Dwight Mitchell Part 4

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Dwight Mitchell, part four. All right, some of the things I want to talk about in this one is he

says like his favorite model is like a 71 911. But when he's saying that, I'm thinking, well, why

couldn't it be a 70? As you see later in the interview, he says he likes the long wheelbase

more than the short wheelbase. So could it just be any like 69 to 73? I mean, 70 and 71 are the

same. They're both 2.2s. And there's a lot that I'm not going to get into about why the 2.2 people

prefer that over the 2.4. Mainly in the fact that like the 2.2 was the last pure car, the 2.4,

they were adding horsepower just to overcome things that like regulations on, I don't even remember.

And then 69 is a two liter. So you can say, oh, I'm a 2.2 liter person. Actually, there was more

like 2.4 guys for the longest time, because it's the last of it, kind of like with the 993. And

I'm overthinking this right now for the audience at home listening to this. But really, my main

question with what I started with is, I don't think any of that stuff really mattered to him.

He was going to alter the car and hot rod it or modify it anyway. So that's why I'm thinking like,

what did it really matter? And maybe it's me just getting on stuck on little things like I hear him

say like the 71. And it's just like, there's probably really no reason for it. And now you hear

me talking about it when really I shouldn't even said anything. But now I'm like wanting to comment

on it. And then when we got into the G body, I felt like his kind of memory was not remembering

things because he's telling me the SC's got the 3.2. And then every time I bring up the Carrera,

he's thinking I'm talking like the two seven Carrera. So I just kind of moved on past that.

But the main thing in this one that we need to get into is I said in the earlier one,

there was something we're probably going to get into later in the episodes.

And when I decided I want to interview him, I called him up and he was like thrilled and

everything was going and we had this long conversation for like, I don't know, he had me

on the phone for like half hour at least. And then he's like, well, I got to go. I got to take my

wife to this appointment, this doctor's appointment, just a normal appointment. So I call him back after

that initial call. And and without going into detail or too much, his wife was stuck in the

hospital. I felt kind of dumb. I didn't I'm just like, I can reach back out to you at another time

or we can just not do this. And he's saying no, call me back. And so for the next couple of weeks,

I either called him back or he called me back. And eventually he called me and said she died.

And he's still wanting to do the interview. He sets it up, tells me what day he wants to do it.

And I'm kind of unsure. So I reach out to friends and family and they're like, you know what,

this might be good for him. Just go with what he says. So I reach back out to him. Are you sure

this is what you want to do? Yes. And then you'll see in the further episodes that my friends and

family were right. But here's Dwight Mitchell part four. Okay, update. He called after listening to

the first part of this and let me know why he prefers 71 specifically. The clutch release mechanism

was improved to a pole clutch in 71 only. Also, the 71 model was the last year of the 901 transmission,

which had had many benefits in his opinion, including a better shift pattern, a wider range of

allowable gear ratios and weighed a lot less than the 915, which came in 72. But that still

doesn't specify the 71 any different than the other ones that could have been 70 had a 901 69

had a 901. I know he didn't like a short wheelbase. I guess just the clutch release mechanism was

improved to the pole clutch in 71 only. He said I'm sure there were some other ones, but he can't

come up with them in the moment. He also said that there were some secrets. I don't know if there were

secrets to the year 71 or there are just secrets and generally told me, but he doesn't want to

mention, but they were legal. Any horror stories with racing or driving? Okay, being at a race and

getting towed away in an ambulance, but did not happen in my car. And in all the racing I did,

I had my share of vendor benders and so forth, but I was never injured in a race car. This was at

a solo two event in Salina, Kansas in 1990. And I had just won the first of my national championship

races. The car had to go to impound or screwed here in to be checked to make sure it was legal.

And somebody had to be with the car was the last race of the day. So I asked one of the guys on

the crew, would you be kind enough to stay with the car? I've got something I want to do.

And he said, Yeah, but bring me a beer. I go case to fine. So we had a little golf cart thing.

And I went racing over to where the motor home was. And we had two ice chests out in front of the

motor home when I had soft drinks, one had beer in it. And I grabbed one of the beers and I started

to get back to the golf cart. I said, Oh, wait a minute. Now, you can't be doing anything without

alcoholic beverages while the event is going on. So I thought, maybe even though it was the last

race, maybe I could get disqualified if I handed the sky on my crew a beer. So I raced back into

the motor home, got you know, those foam cosies you put around the beer or soft drink, grab one of

those when racing down the stairs, caught an edge and flying out of the door. And I ruptured

the quad of my left leg completely ruptured. I'm laying there on the ground in extreme pain,

yelling, dumb shit, dumb shit, dumb shit. And they hauled me away in an ambulance. I told them,

I'm going to drive a race car tomorrow. I just thought I'd blend my knee out, not something

that's severe as a ruptured quad. I talked to this doctor and he finally made me a deal. He said,

Okay, I'll tell you what, he said, I'll give you a nice bandage and a pair of crutches and you're

on your own. Most hospitals never would have done that, but they did. So I was trying to get

around on crutches and I was going to drive the car. The fortunate thing was that I was able to

shift to 9-11 without using the clutch if I had to. Anyway, there was a fellow there with a super

V and he had packed all his car up with a bunch of foam so he didn't slide around. And he got me

in the car and he put a bunch of foam inside the car to support my leg so it wouldn't flop

around. And I was able to get the car started. I was able to lift my leg underneath, left leg,

push it down on the clutch belt, hold it down with my hand on the knee. And then when it time to go,

I was able to pull it off, but I had to shift to using the clutch. And the transmission was

probably not the best to wear, but I didn't win that particular race on the second, but I

know I believe that I ended up winning the championship. I came in off the course and

the guy on re-enter shot me. He said, one of the turn workers called in and said, he heard you

scream. I realized the pain must have been so bad. Oh, I forgot what I was saying. Of course,

I have it. I tried to make one shift with my leg and apparently I screamed loud enough

over the sound of the motors that this turn worker heard me and he called it in. But if it

was severe enough, I couldn't go upstairs in my home. We have two-story house for three years.

I got to tell you, this is going to cool. The next spring, San Francisco region decided to run

an autocross on Sears Point Raceway and she came a couple of corners down and I still had

my leg in what was called a blitz-o-brace, which is like a cast, but it's made with hinges and I

could drive the car. Because of my experience at Sears Point and for a lot of races against guys

that are just autocrossers, I whipped them all with this, including all the Corvettes in Mile 911.

I was all fine and got written up in the SCCA magazine, blah, blah, blah. And I got a call

in morning from this lady in the office of SCCA. He said, I wrote about that article,

you went at Sears Point, congratulations. But guess what? I go, what? I have to pull your license.

What do you mean you got to pull my license? He says, you're getting rehab, medical rehab

for your injury from SCCA and now you're driving, you can't be doing that. And they both, they pulled

my license. And so I had to find a doctor that would sign off and say, he's not going to hurt

himself driving the car. And they gave me my license back a few months later. Yeah.

What's your favorite track or race? I probably, I would probably say Sears Point. If I'd driven

on Laguna Saca with the new course, I probably would have said that. On a sea marine, it's changed

a lot. And when I was there, it was not the same, laid out the same as that why I probably say

Sebring had I driven on that. But on the courses that I drove on, I would say Sears Point,

probably because they didn't have any real scary fast corners on it. And you could be really

aggressive and drive in it and figure if you spin out, you spin out, you're not going to hit anything.

Was one exception was turn 11 or turn 10 at Sears. I lived the carousel and I looked passing cars

on the entrance to Sears Hill. And I, can I tell you a story about a race that I drove where you

started last? Yeah. Okay. Anyway, in the customer car, it was a 9-11 and it was at Sears Point.

And it was a national race, a regional national. And we had done some changes in the oiling system

in the car. And we had took care of the oil tank, which is in the front of the car.

And one of the guys in the shop put it back in the car. And everything was fine, went down there.

And I took the car out for the first practice session in the morning. And I could feel the engine

was starting to start it up. So I shut it off, coasted into the course. And I turned to my

technician. Did you clean that oil tank out before you put it in the car? He goes, no.

And it had put out some welding on it. And the guy that did all the welding, which was an outside

contractor, he put this thing in with things and metals in the oil. Anyway, so Millage was there,

he was in racing. And ours was the first race of the day. It was at Sears Point. And so about a

little over an hour drive to Sears Point, something like that. We put the car in the trailer. I

called up a parts house that I used, but had a set of bearings that were the right bearings.

Put an all-nighter, took the engine out. Fortunately, it was an air-cooled car. So I

get to take all the cylinder heads and everything on the upper end of the car and just set it aside

and split the case. Anyway, rebuilt the case, put it in, put everything back in the car and got back

in the paddock area by about seven o'clock in the morning. Of course, then qualified. So I had to

start at the back of the pack. And it was a pretty good sized field. The first race was the regional

race. And there was a guy that raced at Jaguar back when I was racing named Merle Brennan,

who was a very good racer. And he told me at a separate event that he had some kind of problem.

He started at the back of the pack. And when he was in pretty good in the paddock area,

he started going up to all the guys in the last five or six rows, who pretty much were very fast,

a little 10 minutes, so forth. He was well known. I was well known. And he would go up to the drivers

and say, I just want to let you know I'm back there and I'm coming through. And he said,

when that happened with the green flight drop, the two rows of the grid just separated. I passed

like 12 cars before the first corner. So I said, I'm going to try that. So I did it. And sure

enough, the grid in front of me just gave me this right up. And I finished second or third overall

of the 30 minute race. Oh, I would have one more lap. But I would have asked the winner to the second

and the national race. I finished third. Of course, I couldn't hear it. But there was a spectator race.

There was an answer. And the announcer was following me through the pack. And my wife was

telling me that about the only car who the announcers were talking about was me moving

through the pack. And how exciting it was that they could tell my progress and all the cars I

passed. That was a very, very fun thing. And watching this, the two lines just separating

and giving me this, my turn two, I'm sure I'd passed 10 cars.

Any race car team that you wish you could have been a part of?

Factory Porsche, obviously. But back in those days, people got killed driving race cars.

And I had a wife and two kids. And I probably could have been a semi-professional driver,

maybe even a pro. And I can remember when I was driving the 914, I remember driving down the road.

I came to a theoretical fork in the road. Should I turn left and try to be a professional race

car driver? Or should I turn right and take care of my wife and kids? And I chose to go to the

right. But because I was pretty good, I had many options to continue racing. And it was one of

the reasons I did autocrossing because the likelihood of getting hurt and an autocross

was pretty remote. But as I told you on the phone last week, my wife was 66 years passed away,

but we could go today. She was very supportive of racing. And the fact that I could still

support my wife and kids and still race was obviously was the right decision.

Yeah. Do you have any regrets with your career?

I think there is one, but I don't think I can remember it.

Yes, there is. And then there was a 914-6 that I prepared. There was only one individual in Texas

who had a bunch of money. Again, I was doing an instant trading of cost against being able to

drive a car. I think this was the first time. It was the same time I drove in the 24-hour race.

And so I was fairly familiar with it. Well, I was trying to keep the cost down,

and there's a component in the 911s called a cam carrier. The racing versions had four

bearing carriers. The street ones only had three. And I looked at it and said,

it'll be fine. It'll be fine. So I did not go to the expense of buying a racing cam carrier.

I put the street one in. And with two hours to go in the day to only 24 hours, we weren't going

to win, but we were doing well. And the cam broke. Racing cam had a bearing loss, but there was no

where there should have been a bearing supporting it, but there was no bearing supporting it.

And I had made that decision and not replaced that part. That's the last time I did any work

on a race car and compromised any parts that I put on the car. I was done in the car when it broke,

when the other guys was, but I figured I could nurse it the last two hours. And he talked about

bearing, flooring, racing. Today's only 24 hours where he only had five cylinders.

He finished the race anyway. Way down the line, but anyway.

What advice would you give to someone that wanting to get into autocross?

Drive a go-kart first. And do go a step at a time. I had a number of customers,

they had a car and they wanted to train an autocross car. They wanted to do everything

right up front. And there was one fellow, he did Porsche Coke time trialing. And there wasn't much

we could have done of the car and didn't do as a lot of money. His son drove the car

fairly good, but he was just never vast enough. The car unfortunately finally got total park

out on the street. He was in a class, the car had to look pretty much stuck, but underneath he could

do a lot of different things and a lot of tricks he could do. Many people would bring me a 911.

I wanted to do everything that everybody else says and they'd go out and they'd expect it to

some way faster time. And it'd be the same time that we did all the work on it. And they kind

of complained, why is my car faster? I said, the car is faster. You are not. So I learned early on

that if somebody came to the shop with that request to do everything you can do to the car,

I sent him down and talked to him and told him, you are not going to be fast until you become

fast. It's not the car at you. And so I learned the hard way because the guy that was one of my

early customers, and of course he badmouthed me, oh, I took his joint, spent all that money,

and I wouldn't any faster. That was a big wish of mine. And not people knew me that they pretty

much discounted it, but I didn't like having the talk that way. So I decided to be forearm and

tell people they're doing this that if you're getting started out across private stock,

see how fast he goes, dead stock, and then we'll go from there. So that's what we did.

What advice would you give to someone trying to excel at driving?

Get a coach. Get a really good coach. There's a lot of people that made money and they retired

from racing and became pretty good coaches. I'm trying to think of the guy who lives up in

E rights for excellence. Oh, E afar was a very good coach. I did coaching, but not in race cars.

Vanderbreek, something Vanderbreek, Vanderbreek.

Johannes, Johannes von. Yeah, he was professional drivers and he drove one class down in prototypes

and he was very good. He now rides and he drives car, I guess he does some road tests

and stuff like that. Get a good mechanic and get a good coach. Actually, that's the third thing.

Pick a target. Pick the guy that is the fastest guy in your class in the same kind of car

and compare your lap times to his lap times. And nowadays with all the computer stuff,

you can do segment times too. A lot of the teams do this. I'll take our teams, but if one guy is

a little slower, they'll look at the graphs and so forth that were really faster. But back in the

days, amateur racing, there were no computers in cars, although I have a funny story to tell you

about that too, which I'd like to get in. Bob John Millage. We're in the speech here. John, at the time,

was a computer programmer for Lockheed and he ran across some old old computer, found this thing that

was a look like computer and it had a tape drive on it and he rigged it up so that it would work.

It didn't log any data. It wouldn't connect to anything. We made it look like it was connected to

places in the car, cars, and we pulled up to pre-grid for the practice session.

Somebody looked at it and said, you go back there. We're going to try doing some computer

calculations on how we can make the car faster. And we made this big deal about when we came in,

back in the attic area, we were very secretive and we kept this thing covered and then we uncovered

and we went in one of our cars and looked at the data. It didn't show anything,

but we spoke to a lot of people. God, twice got a computer in his car.

True story, true story. We had a lot of fun. I won the race too and people were going around saying,

how could he do this? Well, it was a joke. Yeah. And Nick, I got a big kick out of it.

Yeah. Okay. Do you know much about Porsches? I was going to ask you more streetcar or Porsche

questions. Okay. So are you air-cooled or water-cooled? I'm an air-cooled guy. I sold the business

before the water-cooled came out. PDK or manual? Well, it depends on why you go faster, have fun.

You go faster in PDK and you have more satisfaction doing heel-toe, heel-and-toe downshifting.

Another true story. When I had this Triumph TR3, I would sit in my garage and practice rotating

my right foot to push on the brake pedal and the S-pedal at the same time. And I got really good

at it. And in autocrossing, I got really, really good at heel-toe downshifting. There's a fellow

that I worked with, was a gun enthusiast in the class he was at. The instructor was an autocrosser.

He was getting on not a shotgun and fired faster. The driver used an analogy of heel-toe downshifting

and he said, there's this guy named Dwight Mitchell and he was the best at heel-toe downshifting.

He got a practice practice practice. And one of my colleagues, the company I worked for,

was in there. He came in the next day and told me the story about my name came up as an example of

how to shoot a gun faster. True story. The fact that this came up in a gun class to get licensed

was crazy. Anyway, fire away, doctor. Favorite model series, Porsche. The most fun,

probably in early 9-11. The car was bought for a reason because it was light. It was very

user-friendly, handled beautifully, didn't have any faults. The later cars, like the turbos,

of course, the early turbos were called widow makers. I drove a lot of them, but they were dangerous.

9-14s, because they're so well balanced and you can do almost anything with them.

To me, it's a toss-up between the 739-14 2-liter and the 719-11, which I both had pleasure owning.

I owned some 914-6s that I bought in the shop just to make a little bit of money on. And I restored

one. I still like my 4-7 better. And all the autocrossing I did, only once ever was beaten

by 9-14, because of 9-14-6, only one time. Do you remember Dave Coleman, who wrote for

Excellence for a while? He had a beautiful 9-14-6 GT. I don't know if it was a genuine GT

or a conversion, it was probably a conversion, but he could never beat me with my 4-7 on a 9-14.

So there used to be the Porsche Corvette Challenge autocross once a year, and we competed

with Porsche people against Corvette people. It was all for fun, obviously. But the Corvette guys

never could understand how this little 9-14 could beat this big, bruising Corvettes.

So what about Short Wheel Base or the 69-73?

Oh, 69-73, definitely.

And would you say the Long Hood or the Classic 9-11 or G-Body?

Long Hood. G-Bodies getting too heavy. And they had the 2-7 motor in it,

which turned out to be a real dog, as you probably know. There's a lot of people that

took the G-Bodies and built them up and went fast in them. In fact, the guy, the boy 9-11,

always autocrossed it with the 2-7 motor. It came with the 2-2, but it was legal to put the 2-7 in

and I was never beaten by a G-Series car that had everything done to it. Never once,

and it was because it was lighter weight. And I made a point of doing everything I could legally

to make it light, like lightweight seats, lightweight battery, and keep everything magnesium.

I never used any aluminum engines. And the car just worked better. It had the combination

and that may be something like, what's the name of the guy that builds all the

multi-million dollar conversions? Singer. Singer, yeah. And that's one of the reasons he started

with the Long Hood, early Long Hood cars, because they're so light. They're based on a 964 body,

but he makes them look older. They were converted back to look like a Long Hood.

Right. Yes. Sorry. I apologize for that. Yes, you're absolutely correct.

So SC or Carrera 3-2?

A 73 or 74 Carrera. No, I'm talking like 78 to 83 SC or 84 to 89 Carrera 3.2.

The earlier Carrera's, there was definitely mechanicals. I worked on so many SC's,

3-2 SC's. There was a 78 Carrera, a 77 Carrera. Okay. Nice. I can draw. It's been 30 years since

I had my shot. Okay. What about 964, 993? 993. Do I go in the water cooled or you don't know?

I've never driven a water cooled. Okay. Well, that's not true. Our son-in-law had a water cooled

boxter and he also bought a water cooled 911, but they just feel heavy to me. I went to the

Colin Chapman School of Braves for our building, and lightness.

Thanks for joining us for today's episode. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe,

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Goodbye for now. We hope we can get together again for our next episode. Now get out there

and enjoy the cars and the people.

Dwight Mitchell Part 4

About this episode

Porsche 911

2.2

horsepower

2.2 liter

pole clutch

901 transmission

Porsche 915

autocross

Chevrolet Corvettes

SCCA

Sears Point

Laguna Seca

Sebring

air-cooled car

paddock area

Porsche 914

cam carrier

lap times

amateur racing

computer programmer

water-cooled

PDK

heel-toe downshifting

Triumph TR3

widow makers

Porsche 914-6

Singer Vehicle Design

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