Carolina by the Numbers: WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM DATA & 265 Laps at CMP
We admit we are a little behind on publishing our data, but like everything else at Black Flag Racing, we like to think good things come to those who wait. Besides it can’t be Zephyr Prime all the time can it? Spreadsheets don’t judge you immediately, which makes them emotionally safer than lap charts. Our data is available for everyone to see and judge accordingly. The raw timing data is available on SpeedHive, here. If you want the pit notes, reach out about working with the team and show up to the next race.
Without further ado, here is what 265 laps, two drivers, eleven pit stops, a hard-working pit crew, and an overworked set of front brakes actually looked like — and, more usefully, where we plan to save time in the next race.
Bottom line, up front
Car #86 took the flag 33rd overall and 11th in Class C — 265 laps over two days, two drivers, eleven pit stops, and a front-brake package that gave everything it had, and then a little extra it didn't.
The whole report in three sentences: both drivers were genuinely quick, and between them they kept a heavy front-driver pointed the right way through a soaking restart and a fast, grippy afternoon. Almost every second we left on the table was mechanical or procedural rather than a driving problem — unplanned stops, a refueling procedures that need a lot of work, and one fifty-minute brake change that ran long for the least glamorous reason in racing: we didn’t have the spare pads and had to go find them. The biggest gains in the next race aren't in the seat — they're in the spares box, the brake package, and a vented fuel jug, which together are the cheapest and most boring lap time we will ever buy.
Finish
P33 overall
Class C
P11
Laps
265
Race time
13:29:01
Best lap
2:10.451
Top speed
62.9 mph
The course, and the sky
Carolina Motorsports Park is the only purpose-built road course in the Carolinas — 2.279 miles and fourteen turns laid over a former WWII airfield, with about a hundred feet of elevation to keep the car honest. It runs clockwise off a 1,650-foot front straight that funnels straight into a 90-degree left at Turn 1, then works through a technical back half and the tight 12-13-14 complex that caps the lap. Fourteen corners a lap, most of them asking the very best of the brakes for a heavy front-wheel-driver, and that's most of the plot right there.
The sky did most of the directing. Saturday opened cool and green — a low-grip surface that gave time back lap by lap as it warmed and rubbered in, our quickest Saturday laps arriving late in the afternoon. Overnight rain left Sunday's 9 a.m. restart genuinely wet; the track stayed damp through mid-morning, dried through noon, and turned fast and grippy for the afternoon — which is exactly where the weekend's best lap times live. Kershaw in late April runs cool mornings into low-80s afternoons and is known for changing its mind quickly. The weekend of the race, it did both, and the car's pace simply followed the road.
01The shape of the race
Every green lap, both drivers, both days (pit laps removed so the axis stays honest.)
Read left to right, the trace is a mood ring for grip. Saturday holds a steady conversation in the low 2:30s and quietly improves as the surface comes in. Sunday opens in standing water and the lap times ease into the 2:40s while the tires look for the road — then the track dries, rubbers in, and the whole field, us included, drops a full tier into the 2:10s. Same car, same drivers, fifteen to eighteen seconds a lap. Weather, it turns out, is the quickest thing at any race track. Its important to note that we were running all-weather Bridgestone tires.
Temperature & track state
02The two seats
We've withheld names. Read the columns instead.
| Metric | Driver A | Driver B |
|---|---|---|
| Fastest lap | 2:13.957 | 2:10.451 |
| Best 5-lap average | 2:16.203 | 2:11.753 |
| Day 1 clean average | 2:31.9 | 2:26.2 |
| Day 2 clean average* | 2:20.2 | 2:22.9 |
| Consistency (lap-time CoV) | 5.2% | 9.2% |
| Green laps turned | 102 ~233 mi | 144 ~328 mi |
| Net avg — incl. flags & unplanned† | 2:36.6 | 2:59.9 |
Two complementary drivers, and the split is clear: one brings speed, the other brings a metronome. Driver B holds the outright pace — the weekend's fastest lap, the best five-lap run, and every one of the ten quickest laps of the meeting — and additionally carried the larger share of the wheel time, including the wet Sunday restart and most of the dry afternoon: 144 green laps to Driver A's 102, roughly a 60/40 split. Driver A is the steadier on paper — a 5.2% lap-to-lap spread against 9.2% — but most of that gap is explained by the track, not the hands. B drove the widest band of conditions of the weekend, from a soaking restart to the dry charge, and lap times that span wet-to-dry scatter far more than times from a single dry stint ever will; held to like-for-like dry running, the two sit much closer than the full-weekend spread suggests. On a long enduro this is an ideal pairing: a quick driver who'll shoulder the load and the worst of the weather, and a metronome to bring it home.
But raw pace for the drivers isn't representative of the whole bill — and reading the rest of it correctly is the most useful thing on this page. Fold in the time lost to black flags and unplanned stops (accounted for against whichever stint they happened to follow) and the order inverts: a net of 2:36.6 a lap on one side, 2:59.9 on the other. Before reading anything into that, notice what it mostly measures: Driver B drove forty per cent more laps than Driver A and took both the wet restart and the dry charge, so the stops that came due on track came due on B's watch — the busiest seat inherits the most pit lane, more or less by arithmetic. And here's the part to hold onto: almost none of that swing is a driving number. Sunday's unplanned stops — an ATF top-up in the wet, a refuel, a radio dropout, and above all the 50-minute brake change — landed on Driver B's stints because that's when they came due, not because of who was in the seat. Of the roughly 35 seconds a lap between B's net and B's green pace, 21 of them are that one unscheduled brake stop — and the pit log says exactly why it ran fifty minutes: the replacement pads weren't on hand. That's a spares problem and a setup ceiling, not a driving error, and it would have attached to whoever was driving the car when the brakes gave up.
None of which demotes the speed — if anything these issues are the most encouraging read on the page. It says our biggest gains are mechanical and procedural. We can set the pace, now we just need to give the car a brake package that can carry its own pace, stock the spares to absorb the consequences when we lean on them, and keep the flags off the board, and the unplanned time penalties simply stop appearing, and that's the headline — a quick, genuinely complementary pairing, and a team whose next job is to continue to build a car and a pit operation worthy of the pace the team can run.
*Both drivers ran in the changing Sunday conditions. Driver B absorbed the wet restart and the slow penalty laps as well as the quickest dry running, so a single Day 2 average understates B's dry pace; Driver A's Day 2 laps were almost all on the dry, rubbered track. The conditions split below is the cleaner read.
*Net avg folds each black-flag and unplanned stop into the green-lap pace of the stint it followed, divided by that stint's green laps, using full stop durations. By stint: the contact flag (16:09) fell on Driver A's stint; the unplanned ATF top-up (7:04), the off-sequence fuel splash (13:47), the comms stop (5:04), the passing-under-yellow slow lap (8:23) and above all the 50-minute brake change (50:28) all fell on Driver B's. The blended-line penalty was served at a driver swap and is treated as a handover cost, not charged to either seat. Almost all of the added time is recoverable team time — half of it the single brake stop, which ran long only because the spare pads weren't on hand.
03Weather was the fastest driver
The same machine, sorted three ways.
| Window | Avg lap | Best | Laps |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day 1 — cool, mixed | 2:28.8 | 2:11.9 | 132 |
| Day 2 AM — damp / drying | 2:31.0 | 2:15.5 | 38 |
| Day 2 PM — dry, rubbered | 2:17.3 | 2:10.5 | 76 |
The cleanest evidence of weather impact is the one driver who ran both ends of it: Driver B turned about 2:50 a lap in the genuinely wet Sunday restart and 2:15 once the same asphalt dried — a thirty-five-second swing with nothing changed but grip. This is also the most useful sentence on the page for this fall: the next cold one is Summit Point, and our own data says the first damp, cold-tire stint costs us a full pace tier. We'll plan the opening hour around the slower start, rather than discovering it again live.
04The stint ledger
Every stint, its true pace, and what it cost once the pit stop is folded in.
| # | Drv | Day | Laps | Best | Avg lap | Avg incl. pit | What followed | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A | Sat | 23 | 2:20.3 | 2:32.3 | 3:13.2 | driver swap | |
| 2 | B | Sat | 27 | 2:19.5 | 2:29.0 | 2:58.7 | driver swap | |
| 3 | A | Sat | 28 | 2:23.4 | 2:33.6 | 2:59.5 | driver swap | |
| 4 | B | Sat | 26 | 2:22.7 | 2:28.9 | 3:01.9 | driver swap | |
| 5 | A | Sat | 11 | 2:23.2 | 2:30.9 | 3:41.8 | driver swap | |
| 6 | B | Sat | 4 | 2:16.6 | 2:26.9 | 4:34.6 | refuel | |
| 7 | B | Sat | 17 | 2:11.9 | 2:20.6 | 2:20.6 | Saturday ends | |
| 8 | B | Sun | 8 | 2:32.0 | 2:52.4 | 3:45.4 | unplanned · ATF | |
| 9 | B | Sun | 18 | 2:19.4 | 2:29.4 | 3:26.8 | swap + BF1 | |
| 10 | A | Sun | 12 | 2:15.5 | 2:19.3 | 2:19.3 | planned 1-hr break | |
| 11 | B | Sun | 29 | 2:10.5 | 2:15.5 | 2:44.0 | unplanned · fuel | |
| 12 | B | Sun | 7 | 2:10.7 | 2:15.9 | 2:59.3 | unplanned · comms | |
| 13 | B | Sun | 11 | 2:10.8 | 2:47.5 | 7:22.7 | unplanned · brake repair | |
| 14 | A | Sun | 4 | 2:19.5 | 2:21.6 | 6:23.8 | BF3 — contact #70 | |
| 15 | A | Sun | 26 | 2:14.0 | 2:20.5 | 2:20.5 | to the flag |
setup-limited dry stints · Avg incl. pit = the stint's green pace with the following stop shared across its laps — the true cost-per-lap of how that stint ended. Stints 7, 10, and 15 carry no charged stop — Saturday's overnight, the planned one-hour break, and the checkered.
This is where the gap between our pace and our package shows up in black and white. The dry afternoon was genuinely quick — stints 11 through 13 are the three fastest of the weekend, every clean lap in the 2:10s — run right at the edge of what the brakes and the fuel load could take. The 29-lap charge of stint 11 drew the tank down and brought on an off-sequence fuel stop; the dry charge wore the front pads down, and after stint 13 — still showing a 2:10.8 best — they were done, bringing on the 50-minute brake change. Neither was a mistake in the seat — both were the predictable cost of running quick on a car we hadn't yet set up or stocked to sustain it.
The "Avg incl. pit" column is where that bill lands. Stint 11's honest 2:15.5 pace becomes an effective 2:44.0 once the fuel stop is spread over its 29 laps — survivable, because the laps soak it up. Stint 13 is the one to learn from: still a 2:10.8 best on track, but fold in the brake change that followed it and the effective lap balloons to 7:22.7. The quickest stints of the weekend became, lap-for-lap, the most expensive — not because anyone drove them wrong, but because the car wasn't yet set up or stocked to turn that pace into track position.
Add up the two stops the afternoon pace brought on and it's roughly 64 minutes — about 28 laps of track position — handed back to fuel and brakes (a third unplanned stop, five minutes for a radio dropout, was bad luck rather than pace). That's not a bill any driver ran up; it's one the whole team can pay down.
None of this is a knock on the speed; the pace is real and it's exactly where our best laps live. It's a lesson for the whole team, and a welcome one: with the brake package we have, the sustainable pace sat a notch below the one we could run. Closing the time gap is a team job — better brakes to raise the ceiling, a spares box deep enough that a pad change is a ten-minute stop instead of a fifty-minute wait for pads to turn up, and a stint plan that more deliberately names the sustainable target before the green so nobody has to guess at it from the seat. Put those in place and the quick pace doesn’t costing us, it benefits us; until then, a touch of more deliberate pre-race planning for the dry will help keep the unplanned stops off the board.
05The pit lane
Eleven stops · 2:53:41 stationary · 21.5% of all logged time.
First, the part the stopwatch doesn't directly show: the pit crew were outstanding. Every slow second on this page is the rulebook, the fuel jugs, a black flag, or a plan that needs fine tuning — none of it was the people over the wall, who hit their marks all weekend. Fixing the pit lane is a job of better tools and fewer penalties served, not more effort.
The black flags, by name
The encouraging thing about all three is that they're the most fixable kind of time there is — entirely within our hands, no parts required. Two of them came out of the same twenty minutes of wet-morning, driver-swap chaos — exactly the sort of tangle a tighter changeover routine erases — so the better part of half an hour they cost is sitting right there to keep next time.
- in the 17:14 stopCrossing the blended line — Driver B. Picked up at pit entry / track exit and served inside the long late-morning combined stop, where it rode along with a swap and the first brake change — in a swap-day tangle the lap log itself flags. The kind of call a marked, rehearsed pit-in line makes disappear.
- on trackPassing under yellow — Driver B. Served on track as a single slow lap in the afternoon rather than a stop. A clearer in-car yellow cue — on the cockpit list below — makes this one easy to keep.
- 16:09Contact with the #70 — Driver A. The most expensive single flag, and the one we least want to repeat.
After action: the #70 contact
The one worth the full account is the contact, because of how it was handled more than how it happened. Exiting Turn 8, the #70 caught our right rear — passenger side, just forward of the tire. The damage was cosmetic, and Driver A did the right thing on instinct: came straight off the racing line and brought the car in without arguing the point on track. Race control assessed it as our third black flag of the day, and because it was the third, the penalty escalated past a warning — under the Lemons rulebook, the team had to complete a set of brain teasers before we were cleared to rejoin. (There are worse sanctions than a pop quiz in a paddock. Thank god for the Lemons rulebook.) For the #70, it was their first flag of the day; they got a quick verbal warning and went back out — the same escalation ladder, just a different rung.
Here's the part that actually matters, and it's a point of pride rather than a number: every flag we took, we owned. No protesting to the marshals, no relitigating it over the radio, no excuses — Driver A acknowledged the contact and pitted, the team served the penalty as handed down, and we went back to racing. That's the standard on a shared race track: you fix what you can fix, you wear what you earn, and you keep the conduct clean even when the call stings. The fast laps will come and go; the reputation for racing straight is the thing you actually carry to the next event. We'd rather collect zero flags — but if one comes, this is exactly how we want to handle it.
The fuel is the floor
Lemons rules are firm — gravity feed, five-gallon jugs, no funnels, no pressure — which makes the pour itself the slowest fixed part of every stop. Across the weekend the team made seven fills of roughly ten gallons — two jugs — apiece, topping up about every 29 green laps, comfortably inside the tank's range: the 29-lap charge of stint 11 ran from full to a quarter without a splash. The trouble is the pour. An unvented VP jug glugs — as fuel goes out, air has to claw back up the same neck, and a full five gallons takes the better part of a minute and a half to clear.
What the fuel says about the drivers
Work backward from those seven fills — call each one ten gallons — and the car is a drinker: about 6.6 mpg, roughly a third of a gallon a lap. Split by who was in the seat between fills, the two come out close — Driver B a shade thirstier, around 6 mpg to Driver A's 7. But that gap is mostly conditions, not throttle: Driver B drew the cold, stop-start wet restart, where any car guzzles, while the long, flowing dry stints sip. Treat the per-driver split as an estimate; the fills weren't metered. The headline that is firm: a deliberately rich tune (AFR around 10.8) drinks fuel, and a thirsty car makes a slow pour hurt twice.
The pour is the floor
Vent the jug properly — a vent cap, or a breather tube so air comes in while fuel goes out — and the same jug empties in roughly half the time. Two jugs a fill, seven fills across the weekend: the pour alone ate an estimated twenty-one minutes — close to nine laps of track position — and a vented jug hands about half of that straight back. It's the cheapest time on the car, and the only tools required are a drill and a vent fitting. Maybe it’s a good time to start thinking about dry-breaks?
Fuel figures work backward from seven fills at roughly ten gallons each; treat them as estimates, since fills weren't metered and burn tracks conditions as much as throttle. The conclusion holds across any reasonable number — gravity is a bottleneck, venting is the lever.
06What the car was thinking
Day 2 telemetry, called in from the cockpit. Day 1 numbers were lost to the void and are still being recovered.
Trans temp
156–206°F
35–60° cooler than Day 1. The new transmission cooler earned its bolts.
Oil temp
129–188°F
Untroubled. The baffled pan and cooler are doing their jobs.
Oil pressure
36–69psi
Healthy under load; the low reading was taken at idle.
Water temp
140–207°F
Roughly 8–10° cooler on the day. No complaints.
Air / fuel
9.0–12.6
Deliberately rich (≈10.8 mean). The safe, cool, alive-at-the-end mixture.
Charging
14.0–14.6V
Flat and steady. The alternator had a quiet weekend.
After the oil-starvation lesson of an earlier race, this is the report card we wanted: the engine ran cool and calm, the transmission ran cooler than the day before thanks to the added cooler, and the only fluid that needed attention was a half-quart of ATF early on to settle some hesitant shifting — which it did. The K24 was the most professional thing on the car all weekend.
07The brakes — our biggest opportunity
The front brakes worked hard this weekend — hard enough to need two fresh sets on Sunday, the second change costing us the 50-minute stop you can see in the trace. No mystery as to why: a heavy front-drive vehicle, a fourteen-corner circuit, and a stock fixed brake bias put nearly all the braking through the front axle, and the front pads paid for it. The system did exactly what that geometry asked it to.
What makes this the headline of the weekend isn't that it cost us time, it's that it's the single largest block of lap time we can unlock, and we know precisely where it is. Better pad compound, real cooling and ducting, a look at shifting some bias rearward — and a spare set staged in the trailer so a change is a quick stop, not a 50-minute one — would lengthen our stints, hold our pace deep into a run, and take the brake stops off the board. Of everything on this page, this is the most exciting fix, because it's the one with the most to give back.
08What we're fixing
- The front brakes, properly.Pad compound, cooling and ducting, and a look at shifting some bias rearward. It's the highest-leverage job on the car — the most lap time available from any single change, and the one we're most looking forward to.
- Get the refuel time down — before Bowling Green.The quiet line-item that has to change before our September round at NCM Motorsports Park in Bowling Green. Across the weekend the fuel pour alone cost an estimated twenty-one minutes — close to nine laps of track position — because the rulebook makes gravity the only option and an unvented jug glugs. Venting every jug (a vent cap or breather tube) roughly halves the pour and hands back the better part of ten minutes; a rehearsed two-person pour takes more still. Brakes are the bigger single fix, but twenty-one minutes on the ground is a finishing-position problem — and unlike most of this list, it's solvable with a drill, a fitting, and an afternoon of practice. It gets fixed before Bowling Green.
- Bank the black-flag time for procedures and avoid contact.Passing under yellow, a blended-line call on pit entry, and contact with the #70 added up to well over 30 minutes of lost lap time — and it comes back the same way it left, as a team: clearer in-car flag cues, a marked and rehearsed pit-in line, a cleaner penalty handoff at swaps, and the racecraft margin that simply grows with seat time. Driving-standards margin is the cheapest lap time in motorsport, and it's free to add.
- Outfit the cockpit.Three things the driver shouldn't be without: a proper radio mount — we lost comms for a 35-minute stretch and ate a stop for it; a labeled track map within sight; and a clock visible from the seat, so fuel and stint time get managed without asking the wall.
- Arm the pit wall to match.The crew needs the same labeled track map the driver has, so a hazard called from the car — "stopped car at the exit of turn 4" — lands on a shared reference instantly. Pair it with a more simple data-logging sheet: the current telemetry log is too excessive to fill cleanly at racing pace, and we lost most of Day 1's numbers to it’s unnecessary complexity. Fewer fields, bigger boxes, more laps captured. We also need a clipboard for whoever is datalogging.
- Stock the spares box — one deeper.This is the clearest team takeaway of the weekend. The unplanned time that came from running the car hard wasn't a driving problem; it was a parts-on-the-shelf problem — the log for the 50-minute brake stop says it in four words: new pads initially unavailable. That stop is a ten-minute stop if a second set of pads and rotors is staged and ready. So the new rule is simple: carry one more of everything than we think we need, as far as the budget will stretch. The weekend told us where to start — brake pads and rotors (now that we know the wear rate), plus belts, fuses, and a spare alternator. A consumable in the trailer turns a weekend-ender into a quick stop — cheap insurance, no lap time required, and entirely within our control.
- Formalize the driver-changeover brief.Every swap gets a 30-second handover: what the track is doing — grip, standing water, where the hazards are — and what the car is doing — brakes, temps, anything new since the last stop. Conditions shifted by the hour here; the next driver should inherit that knowledge, not rediscover it at speed.
- Plan the cold start.Our own trace puts the wet, cold-tire tax at a full pace tier. For the next cold event — Summit Point in October — we'll build the opening stint around tire warm-up instead of learning it on the clock again.
Car #86 — 2007 Honda Accord, K24 · 24 Hours of Lemons, Carolina Motorsports Park (2.279 mi), April 25–26, 2026.
Results provisional. Driver names withheld; figures are computed from the full lap log (267 timed records, 265 laps completed) and reconciled against the session classification and the pit-wall telemetry sheet. Where the hand-logged pit-wall clock conflicts with the lap timing, the lap-timing tab governs. Timing source: MyLaps / Speedhive session 12001047. Day-1 telemetry pending recovery.
Black Flag Racing · The Build.
