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Thursday, April 3, 2025

Activation ACO!

Pictured from Left-to-Right: David Middleton (MIE Racing), David Lowe (ACO USA President) and Crew Chief Eric (GTM/MPN).

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After all the dust had settled from visiting the Automotive Hall of Fame, and our bellies were satisfied with our meal from Ford’s Garage, it was time to get serious about why David Middleton (from MIE Racing) and I had come to Detroit.

M1 Concourse is a private track day and storage facility located in Pontiac, Michigan for motorsports enthusiasts but also offers a state of the art event center with catering.

Our mission as members, volunteers, and part of the ACO USA “pit crew” was to assist ACO USA president David Lowe with a first of it’s kind event for the ACO. A “Start to Dark” viewing party hosted by M1 Concourse (a private race track in Pontiac, Michigan) where we would have exclusive access to the Le Mans feed directly from France. Though that might not seem like much, it’s something David Lowe has been working on getting for 10 years, and he was proud to be able to offer it to ACO USA members for the first time.

Team Introductions

Transcript

We doubled down with not only a Le Mans 2024 viewing party and the feed coming directly and exclusively from France in real-time but we added two simulators provided by our host M1 Concourse to debut the latest racing simulator Le Mans Ultimate, the officially licensed racing sim for the World Endurance Championship (WEC).

Le Mans Ultimate Experience

If you’ve been following along up to this point you probably saw the YouTube posts, Discord chats, Twitch live streams and follow up articles about all the research and testing that David and I put into preparing Le Mans Ultimate for this event. We were definitely faced with some challenges organizing an activation with hardware we wouldn’t get familiarized with until we arrived (as well as brand new software). #adapt&overcome. The Friday before Le Mans was spent setting up, downloading, patching, calibrating, re-calibrating, testing, followed by more and more calibrating to make sure the systems were not only equal but fun to drive on.

The end goal was to have one system setup with “all the training nannies” turned on like driving lines, no damage, and other driver assists, so that contestants in our Hot Lap Challenge could get familiar with the near 9-mile Circuit de la Sarthe (aka “Le Mans”) before jumping to what we called “the competition rig” where they would compete for some really cool prizes arranged by William “Big Money” Ross from the Exotic Car Marketplace through his connections at the Nuvolari Collection and Tazio Magazine.

We made a last minute game time decision to live stream the activation (above), allowing behind the scenes action, interviews and some funny commercial breaks by William throughout the 7.5 hours of “Start to Dark.”

We even got Le Mans winner, and Legends Liasson for the ACO USA, pro-driver Rick Knoop to try out the sim. He still races Cam-Am and other cars from his era in vintage racing series all over the country.

“You can take the racer out of the race…” but, he went #fullsend with a drivers meeting, pre-brief, coaching and more before putting down his hot lap. Even at 70 years old, and very little sim experience Rick is as sharp as ever, and a quick study. He completed his lap of Le Mans with a grin from ear-to-ear saying “I’ll be back to try that again” as he was called off to go on stage and chat about his Le Mans experiences with other drivers who were at the party. (below). 

Rick Knoop on stage with Tim McGrane from M1 Concourse talking about his Le Mans experiences in 1978 and 1984.

15 minutes “to post your best hot lap” seems like a lot of time to get around Le Mans, but when the average driver was posting times between 3:50 and 4:30 including a throwaway warm up lap, that didn’t leave a lot of room for error in a Hypercar. We spoke with every contestant that came off the machines getting their immediate reactions and thoughts about Le Mans Ultimate, everyone had very positive things to say regardless of their previous sim racing experiences.

Crew Chief Eric chatting with Competition Winner “Dabe” about his laps at Le Mans in the virtual Cadillac Hypercar

At the end of the competition driver “Dabe”, a French-American who recently moved to Detroit and has experience racing all over Europe took home first place honors with a respectable time of 3:51.897 in the Cadillac, followed by an impressive run by ACO USA president David Lowe at 3:59.079 in the Porsche 963 and rounding out the Top-3 was Jay in a Ferrari 499P with a 4:58.616.

The Big Showdown

After all the competitors had put in their best laps, David and I decided to host a live showdown for the guests. We’d kept our lap times “relatively secret” until this point. To make it fair we decided to settle our pre-event rivalry by running LMP2 cars, which neither of us had experience with. Up until that point, I’d been leading David by 2+ seconds (with time still on the boards) using the 2023 Peugeot 9X8 Hypercar. #noaero

William was our official race marshal, helping synchronize our starts and give colorful play-by-play commentary. Excuses are the first thing any racer learns, so here it comes…

Dear Diary,

I had a rough start, I didn’t like the LMP2 at all. It reminded me too much of the Glickenhaus’ and Vanwall’s I’d tested during the month leading up to the event. But, my competitive nature and inner time trailer got the better of me and forced me to push lap after lap, dropping time with each pass. 15 minutes felt like an eternity in the LMP2. I could hear William in the background “Oh, Eric’s behind…. oh wait, he’s making up time… man it’s close.” I ended up with a “bonus lap” which happens when you cross start/finish with seconds left on the clock. Thankfully, LMU lets you finish the lap and doesn’t just quit. I still hadn’t gotten adjusted to the car, nor had I locked in a win. This was the last “push lap,” and I was running out of tires. Driving the LMP2 as hard as I could, trying to make no mistakes, I got all the way around to the final set of turns in the Ford Chicane. I cleared the first part and suddenly the car was stepping out, had I induced Lift Throttle Oversteer? Was it some weird Trailing Throttle Oversteer… or are these cars just that unpredictable? Without much room to correct and not enough power to pull out of the slide, I’d lost the 3+ second advantage I’d gained over David.

Le Sigh. ~Crew Chief Eric

 

Disappointed and frustrated, I’d ended up not far off his best time giving him the “W” in our shootout. He might have won the battle, but the war is far from over. #notfirstyourelast #friendlyrivalry #simracing

Left-to-Right: Rick Knoop (Le Mans Winner 1984), Andrea Robertson (Le Mans Driver GT40) and Tim McGrane (M1 Concourse)

M1 Concourse we a great setting for the viewing party, and we’re extremely appreciative of them loaning their simulators to us for the activation. We look forward to returning to M1 for other events next season. We also want to give a huge shoutout to William Ross from the Exotic Car Marketplace for coming out to help us with the event, he’s always exceptional to work with and always there when we need help the most. And a shoutout again to Rick Knoop and David Lowe for being amazing ambassadors of Le Mans and Endurance Racing, it’s their continued enthusiasm that makes the ACO USA an awesome organization to belong to. (Consider Joining the ACO USA today!)

There’s so much more to chat about with respect to the event, the weekend, and the Le Mans race results… but we’ve saved that for our upcoming Drive Thru News episode #46, so tune in on Tuesday 6/25 to catch the rest of this story everywhere you listen, download or stream Podcasts!

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