How to win: Four Year Honda Challenge Domination Part 2
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Part 2
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But, just like a lot of things on social media that aren’t aligned with reality, spraying champagne amongst beautiful trophy girls isn’t the actuality of racing; it is merely a few seconds of flying alcohol and then it’s over. The rough truth about racing is it’s hard work, sacrifice, business, dedication, wrench time, risk, and tough lessons learned.

Here are some of the “behind the scenes” of what it takes to win and keep our streak going for four years. It has absolutely nothing to do with knowing how to pop the cork on a champagne bottle. Nobody on this team races for a living or works on cars for a living. Everyone at DNN Motorsports has a real non-automotive-related job, and nobody is paid. The team just enjoys hanging out together, partying, and figuring out how to kick anyone else’s ass who shows up in our class. Here is how we do it.
Car Preparation
You can’t win a championship if your car doesn’t finish the race. Our team critically goes over every single nut and bolt on our cars before every event. They are continually sterile-clean, so we don’t miss anything. We use an Excel spreadsheet to track the life of every part. How long has the right front axle been in the car since Insane Shafts rebuilt it? We know the answer to that question.

Lesson One: Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. When you are racing at the top level, you have to bring the right gear, which means your car has to “want for nothing.” We continually have lists of improvements we would like to do to our Integras. Budget, time, and testing determines whether or not we improve on a car during a regional season.

Before we go to the Nationals, we want our car to have everything it needs, no matter how small the detail. This year we swapped out our lug nuts for Skunk2 Racing units to save a few ounces of rotational mass. We also began to replace steel bolts with titanium hardware under the hood (at great expense) to move more of the car’s required minimum weight (2,500 pounds) to the back of the vehicle for better balance.

To ensure we had our cars precisely at minimum weight for qualifying, we started weighing fuel and adding small 2.5-pound weights of ballast. When someone on our team realized NASA rules indicate that ballast has to be a minimum of 5 pounds, we searched the internet until we found 5-pound, 7.5-pound, and 10-pound weights that we could quickly swap back and forth to get a 2.5-pound adjustment and still be NASA legal.

Was it worth it? One of our cars hit the scales after the race at 2,502 pounds. You could argue that all of our playing around with weight probably added up to a bowel movement after a trip to McDonald’s. However, what we did with weight is an example of the level of detail we take to car preparation in combination with the intricate understanding of NASA rules. This is something we learned back in our autocross days racing in the Stock class — when you had to do the most you could with limited modifications.
We used Smart Camber to check our alignment before and after each session to ensure the car was perfect for every warm-up, qualifying, and race.

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We did not take a “set it and forget it” mindset. We continually tried to improve the cars during the entire championship weekend. After we set the fastest lap of the weekend and captured the pole position, we immediately put the car up on four jack stands and checked every bolt.

We even checked the alignment with Smart Strings and Smart Camber before and after every session to ensure nothing on the car changed. We used pyrometers and digital tire gauges to make sure our tires were working at optimal levels. At the Nationals, nothing is left to chance when it comes to the car. We triple checked everything because our motto at the event was “Refuse to lose.”

Summary of car preparation: Make sure the car is perfect, and then make sure again.
Driver PreparationNot only does the car need to be in perfect shape, so does the driver, both mentally and physically. For the mental game, I spent the time and resources to fly to Ohio a few weeks before the Nationals to attend The School at Mid-Ohio, which gave me inside knowledge of the track. Being a team from California, we had never been around Mid-Ohio, and the National Championships is not the weekend to “learn” a new track.

The instructors at the school gave me the confidence I needed, but I didn’t stop there. I went back to California and logged time on my partner’s VR driving simulator and ran Mid-Ohio on iRacing over and over again until I could draw the track to scale on a piece of paper with my eyes closed. When I wasn’t doing that, I continually played with a drag racing Christmas tree app on my phone to hone my reaction times for the standing starts in Honda Challenge.
Taking a professional driving course at the track and logging hours on a driving simulator ensured when our team showed up at Mid-Ohio, we were ready to hit the course with confidence.

Physical fitness was something I have shamefully ignored for many seasons of racing. I started listening to podcasts of professional racing drivers and began friending some of them on social media. I wondered what they were doing that I wasn’t.

One driver I have always looked up to was Johannes van Overbeek because he and I are the same age, are both from a similar part of California, and he has been to the real 24 Hours of LeMans (where I have only been to the 24 Hours of LeMons). He has won the 24 Hours of Daytona overall and is respected as being super-fast and calculating behind the wheel. What I noticed was every Instagram photo of this guy is him eating kale or riding his bicycle over 100 miles. Meanwhile, I was sucking down Big Macs and driving a beat-up truck to Pick and Pull to find more cheap Integra parts.

I decided I needed to prioritize my physical wellness and joined Orange Theory Fitness. I crushed the 5 a.m. workouts five days a week for eight months straight heading to the Nationals in 2019. I’ve won races as a fat dude, and I’ve won races when I was in shape — it was easier when I was fit. I found myself making less small mistakes (like missed shifts) late in races.

Summary of Driver Preparation: Get your fat ass in a gym, and don’t wait until two weeks before the race to do it. Ain’t gonna work.

Data Doesn’t Lie

During all four seasons of our Honda Challenge streak, I’ve had Stephen Young as my engineer/crew chief/spotter/drinking partner, and overall conscious. He pours over video and Racepak data and tells me when I am being a wuss — and I listen.

Racecar drivers are liars — period. If you ask one if they put a wheel off on the exit of Turn 1, they will tell you they didn’t. When you are pulling gravel out of the tire bead, they will still deny going off track. Video and telemetry take away this driver “I didn’t do it” bologna.