Fourteen hours at MSR Houston, 301 laps, and ninth in class for the second race running. We went through the timing data, the pit-wall log and every lap all three drivers turned, and sorted the weekend into the numbers that explain it.
Bottom line, up front
Texas Tippin’ ran fourteen hours across two days at MSR Houston, counter-clockwise, with 121 cars on the timing sheet. Car #86 completed 301 laps and 716 miles, finished 37th overall and ninth in Class C, and did all of it without a single stop for a mechanical problem, which is a first for us. Each of our eight trips down pit lane was for fuel, a driver change, or a conversation with the judges.
We’ll get to the conversations. Numbers first.
01The scoreboard
Laps
301
152 Saturday, 149 Sunday
Distance
716 miles
Overall
37th of 121
Class C
9th of 35
Grid to flag
90th to 37th
Best lap
2:11.061
65.4 mph, Driver C
Median green lap
2:19.3
Time on track
87.2%
class average 67.3%
Stops
8
none mechanical
Black flags
5
Fuel burned
about 68 gallons
~10 mpg
Oil added, per the log
half a quart
Highest in class
2nd
11 laps, Saturday
Laps in the class top ten
275 of 301
Seven hundred and sixteen miles is the farthest this car has gone in a race weekend; Summit Point was six hundred and fifty-six and Carolina Motorsports Park was six hundred and four. It’s also our second ninth-in-class in a row, in a field where 37 cars cleared 300 laps and we were the thirty-seventh. The time-on-track figure comes from Citrus Racer and it’s our favorite on the board: the average Class C car spent a third of the race off the track. We spent an eighth of the race off track, and none of it was spent waiting on a part.
02Every lap, both days
Figure 1 is the whole race, one mark per lap. Nobody on the team had turned a lap at MSR Houston before the green flag. There was no test day, so the first laps were race laps.
Of the 301 laps, 231 were clean green-flag laps under 2:30, 16 were slowed by traffic or a local yellow, 36 were spent behind the safety car, and 18 were laps into or out of the pits or away from a start. The full-course yellows ate 117 minutes, 14 percent of the race, and Saturday took most of them: 26 yellow laps to Sunday’s 10. Our median green lap came down from 2:20.3 on Saturday to 2:18.6 on Sunday, once everyone had gotten comfortable on the track.
03Three drivers, three jobs
We use letters on this site, not names. In Houston the three letters did three different jobs: one anchored the weekend, one kept time, and one showed up on Sunday and closed.
| Driver A | Driver B | Driver C | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Laps (share of 301) | 61 (20%) | 93 (31%) | 147 (49%) |
| Time in the seat | 2 h 27 | 3 h 58 | 6 h 06 |
| Miles | 145 | 221 | 350 |
| Clean laps | 51 | 67 | 113 |
| Best lap | 2:12.694 | 2:13.355 | 2:11.061 |
| Median clean lap | 2:19.3 | 2:21.0 | 2:18.5 |
| Median, first outing → second | stint 1 2:19.9 → stint 2 2:17.3 | Sat 2:21.9 → Sun 2:20.5 | Sat 2:19.2 → Sun 2:16.7 |
| Middle half of clean laps | 2:15.6–2:21.8 | 2:19.0–2:23.1 | 2:15.7–2:21.5 |
| Spread (standard deviation) | 4.4 s | 3.5 s | 4.1 s |
| Clean laps within 2 s of own median | 33% | 52% | 35% |
| Clean laps under 2:20 | 61% | 39% | 66% |
| Clean laps under 2:15 | 24% | 4% | 14% |
| Best five laps in a row (average) | 2:14.5 | 2:16.9 | 2:14.2 |
| Full-course-yellow laps | 2 | 18 | 16 |
| Fuel at green pace (gal/min) | 0.091 | 0.116 | 0.104* |
*Sunday’s measured tank. C’s other two stints are in the fuel table.
The gray boxes in Figure 2 are Sunday’s pace bands. We wrote them on Saturday night from Saturday’s laps: a target window for each driver, with a floor underneath it. A lap under the floor gets CHECK on the pit board, which means look at the gauges and settle down, not well done. All four Sunday stints put their median lap inside the band. The three drivers also went under their floors 16 times between them, so the board had a busy day.
Driver A: the closer
A didn’t drive on Saturday. He climbed in at 11:16 on Sunday morning with zero laps at MSR Houston and a borrowed pace band that came with a promotion clause: put the first stint’s median at 2:21 or better and move up to C’s band for the second.
His first flying lap was a 2:34. His fourth was a 2:19.2. The stint’s median was 2:19.9, and the last two laps before he came in were a 2:13.4 and a 2:13.2. Promotion granted.
He then drove the final 85 minutes to the checkered flag and got faster as he went. The first third of that stint ran a 2:19.6 median and the last third a 2:15.6. His last six laps were all between 2:14.1 and 2:15.6, so he was still finding time when they ran out of race. His best, a 2:12.694, is the fourth-fastest lap of our weekend, behind only three of C’s, and 24 percent of his clean laps were under 2:15, the highest share on the team.
He was also the lightest on fuel. The one tank we could measure for him, his first, took five gallons after 62 minutes, 21 percent under the plan. Quick, strongest at the end, and still had plenty left when it was over. We don’t know what to do with that except schedule him for the last stint again.
Driver B: the unit of measure
The fuel number on Sunday’s pit-wall card was 0.115 gallons a minute. That number is Driver B. His Saturday stint burned 0.273 gallons per green lap and his Sunday stint burned 0.272, a day apart and with different amounts of yellow in each. In gallons a minute that’s 0.116 both times. We’ve stopped calling it the planning figure and started calling it a B.
He’s the same with lap times. Just over half of his clean laps, 35 of 67, landed within two seconds of his own median, against about a third for the other two, and his spread was the tightest on the team at 3.5 seconds. Give B a job and he does it the same way for as long as you need him to, and he keeps you posted on exactly how much he’s got left in the tank.
Those reports paid off. Four fuel-gauge calls on Sunday morning let us calibrate the needle against the jugs, which gets its own paragraph in the fuel section below.
B also drew the short straw on yellows. Eighteen of the team’s 36 full-course-yellow laps were his: 59 minutes of his weekend spent studying a pace car. He still took the car on Saturday from 56th overall and 11th in class to 22nd and second. On Sunday he took the green flag, found nearly a second and a half on his own Saturday median (2:21.9 to 2:20.5), and went under his floor nine times, which means that by mid-morning Sunday-B had outgrown the paperwork Saturday-B wrote for him.
Driver C: the anchor
C drove 147 of the 301 laps, 49 percent of the race, and spent 6 hours 6 minutes in the seat. He owns the three fastest laps of our weekend: 2:11.061, 2:11.355 and 2:11.488.
He took Saturday’s green flag from 90th on the grid, at a track he had never driven, and handed the car over two hours later in 30th overall and third in class. He did it on 7.5 gallons, which is the work of a man who was asked to bring the car back and took the request literally. Then he drove the last two and a half hours of Saturday as well and ran the tank to the low-fuel light after 54 laps’ worth of green-flag fuel, which is where the arithmetic said the light lives.
On Sunday he got quicker and tidier at the same time: a 2:16.7 median, 34 of 39 clean laps under 2:20, and a 29-lap run in which the slowest lap was a 2:22.6. The 2:11.061 came on lap 260, late in that run.
C was also black-flagged twice and released twice. Saturday’s was a passing-under-yellow call that the officials looked at again and withdrew. Sunday’s was for leaving the track on an oil slick that hadn’t been flagged yet. His record in Lemons traffic court stands at 2–0, and we’re having it framed.
04Fuel: one plan, three appetites
The plan number was 0.115 gallons a minute at green-flag pace. The weekend gave us five honest measurements of the real thing: fills to the neck with a known number of gallons. To compare stints with different amounts of yellow in them, we count a full-course-yellow lap as 0.6 of a lap of fuel and a pit lap as 0.3.
| Stint | Driver | In the seat | Fuel added afterward | Gal per green lap | Gal/min at green pace | Against 0.115 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sat 1 | C | 118 min | 7.5 gal, to full | 0.195 | 0.082 | −29% |
| Sat 2 | B | 128 min | 12 gal, to full | 0.273 | 0.116 | on plan |
| Sat 3 | C | 144 min | ran to the fuel light (about 14.6 gal), then a 1.1 gal splash | 0.268 est. | 0.116 est. | +1% est. |
| Sun 1 | B | 110 min | 11 gal, to full | 0.272 | 0.116 | +1% |
| Sun 2 | A | 62 min | 5 gal, to full | 0.213 | 0.091 | −21% |
| Sun 3 | C | 104 min | about 10 gal, to full | 0.237 | 0.104 | −10% |
| Sun 4 | A | 85 min | none recorded; ran to the flag | – | – | – |
Adjusted by driver, one plan number becomes three. B is 0.116 on both days, which is where 0.115 came from in the first place. C is 0.104 at race pace on Sunday, and on Saturday he bracketed that from both sides: 0.082 on the opening stint, when he was learning the track and spent 12 laps behind the pace car, and about 0.116 on the afternoon tank he ran to the light. A is 0.091 on the one tank we measured, and we’d like a second measurement before we build a strategy on it.
Add it up and the car burned about 68 gallons in 716 miles. That’s 10.5 miles a gallon, and about 9 percent less fuel than the plan number predicts for the same laps, which is the right direction for a planning figure to be wrong.
B’s gauge calls gave us something new, a translation for the fuel needle. When he called five-eighths, the arithmetic says there were 13.9 gallons aboard. At a half, 10.7. At three-eighths, 8.4. At a quarter, 7.3 of the tank’s 17.1. The needle runs an eighth to a fifth of a tank behind the truth, on the cautious side, so a quarter on the gauge is about forty minutes of green-flag running before the low-fuel light and an hour before the car goes quiet. The Accord, it turns out, has been sandbagging.
05Stops, flags and the name on the door
The team is called Black Flag Racing. For the record, the name was picked before the season started…and long before this race.
The car was shown a black flag five times in fourteen hours. Two were C’s, covered above, and both ended with him waved back onto the track. One came during B’s Saturday stint due to contact that doesn’t show up as a separate stop in the timing. The other two flags stuck. Once on Sunday morning, and again just after noon, we were written up for passing under yellow and parked for fifteen minutes each time.
Figure 4 is what all eight stops cost. Together they took 100 minutes and 32 seconds out of the race, and the two penalty stops account for 49 of those minutes. The penalties themselves were 30 minutes of sitting still, which at our median green lap is 12.9 laps. Fourth place in Class C finished ten laps ahead of us.
That’s the expensive number in this article. It’s also the encouraging one. In Houston the thing standing between this team and a top five in class wasn’t the engine, the pace or the pit work. It was penalties under yellow flags, and those are free to fix.
| Pit entry | Lap | What happened | Time lost | Stopped at the wall |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sat 11:58 | 44 | Fuel 7.5 gal, C to B | 8:44 (3.8 laps) | 7:12 |
| Sat 14:13 | 93 | Black flag; contact with other team, B to C | 14:00 (6.0 laps) | 12:46 |
| Sat 14:57 | 106 | Black flag: call withdrawn | 4:20 (1.9 laps) | 2:58 |
| Sat 16:46 | 150 | Splash, 1.1 gal | 7:50 (3.4 laps) | 5:50 |
| Sun 10:47 | 196 | 15-min penalty, 11 gal, half a quart of oil, B to A | 27:02 (11.6 laps) | 25:18 |
| Sun 12:15 | 221 | 15-min penalty, 5 gal, A to C | 22:01 (9.5 laps) | 20:48 |
| Sun 13:04 | 233 | Black flag: unflagged oil, released | 7:43 (3.3 laps) | 5:55 |
| Sun 14:26 | 265 | Fuel about 10 gal, C to A | 8:51 (3.8 laps) | 6:34 |
| All eight | 100:32 (43.3 laps) | 87:22 |
The pit work held up. Take the 30 penalty minutes out and our eight stops averaged 7:10 at the wall. The last one of the weekend, ten gallons and a driver change, was the proof: the crew’s stopwatch had it at 6:37 and our estimate from the timing data is 6:34, so either the method works or we were wrong by the same amount twice.
Figure 5 is the same story told as a running order. C took the car from 90th to 30th in the opening stint, B had it 22nd overall and second in class by mid-afternoon on Saturday, and it went to bed 28th and seventh. On Sunday morning it got as high as 25th. Each penalty cost about ten places on the overall sheet, and the second cost three in class, from seventh to tenth. C and A got one of those back by the flag. Over the whole weekend the car spent 11 laps second in class, 53 inside the top three, and 275 of 301 inside the top ten.
06Where we stacked up in class
| Class | Team | Laps | Laps vs. us | Best lap | Median green lap | Lost to stops |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | #48 Grandma Jane | 326 | +25 | 2:02.499 | 2:14.7 | 54 min |
| 2 | #80 Event Horizon | 326 | +25 | 2:05.998 | 2:14.0 | 67 min |
| 3 | #311 Big Rock Candy Mountain | 324 | +23 | 2:10.813 | 2:20.2 | 40 min |
| 4 | #600 DEWHUT | 311 | +10 | 2:09.905 | 2:19.6 | 86 min |
| 5 | #757 Weenie Hut Juniors | 310 | +9 | 2:11.576 | 2:23.3 | 60 min |
| 6 | #771 Low Speed High Drag | 308 | +7 | 2:10.024 | 2:22.8 | 48 min |
| 7 | #981 Mostly Potential Rarely… | 303 | +2 | 2:07.711 | 2:20.7 | 98 min |
| 8 | #424 The Viberator | 302 | +1 | 2:08.746 | 2:21.2 | 78 min |
| 9 | #86 Black Flags | 301 | – | 2:11.061 | 2:19.3 | 101 min |
| 10 | #75 Burnt Toast | 297 | −4 | 2:09.480 | 2:20.9 | 107 min |
Sort the class top ten by a typical green-flag lap and we come out third, by a few tenths. Only the two cars that finished first and second were clearly quicker, and at about five seconds a lap they were running a different race. Sort the same ten by time lost to stops and we’re ninth, with only the car behind us giving away more. We set the 25th-fastest best lap of the 35 cars in class and finished ninth, so the result came from staying out there. The next step is the same plan with fewer conversations.
07The car’s side of the story
The pit-wall log is the car’s side of the story: 41 sets of gauge readings, 33 of them on Sunday at roughly ten-minute intervals. Saturday’s stop at 11:10; the in-car radio could still hear the pit but had stopped answering it. By Sunday morning it was talking again.
What the gauges say is that the Accord was bored. Water temperature sat between 180 and 201°F, apart from one reading taken as the car left a 25-minute stop. Oil pressure never left the 55 to 71 psi range. Oil temperature peaked at 207°F. The five-speed automatic, which the internet would like you to know does not belong in a race car, peaked at 216°F. The charging system read 13.7 to 13.9 volts apart from a single 13.2. And the only fluid the log shows going in all weekend, other than gasoline, is half a quart of oil.
| From the pit-wall log | Driver C | Driver B | Driver A |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oil temperature, °F (median / peak) | 194 / 207 | 179 / 188 | 190 / 207 |
| Transmission temperature, °F (median / peak) | 207 / 216 | 193 / 198 | 198 / 213 |
| Water temperature, °F (median / peak) | 192 / 199 | 189 / 193 | 195 / 201 |
| Oil pressure, psi (range) | 55–70 | 64–71 | 60–70 |
| Air-fuel ratio, spot readings (median) | 12.8 | 12.0 | 15.3 |
| Readings logged | 17 | 10 | 12 |
B’s numbers are the coolest of the three, but B also had the car first thing on Sunday morning, so we wouldn’t read much driving style into that. C ran the transmission warmest and also ran the fastest, which is how that usually goes. And during Saturday’s long full-course yellow the oil dropped from 206 to 160°F and the transmission from 207 to 166°F inside half an hour. The car treats a double yellow like a spa day.
08What we’re taking into next season
- Yellow means yellow.The two penalty stops cost 49 minutes. The four fuel stops cost 39.
- Plan fuel by team average until we get more discrete measurements.With A at 0.091 gallons per minute, B at 0.116 gallons a minute, and C falling somewhere between 0.104 and 0.116, we can plan our fuel strategy based on 0.115 gallons per minute until the first stint proves it to be too conservative…or optimistic.
- A tank is good for a little over two hours of green.Saturday’s last tank reached the low-fuel light after 2 hours 17 minutes of driving, and the splash that followed cost 7:50. Next time that stop goes on the schedule, and the pit gets a little more warning.
- Check the radio both ways before the green.Saturday’s log has eight gauge readings due to a problem with the antenna setup compared to Sunday’s 33. Comms checks need to happen at range and during the track walk if there isn’t a test day before the green flag drops.
Thanks to the crew, who logged gauges every ten minutes for seven hours on Sunday and turned the last stop in six and a half minutes; to the team that jumped in with a spare pair of hands when we came in for Saturday’s splash before our wall was ready for it; and to the people who keep this car on track: Haas Auto Service Center, whose engine went 716 racing miles without a complaint, Bad Ass Pickles, Heavy Truck Painting, SPADA Tractor Imports and SOARD Solutions. Without them, none of this would be possible.
All The Way.
How we counted. Lap times, positions and results are from MyLaps Speedhive, still marked provisional when we pulled them on 10 November. The time-on-track comparison is from Citrus Racer. Gauges, fuel and driver changes are from our pit-wall log.
A clean lap is a green-flag lap under 2:30, not counting the lap out of the pits or the first lap of each day. From 2:30 to 2:40 counts as traffic; anything slower is a full-course yellow.
Time in the seat is the stint’s lap total minus time stopped, where time stopped is the pit lap minus a median lap minus 40 seconds of pit-lane transit.
A fill is to full unless the log says otherwise. Gallons per green lap is the fill divided by green-equivalent laps (a yellow lap counts 0.6, a pit lap 0.3); gallons per minute divides that by the stint’s median clean lap. The Saturday-afternoon figure assumes the low-fuel light comes on with 2.5 gallons left in a 17.1-gallon tank.
Other teams’ median laps and stop time are computed from their public Speedhive lap data the same way as ours.
