Drivers' schools are incredibly fun and the best way to improve your driving prowess. Track days can be incredibly useful for honing your skill once you have been on track enough to catch your own mistakes. While incredibly useful tools for learning to drive fast, neither can touch the 24 Hours of LeMons for having fun with motorsports. I have previously written about the basics of getting to a LeMons race, and what happened at our first race. The team just finished another race, the 2010 Arse-Freeze-Apalooza at Buttonwillow this past weekend, where we finished 68th of 173. Better than half made us happy, because the head gasket blew with an hour and a half left in the race.

Track driving is certainly a specialized skill and racing is a step beyond that--in addition to driving a car at the limit, you have to deal with numerous other cars on track who may decide to pass you at any time. In crapcan racing things are even crazier because most folks don't care much if the car gets hit and many of them have little to no experience driving on a racetrack, much less in anger.

Track Experience

The biggest piece of advice I can give is to get some track experience before heading out on track in your first LeMons race. Street driving, or even autocross shares very little with driving on a racetrack, and there is no adequate preparation aside from sufficient time on a track. Even if you have done a lemons race, going to a much less crowded HPDE or other track even twill be very information--rare are the times you get to take an unmolested line, much less lap, at a race.

Many Races

The first time you go to a 24 Hours of LeMons event, you'll find at least three different types of race teams: those who built something that doesn't belong on a racetrack; the teams there to win; and the teams that are just there to have fun in any way possible. Don't get me wrong, everyone is there to have fun, but the former two have very specific goals in mind. The folks who bring a Fiat 600 or a limousine aren't interested in winning the race outright--they're looking for the Index of Effluency, or simply testing their own mechanical mettle.

By the same token, some teams come with the intent to win the speed race--they have a reliable, quick car, know how to do fast pit stops, and don't intend to spend time in the penalty box. If it's not obvious who these teams are, check the time sheets after a couple hours of racing; they are the ones on the lead lap or just behind. Figure out which cars belong in this group, do your best to stay out of their way, and certainly don't hit them.

Caution Wave

If you've done other racing or track days, one of the first things you'll notice about crapcan racing is the number of yellow flags thrown. When you have hundreds of $500 cars on a racetrack with inexperienced drivers, problems happen often. At the Arse-Freeze-Apalooza, Jay said that the recovery crew did 75 tows on Saturday alone. Oftentimes, cautions will be thrown well ahead of what you can see if you're closely following a pack of cars. For this reason, you'll see folks who have been racing a while throw up their hand by the rear-view mirror and wave when they see a yellow flag. This way, everyone behind knows that they are going to slow for caution, and you should too.

Photos by Marshall Pierce.

Since I have access to a Closed Course and a Professional Driver, I recently did a study of my M3's gas mileage at different speeds. Since all cars are geared differently and exhibit vastly different aerodynamics, this won't hold much water (gas?) for any other vehicle.

I have long used an SSH tunnel (put simply: ssh -D 8000 server + FoxyProxy) to browse the web securely from unencrypted wireless access points and other potentially hostile networks. While this is secure, it isn't all that convenient and has inherent problems. What I really want is a proper VPN, that will seamlessly encapsulate all traffic from my local machine and pass it through the tunnel to be emitted by the server. OpenVPN is one of those things that has a reputation for being difficult to setup,so I long avoided it. Once I decided to actually make with the go, it turned out to not be terribly difficult, though I did have to do a bit of searching to get exactly what I wanted.

There are a number of good tutorials for setting up OpenVPN, and the following instructions will mostly mirror those. First, install the requisite packages:

caligula:~$ sudo aptitude install openvpn

Then, setup a place to generate the requisite keys:

    caligula:~$ mkdir tmp/vpn && cd vpn
    caligula:~/tmp/vpn$ cp -r /usr/share/doc/openvpn/examples/easy-rsa/2.0/* .

At this point, many tutorials (the above mentioned ones included) say that you should run ./init-config, which doesn't exist in recent version OpenVPN. With the scripts for generating keys in place, open up vars and edit the stuff at the bottom, which should be pretty straightforward:

    export KEY_COUNTRY="US"
    export KEY_PROVINCE="NY"
    export KEY_CITY="Rochester"
    export KEY_ORG="Dinomite-Net"
    export KEY_EMAIL="drew@dinomite.net"

The vars file just sets up a bunch of environment variables, so you'll want to source it and then build the certificate authority:

    caligula:~/tmp/vpn$ source vars
    caligula:~/tmp/vpn$ ./clean-all
    caligula:~/tmp/vpn$ ./build-ca

Building the certificate authority involves a few questions, for most of which the defaults defined from vars are all you need. Next, build the keys for the server and client (I name my computers after Roman emperors):

    caligula:~/tmp/vpn$ ./build-key-server caligula
    caligula:~/tmp/vpn$ ./build-key vespasian
    caligula:~/tmp/vpn$ ./build-dh

With all that done, you can copy the appropriate key files over to the client, in my case vespasian. Since I already had tunnelblick on that machine, I put the files directly where they needed to go:

caligula:~/tmp/vpn$ cd keys
caligula:~/tmp/vpn/keys$ scp vespasian.crt vespasian.key \
    ca.crt vespasian:~/Library/Application Support/Tunnelblick/Configurations/

Two steps left. First, make the client configuration file. For tunnelblick, this goes in the same directory as above, and you can name it whatever you want:

    vespasian:~$ cat Library/Application Support/Tunnelblick/Configurations/client.conf
    client
    dev tun
    proto udp
    remote caligula.dinomite.net 1194
    resolv-retry infinite
    nobind
    persist-key
    persist-tun
    ca ca.crt
    cert vespasian.crt
    key vespasian.key
    comp-lzo
    verb 3

There are plenty of other sites that will explain what all of those options mean, so I won't go over it here. The important things to change from above are the remote and the names for the cert and key. Now on to the server config and the files that it needs:

    caligula:~/tmp/vpn/keys$ cp dh1024.pem caligula.key caligula.crt /etc/openvpn/
    caligula:~/tmp/vpn/keys$ cat /etc/openvpn/server.conf
    server 10.7.7.0 255.255.255.0
    push "redirect-gateway"

    dev tun0
    proto udp
    keepalive 10 120
    comp-lzo
    dh /etc/openvpn/dh1024.pem
    ca /etc/openvpn/ca.crt
    cert /etc/openvpn/caligula.dinomite.net.crt
    key /etc/openvpn/caligula.dinomite.net.key

    status /var/log/openvpn-status.log
    verb 3

The secret sauce in that config is push "redirect-gateway" which is what tells the client to route all of its traffic through the tunnel to the server. To make this work, the server needs to be set up to do NAT:

    caligula:~/tmp/vpn/keys$ echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
    caligula:~/tmp/vpn/keys$ iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 10.7.7.0/24 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

That's all there is to it! Just restart the server (sudo /etc/init.d/openvpn restart), connect, and all your traffic is now safely encrypted to the server.