Notes from a hockey mom at her first Le Mans race

LIME ROCK — Hockey rinks can be noisy, but they’re nothing like a race track. Car racing tracks have a recognizable droning that struck me like a nightmare plague of Litchfield County mosquitoes zeroing in on tender manna, or the whinging of an overly tired group of school children.

You get used to it after awhile.I learned this Saturday, at my first- ever visit to a motor sports event. Besides, the whole thing is truly fun in an adrenalin-driven kind of way. And it was a chance to learn about a wholy unfamiliar world.

It turned out this this, my first race, was a Grand Prix event, a Big Deal in auto racing circles, kind of like the Triple Crown in horse racing or the Tour de France in cycling.

This particular Grand Prix was extra special: It was the first race on the newly refurbished track at Lime Rock Park, which has moved from being a 1.53-mile "fast" track with lots of straightaways to a 1.51-mile "technical" track with lots of sharp corners. In racing parlance, this makes it more "interesting."

The change apparently appealed to more than just the drivers. Lime Rock spokesperson Renea Topp said the event was considered an all-time record breaker, with an estimated 50 percent increase in attendance over last year’s Le Mans event.

Why the increased interest?

"The American Le Mans Series is making extreme headway in sports entertainment," Topp theorized. Not only is it of interest as a sports event, she said, the Le Mans organizers have also made breakthroughs in less-energy-guzzling "green" racing.

In fact, the Le Mans series is considered in many ways to be a testing ground for new automotive technology. Hard to believe, but what these guys are driving on the track might end up in your vehicle someday.

Butch Leitzinger, who drives for the Dyson/ Porsche team, wouldn’t share specifics about what his team is testing this year, but he did say that "ABS [anti-lock] brakes were developed in racing. So was traction control. Racers aren’t allowed to use ABS anymore but we can use traction control, which is something that is beginning to show up on street cars.

"For fuel, we’ve been using 10 percent ethanol this past year. Corvette is using E-85 — a fuel that is 85 percent ethanol — and getting good results."

Another draw, Topp noted, is that "Based on the state of the economy, people are staying local and taking less larger vacations and more weekend-day trips. We thought the increase of gas prices was going to hurt us, but in fact seems to have done the opposite. Our location factors into this as well being that we’re smack-dab in the middle of Hartford, Albany, New York City, Springfield and Boston."

And did the newly refurbished surface meet expectations?

"It is as smooth as glass," said Bob Green, a Skip Barber racing instructor since 1991.

And as an endurance course, it ups the ante in terms of testing a driver’s skill.

"Going straight is the easiest part," explained Green, a veritable font of wisdom regarding the physics of the intimate

menage-a-trois between rubber, road and horse power. "When the corner comes, it gets a little more complicated.

"Braking and cornering is the key to winning. Essentially, the cars are all the same, or as equal as possible, so to win a race, you have to be more effective — and that is the word, effective — at braking and cornering."

I got a chance to see what he actually meant when Green took me and three others out for a test "hot lap" between qualifying rounds on Friday. My legs were shaking when I got in the pace car (a beautiful BMW all-wheel drive road car).

As we picked up speed, Green informed those of us in the back seat how lucky we were to be able to "really feel the turns!"

That’s when I informed the total stranger unlucky enough to be sitting next to me that I needed to hold his hand.

Traveling at 120 mph, with my eyes shut the entire time, was surreal. And yes, in the back you get to feel all the turns very clearly.

What dawned on me the last few seconds of the lap (when I decided to open my eyes) is that normally, when I brake hard, it’s an accident. Actually, it’s an effort to avoid an accident. When a trained race car driver brakes hard — and I mean, strong enough to feel the car lean hard and lift a bit into the turns, he (or she) is working with the familiar. These highly skilled drivers know the track. They know the car. They know, as became clear, the physics of what is happening between acceleration, deceleration, car and road surface.

All I know is that when we finally stopped, my body finally had intuited that the harshness of a hot lap is not an out-of-control event. I guess it must be a game to those who enjoy the sport: How fast can I take this turn? How hard can I push the limits within these margins?

That Green gave me a sense of this is a testament to what drives racing: the seduction between control and the edge of control. It is as much about mastery of machine as it is about mastery of oneself.