Thunderhill was the third stop on the Paul Mumford Memorial Open Track Challenge
It’s been just seven days since I took delivery of my own personal tuner project, and I wasted precious little time finding out what it will take to transform a showroom fresh Volvo S60 R into a track star.
After picking up the keys around 10 p.m. Monday night, I was at the SCCA San Francisco Region’s home track of Thunderhill Park – some 500 miles north of my SoCal home – by 10 a.m. Tuesday morning.
The preciousness of time is something I’ve come to understand the hard way, through soul-shattering events like 9/11, and the sudden death last October of SPEED World Challenge driver Paul Mumford in a plane crash.
Paul Mumford had been a visitor to our RACER offices only a week before he was killed. The magazine was doing a feature on his overnight success in the SCCA SPEED World Challenge GT class, and we wanted to meet this David who’d stepped up and whacked Goliath but good.
From seemingly out of nowhere, Paul had showed up at Road America to put his self-sponsored Viper Competition Coupe on the podium, coming from 22nd to finish third and receiving the Hard Charger award for his efforts. At the time, Paul had maybe a dozen door-to-door races on his resume, total.
In the next World Challenge race at Laguna Seca, Paul would do the unthinkable, winning the GT race outright, beating the likes of Bill Auberlen, Boris Said and Derek Bell.
It was the first World Challenge win for a Viper since Bobby Archer six years earlier, and the first for the new Competition Coupe anywhere.
So, where had this guy been? Turns out that when he wasn’t running a successful insurance business, Mumford was honing his speed at a unique event called The Open Track Challenge, the OTC.
The OTC started 2 years ago as a sort of West Coast version of the One Lap of America. Competitors run “a season-in-a-week,” driving five tracks in five days, adding the three fastest laps from each stop to determine the winner. Time spent traveling between tracks isn’t counted.
After emerging as a hotshoe during Viper Days National events, Paul took on the inaugural OTC in 2002, where he and OTC founder Brian Provost paced a Viper ACR on street tires to second overall out of 70 cars, including many shod with race slicks.
“Driving with Paul was like playing basketball with Michael Jordan,” Provost recalled. “You always felt you had a chance to win.”
The OTC now honors the late Paul Mumford, a phenom on last year's SCCA SPEED World Challenge scene.
In honor of this exceptionally talented driver, Provost renamed the event The Paul Mumford Memorial Open Track Challenge. This year’s OTC started a week ago last Sunday on the road course at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, then headed to Willow Springs, Thunderhill, and Infineon Raceway before finishing last Thursday at Buttonwillow Raceway Park.
Paul would’ve been pleased with this year’s final results. Co-driving the winning car with Doug Hayashi was Erik Messley, who served as chief engineer and crew chief of the one-man crew on Mumford’s SPEED World Challenge Viper.
“Paul loved speed. It didn’t matter whether it was a big time professional road race or a Viper Club meeting,” says Messley. “He just loved to drive fast and be around people who were in it for the fun.”
The day I interviewed Paul for RACER, we went for a ride in his street car, a Mitsubishi Evo VIII, and it was clear the delight Paul took in driving a car with turbocharged power, a 6-speed close-ratio gearbox, huge Brembo brakes, and all-wheel drive traction. He would’ve loved the Volvo S60R.
We zipped over to see the guys at Bullet Performance, a BMW tuning shop that fields a pair of SPEED World Challenge Touring Car entries. As it turned out, Mickey Miller of Bullet had met Paul at the Laguna Seca race, when they sat next to each other at the driver’s autograph session. To both these newcomers to professional road racing, the idea that they’d be sought out by autograph seekers seemed comical.
While we chatted, Paul and Mickey began to form plans to share the expense of transporting their race cars to the East Coast and make a surprise appearance at the upcoming SPEED World Challenge finale in Puerto Rico. A week later, Paul was gone. He was 32 years old.
Paul Mumford's friend and former crew chief Erik Messley co-drove the OTC-winning Acura NSX.
Paul was, and will remain, an inspiration to anyone who got a relatively late start in racing yet still has aspirations of matching skills with the kind of world-class drivers found in the SPEED World Challenge. He was a regular, day-job guy, with tremendous skill and an infectious desire to drive fast cars very fast.
He’d cheated death once before, during a motorcycle racing career that saw him quickly scale the ladder from amateur club champion to fledgling AMA professional. Just as that career plan took off, it came crashing down in Willow Springs’ treacherous Turn Eight, his Kawasaki tumbling at 160mph.
While recovering, Paul determined to get back to the track, but on four wheels instead of two. And he vowed to make the most of every single day, once he was cut loose from his full-body cast.
The day Paul died, he was living for the moment, cramming all he could into the 24 hours we’re each allotted. He and a friend had just taken off in Paul’s light aircraft for a trip to the Bay Area, where they planned to attend that evening’s playoff game between the Oakland A’s and the Boston Red Sox. Something went terribly wrong, and neither Paul nor his passenger survived the emergency landing.
The Paul Mumford Memorial Open Track Challenge is sanctioned by the National Auto Sport Association, and so NASA members were offered track time in between the OTC sessions. I wanted to get the Volvo on track during the OTC as a personal tribute to Paul’s memory, and to be among his close friends, his comrades-in-speed.
One of the first people I met when I got to Thunderhill was Paul Gerrard, who took an immediate interest in my bringing a Volvo S60R to the track. Turns out Gerrard is the lead developmental driver hired by At Speed Motorsports to help re-engineer the S60R into a World Challenge GT contender. At Speed got its S60R from Volvo as a complete car, not a special-order racing shell, so he knows the starting point I’m dealing with quite well. He has no shortage of ideas on how the Volvo can be transformed into a fender-rubbing rival to the Audi S4, Cadillac CTS-V and others in the SPEED WC GT field. Nor does money seem to be short supply. Getting a four car team of production-based sedans like the S60R to perform at the level set by the Cadillac program is an expensive proposition, well into the high six-figures. And along with money, it takes time, precious time.
I got enough time in at Thunderhill, and at Infineon Raceway in Sonoma the following day, to understand the Volvo S60R has potential to be tuned into a competent car for track days, maybe even a star performer. While its turbocharged, twin-intercooled 5-cylinder puts out gobs of power and torque, its chassis is going to need the typical tuner mods: adjustable front coil-overs, stiffer, shorter rear springs, fatter sway bars and a louder exhaust, and it could benefit immensely from a serious carbon-fiber driver’s seat.
But for the moment, my thoughts aren’t on the Volvo, or any other automotive machinery. The only star performer on my mind is Paul Mumford. Now there was a track star.
Rich Conklin is a Senior Writer for RACER magazine
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