I visited The Racer's Group in Petaluma, CA (just north of San Francisco). Anyone who knows anything about GT/sportscar racing are familiar with this Porsche racing team who has collected several prestigious trophies over the year from various GT races as well as the 24 hour races of Daytona and Le Mans.
Neat display of trophies, pictures and posters all over reception area - this is a little part of it.
In the shop, talking to sales manager Larry about... racing Porsches.
The Racer's Group is founded and owned by Kevin Buckler who also owns the Adobe Road Winery, nice mix of businesses! Petaluma, Sonoma, Napa - more or less the whole surrounding area is the heart of California wine country, and the Bucklers keep their wine tasting room right in the workshop, making a visit even more worthwhile for sponsors and such.
So without going into too much detail, it was a productive visit, thoroughly interesting and also very enjoyable!
Ulf had an incident during the night when he had to avoid two cars that crashed in front of him, but the team quckliy towed the car to the pits and replaced radiators and the front bumper. Martin went out and we started to pick up positions again but suddenly the engine just gave up after 4-5 laps into Martins stint. We have downloaded all data from the data logger at every pitstop to keep check on oil pressure, temperature, revs and so on, and there was no sign of anything alarming, the engine just blew.
Really disappointing since we were running extremely well, up in the top 10 already.
Now we´re just trying to get over this and look forward to upcoming races. I´ll get back to you with more pictures and reports in a while.
Just when the grid was about to roll away for the formation lap, a great thunderstorm arrived over the track and the rain started POURING down. The start was delayed since many teams didn´t have a chance to get rain tyres on their cars. We are cool since we got a direct link to the weather gods ;) and get frequent very exact reports.
Good to have live TV to look at in the box. Heavy rain out on the track...
The front of the grid, Martin is sitting in our car to do the first stint. Rain is not a problem for us, we are confident about the car setup and we are used to rain racing in Sweden.
Don´t know when I have the time to update this blog next time, so to follow the race, go to www.24h-rennen.de for live results and web-TV.
After this day's efforts we´ve finally found the right setup on the car to get a fast qualifying time. We had a thorough discussion with our race engineer Fredrik after the morning session and made some changes to the car, which resulted in appr another 15 seconds on this 25km challenging track.
We found a lot of time and the car felt really good on the track, it was just a blast to drive it now, like a dream. With 9.23 we´re among the all important top twenty.
We ended up as 18th (out of 220+ cars) which means we´ll get a flashing blue light to mount facing forward in the windscreen (the 20 fastest cars get these blue lights to signal to slower cars that we are front runners).
Race starts at 3 pm so I´ll post some impressions during the day. For the top twenty there´ll be an extra drivers meeting tomorrow at 10 am
Impressions from the pits tonight, awesome atmosphere.
Peter is in the car at the moment, practice just started. Weather has been cooling of a bit but hopefully there won´t be rain tonight. We hope that our setup changes will provide what we want from the car, to be able to keep full throttle a greater percentage than this forenoon.
Uffe in the team motorhome, ready to try out the Nürburgring in the dark as well later tonight
You can tell we´re getting closer to the race as more and more PR people and sponsors are beginning to show up and there are more and more activities going on around the track.
The team just had a nice barbeque that team owner Anders cooked and some guests to the team are arriving too, among others my former MV Racing team-mate Håkan Hall which was fun. We have done many races together from 2004-2006.
Ok, I´ll make a quick report tonight when the second practice session has ended.
So we are finally underway with the driving. We also still have our one car in one piece which is really not the situation for everyone - no less than 30 cars were involved in some sort of incident during this first two hour long practice! They either spun out, had mechanical failures or collided. Just insane...
Anyway, our run began with me going out to check the chassis balance on the GP track and then check that the suspension, bump stops, dampers, ride height and aerodynamics were correctly tuned for the Nordschleife part.
Ready to rock. I was really happy with my new earplugs from Bellman & Symphon, great clear sound over the CB-radio and they damp out the noise inside the car to a perfect level.
Overall, the balance was perfect on the GP track, which means it´s a little bit to oversteered for the Nordschleife, you couldn´t really go flat out on the fastest and most bumpy parts since the car was just a little too looose. This got worse when the tyres started to wear out, so the team is fixing some small things at this moment; we have some margins to work on the rear ride-height and sway-bars are easily adjusted.
Speed in the car was good otherwise, gearing is good, engine is really strong and the brakes are awesome. On my 2nd lap when I had checked the car was decent also on the Nordschleife I got a good start on my flying lap, passing among other Uwe Alzens brutal Porsche Cayman RS on the GP circuit. Unfortunately on this lap there were some cars that had suffered serious crashes on two different places, causing yellow flags and marshals were out on the track to tow the wrecks so we were like a queue of cars that had to go really really slow for some hundred meters and it just ruined any chance of a decent lap time.
When Ulf went out it only took half a lap before two cars collided and went into the barriers just in front of him, when they were all diving down Fuchsröhre at 200 km/h - he just slammed the brakes and luckily went through without a scratch..! Like expected he did a really solid job. Peter ran well as usual, no drama and good pace but he also had comments about oversteer. Martin was fast as usual, suffered traffic and yellows too and had even more problems with oversteer when rear tyres were really getting too hot. At the end he at least got a 9.46 putting us on 27th out of well over 220 cars.
A lot of cars in the pits, tonight we´ll try to be among the first 20 cars out on the track.
The teams with the best laptimes were the ones who could exit the pits first since they got clean runs in the first couple of laps, before all the incidents started occuring, so tonight we´ll try to do the same thing and get our car out into the pitlane as early as possible. Also at a late stage in tonight's session there might be less cars and incidents on the track that may give an opportunity to get a clean run, the car is a lot faster than it shows at this moment.
Everything in order, dinner with the team coming up. Driver's meeting tomorrow at 08.45 am, then first timed practice. Rules say every driver has to complete two full laps to be allowed to start in the race. There are some forecasts saying there´ll be rain for the second timed practice tomorrow night, so it´s important to get some decently fast laps already in the forenoon (if it´s dry then no one will be able to top that if it rains during the second practice).
I´ll be starting out tomorrow to first check that we have a good balance in the chassis and then I check that the car handles well on the bumpy Nordschleife part of the track too. After that the other drivers will do their laps and hopefully at the end of the session Martin will get an opportunity to put in a good lap with an almost empty fuel tank.
Incredibly warm weather today so we´re drinking A LOT of water. If it gets this hot during the race it´ll very much be a question of having a driver line-up that can race without making mistakes in the heat since it will be truly exhausting at the end of every 100-110 minute stint. The night will then be a blessing when it cools down.
The atmosphere is great as usual! A lot of parties going on around the track and all teams are cheerful and eager to get out on the track.
Rasmus has promised to put the wheels back on the car before I go out on the track tomorrow.
Today has been a day for various preparatory work, such as registration, weighing in of the drivers and last details on the car livery. I was happy to see that the last 1,5 month of extra excercise put my weight back to raceweight (I haven´t checked at home).
Marcus, team coordinator, takes care of our paperwork. Martin (one of the drivers) to the left is in a great mood and together we all feel very well synchronized and confident about how to do our race. To the right my new helmet - about the same paint as before with just some modernisation.
I´ve never been in better shape regarding my speed than I am today. I believe experience, life-style and the correct mindset are three great enablers for performing at your best and being honest; the winter of 2005/2006 I totally sucked looking at my own usual standards, due to very busy times on a personal level. I could still hold up and perform ok due to experience and the fact that I´m fortunate enough to have a high lowest level, but I wasn´t at all the usual me.
I obviously recovered and learned a lot, so only getting much stronger after that winter improved my racing capabilities and I´m easily topping where I was before - I have never been faster. One little example was jumping right into a few races at the Open Winter Series at the Majorna Gokart indoor circuit and claiming the win at my second appearance and posting laptimes easily beating all competitors from real life racing who I used to be very evenly matched with before. I think this is when people say you´ve reached a whole new level!
Here´s the complete laptime list of the fastest guys at the track. http://www.gokarting.nu/Laptimes.aspx
Added to this, an extreme amount of in-car time these last 6 months at my everyday job, at Volvos chassis testing department, stunt driving and precision driving obviously has paid off really well - especially when it comes to driving in slippery/wet conditions which I really like. How? Oh, you´ll see in due time... ;)
/Carl
On top among a bunch of regulars at Go Karting Majorna, most of them true gocart aces. Don´t even ask why I look so happy (NOT!!) in the pic - maybe still focused after the race..!!
The Nürburgring Nordschleife isn´t a racetrack you learn in one day. It´s a 25 km (!!) long winding road course with 77 turns, many of them blind and very fast - average speed over a fast lap was 160km/h (100 mph) last year and with the new car I´ll go even faster. Studying films and practicing on a racing simulator helps keeping ones memory fresh.
This is a video from the 2006 Miles Per Hour sports car show where I was representing Porsche Motorsport with the 997 GT3 Cup, answering questions about racing Porsches and making promotion for Carrera Cup Scandinavia.
Name: Carl Rydquist Age: 31 Home: Redondo Beach Web:CarlRydquist.com Reel:Click to watch Highlights: Winner of Swedish Endurance GT Racing Championship (2001 & 2004). Winner of Zandvoort 500 (2005). Winner of Eurosport Super Racing Weekend Challenge (2001). 24 Hours of Nurburgring (2006, 2007, 2008). Memberships: FIA (international racing license), Performance Two Stunt & Precision Driving Team, Hollywood, CA (professional driver).
