An autocrosser is someone who races their car in a special type of competition where they drive through a course marked by cones. It's about how fast and accurately they can complete the course.
Mazda is a car company from Japan that makes different types of vehicles, including sports cars and family cars. They are well-known for their small, fun-to-drive cars like the Miata.
PCA is a club for people who love Porsche cars. They organize fun events where members can drive their Porsches and meet other fans.
Car
Porsche Targa
The Porsche Targa is a type of Porsche car that has a roof you can take off, making it feel like a convertible while still being strong like a regular car. It's known for its unique design.
The Porsche 911 is a famous sports car that many people love. The 1967 version is special because it's one of the earlier models and is very popular among car collectors.
Car
Porsche Speedster
The Porsche Speedster is a special version of a Porsche car that is lighter and faster. It's designed for a fun driving experience and is popular among car enthusiasts.
Turn 11 is just one of the corners on a racetrack. Tracks have different turns, and they are numbered to make it easier to talk about where you are on the track.
A guard rail is a barrier that keeps cars from going off the road. It's like a fence for the road that helps keep drivers safe, especially in dangerous areas.
The Porsche 917/30 is a famous race car from the early 1970s. It was built for racing and is known for being very fast and powerful, with a unique design that helped it win many races.
DNFed means did not finish. It means the racer couldn't complete the race, often due to problems with the car or other issues.
Car
Mazda 914
The Mazda 914 is often confused with the Porsche 914, a sports car known for its distinctive look and performance. It's a fun car to drive and has a unique design.
The Porsche 935 is another racing version of the Porsche 911, famous for its speed and unique design. It was built to compete in endurance races and is very powerful.
Car
Porsche 934
The Porsche 934 is a special racing version of the popular Porsche 911 sports car. It's built for racing and has features that make it faster and more competitive.
A lap record is the fastest time someone has completed a lap on a racetrack. It's a big deal in racing because it shows how fast a car can go and how good the driver is.
E Production is a type of racing class where cars are allowed to be modified from their original production versions. This means they can be made faster and more competitive while still being based on regular cars.
Slicks are special racing tires that don't have any grooves or patterns on them. This helps them grip the road better, especially in dry conditions, making them faster for racing.
Pole position is the best starting place in a race, right at the front. It means you get to start the race first, which is an advantage because no other cars are in front of you.
LIVE
Welcome to Porsche Pattern with Bracken Helms, the show where we hear Bracken and his distinguished
guests from the Porsche community patter on about Porsches and all things automotive.
Porsche Pattern is sponsored by Circuits Explore. Circuits Explore creates authentic
automotive apparel made for life-minded automotive enthusiasts. The links for Circuits Explore are
in the shown notes. Okay, let's get to it.
Dwight Mitchell, part seven. All right, this is the final episode with Dwight Mitchell.
We start out with Terry Zicconi. He tells some stories about Terry Zicconi. Then he jumps into
the story about the Cal Expo, a race at Cal Expo, which is kind of out of left field. He just goes
into it and he's talking about Bob and I text him and ask him, because I didn't want to stop him
during the story. I thought he was going to get to it, but I texted him just last week and I'm
like, who the hell is Bob? We're talking about Terry Zicconi and all of a sudden you start bringing
up Bob. So he texts me back. Bob Peake, Peake, Peake was in our 914. As the story that Bob told me
goes, he asked a well-respected 914 autocrosser and a leading Formula V driver, Larry Wilson,
can I go flat out through the right hander onto the back straight? According to Bob, Larry answered,
yes. Well, based on what Wilson told him, Peake tried to take the corner in third gear without
lifting. Guess what? Bob didn't succeed. Had a massive spin. As he talks about in this, he has
a massive spin on the outside corner, kicked up a bunch of dust and dirt and had to clean it up.
I had to wait several seconds for the dust and dirt to settle down and see what my 914,
whether it was undamaged or not. But it just needed a significant wash job. As the story
continues, after returning to the pavement, Bob drove my car into the pit area and went looking
for Wilson. When Peake found Wilson, he said to him, you told me I could go. I could go flat
out in that corner. But look what happened when I tried to do that. Wilson with a totally straight
face looked at Peake and explained, you asked me if I, meaning Wilson, could take the corner
without lifting. But if you had asked me, can you, meaning Peake, take the corner without
lifting, I would have said no way. Wilson then turned around giggling to himself, looked back
at Peake and said something like, got you. So that's what he's talking about. Like there's a
race at Cal Expo and he tries to go flat out and makes a big dust storm and the car's filthy and
they got to clean it out. Then he talks about his sister. Then he talks about his teammate.
And he said his teammate's name, which is a pretty well known name during the interview,
but then later said, I want you to take his name out. So I was able to take it out in once,
he says it twice. So I was able to take it out in one spot and it kind of was okay,
not too awkward. But then the other spot, there was no way because it would have sounded like he
was talking about, I can't remember the guy's name, but the guy he was talking about right before,
like I come in and I try to clarify it. So you'll see it. You'll see what I mean.
Then he tells a pretty humorous story about coming up behind a Mazda. That was pretty good.
But I'm really, really, really pleased that Dwight let me do this interview because like I said,
I'd called him. I already explained this. I'd called him and talked to him on the phone for
like a bunch and he's like, yeah, let's do this interview. Then I called him the next week and
he's like, right after I got the phone off the phone with you, I went to the hospital just for
a routine thing and my wife like all of a sudden couldn't walk and then he kept telling me, like
I've said in previous intros, you know, please keep calling me because I felt dumb. I'm like,
your wife's going through some stuff. I'm not going to keep bugging you. Like let's just
let this go away. And no, no, I want to do this. I want to do this. And then she died and I'm like,
oh God, this is like really awkward. And then I was like, you know, but he wanted to do it. And I,
you know, I was talking to like friends, like, what am I supposed to do? Is he just saying that?
And they're like, no, he probably wants to get his mind off of it. Just keep going by what he
tells you to do. Like I'm glad that he did the interview with me, but I was a little bit hesitant,
but you can see at the end of here, like I feel a lot better after the interview because it helped
him. So that was good. And it helped him and it turned out like everything went well. So this is
the end of Dwight Mitchell, but I have been keeping in contact with him. So hopefully things are
good in his life. All right. Dwight Mitchell, part seven. I did one autocross years and years ago,
but that was like a, it wasn't through PCA. It was like a beginner's thing done by
that one guy was there. The guy that's really good at autocross, he just died.
What kind of car?
Like a like a Targa, like a sixties Targa. It's got a name, Marcell.
Oh, it's a Chari Zagoni.
Yeah. So he was one of the guys that put it on. It was like a big, it was only beginner's course.
It wasn't like competitive.
We were extremely good. He had a 67 soft Targa. I think the last time I checked,
he had over 400,000 miles on the car. He would drive to all the Porsche parades. He'd go on
tours. He was a zone seven wrapped at one time. And he was a very good driver. Any time trial for
a while, he didn't want lost for buddies. He was a part owner in Walt's time trial car.
Somehow he was convinced that turn three at Sears Point, he should be able to take it,
flood out their gear. It wasn't possible, but he tried it. He didn't make it. He spun out,
didn't hit anything. And he came in, he started billiarding and he said,
well, you told me you could return three, flood out. He says, I was just teasing you.
There was no arm done or anything like that, fortunately. That's the true story.
For some reason, they had an autocross to Cal Expo. It was on paid lords. There was dirt around
all the corners. Depending upon how it was, a person could go through, flood out.
So Bob said, can I go through, turn three, flood out? Oh yeah, if you can, he could go through it.
Well, he didn't make it. And he bit two 180s. There's so much dust, I could not see the car.
I didn't know if he got upside down or what it was. But the inside, the outside, everywhere in the car
was a mess. Took him a week to clean up the car. This is after the Concord one.
This here is the killing story. He had won his class in an autocross and I had won mine pretty
easily. So in this fun session we do at the end of the day, we switch cars. He beat me in mine
and I beat him in his. That's crazy. It's very close times, but he beat me in mine and I beat
him in his. Figure that, but fortunately, didn't count for points. One last story,
true story. I swear this is my last one. My sister was literally a world-famous sailboat racer.
One of the years of the America's Cup, she sold the winner their sails. Anyway, whenever somebody
would come in our shop and says they had a sailboat, I would ask this guy, do you know
Jocelyn Nash? I said, she's my sister. Conversely, when she had a customer of hers
that had a Porsche, she said, do you know a Porsche guy named Dwight Mitchell?
And they usually did too. Anyway, this one guy, he had a Columbia 50 big boat and I walked to
his office one day and he said, how's it going, right? I said, some goddamn broad at the sailmaking
company pulling up some sails for my sailboat and I said, okay, it could be my sister.
Anyway, so I said, what company are you getting from? And he told me, it was my sister.
And I said, was it in Jocelyn? He said, yeah, how do you know that? I said, she's my sister.
He stopped for a minute and looked up at my totally straight face. She's still a damn broad.
She was just as competitive. She actually, at one time, was on the cover of a life magazine.
She was a beautiful woman. She had an IQ somewhere off the charts. She knew how to
deal with people. And she was a real pioneer in getting women into sailboat racing.
She was 91 when she passed away, which was not that long ago.
Some friends tried to get a movie with her life and made a pilot of it,
but they never could get the funding to make it a real one. There's a sailboat race.
There's sailboats. No boat is really like that. From San Bernardino to Harvard to Hawaii. I think
it's either every other year. And she crewed or was a crew chief on a boat one year. And one year,
she decided she was going to sail it single-handed from California to Hawaii. Unfortunately,
she didn't make it. Something happened to the boat mechanical. She had to turn around.
And she always regretted like me was that part of the portion that
somebody she'd overlooked. She was more famous for sailboat racing by far than I ever was in
the Porsche community. Was there anything else that you overlooked or frustrating things that
happened in your racing career? Probably the disappointment we had was running the 914 for
the dealers. The speedster was built by Porsche. The 914 was built by Volkswagen. So there were a
lot more things that we had to change on the 914 to make it raceable than you had to do on the
speedster. There were a lot of things that like the shift linkage, they finally changed
into 73 on the side shifter. And the brakes were terrible. I remember in the speedster,
I could go to the top of the hill or the corkscrew, go over the top of the hill,
and break the speedster down and get through the corner. The first time I tried it in the 914,
I went sailing off the escape road. I go, well, I guess you get the 914 and it stopped, but it's
fast. I never had a lap time as a 914 as I had in the speedster. It was always just a little bit
faster. And the speedster finished every lap of every race we ever ran. And the guys that bought
it, when he bought it, it ran every race. But that car until it was crashed, finished every lap
of every race. I was very proud of that. Yeah. And won a lot of them.
And then I think you told me this story or I read it somewhere. I don't even know what track you
were at, but a teammate said you couldn't go through the kink flat out. So you lifted and cars flew
by you and then you made it back. You battled back to second, but then you wrecked at the very end
trying to get that first place spot. That was Rotolanta. The SCCH championships Rotolanta.
Been embarrassing. It was raining. And at that time, the paddock area were on, he would call,
the far side of the turn. I think it was turn 11 because the start and finish was around the corner.
Nowadays, everyone at the paddock area is all on the inside of that last turn.
The entry to the old paddock area was on the outside of that last turn and you kind of came
out under the bridge. And mostly I noticed most of the guys were not using all the road coming out.
Any race, they'll tell you, you want to use all the road to keep the speed up. Anyway,
the turn after the bridge, I think the bridge turn was turn 11. And they didn't have the
tank in the bridge before the bridge they have now. So you're hitting this bridge at the top
speed of the car and look, it was raining and so forth. And so I was right behind one of the
Havaker cars. And I said, okay, he's not using all the road. I'm going to go all the road and
go up to the lane to reenter the paddock area. Well, I couldn't tell because the elevation
was such that sitting low in the car, I couldn't see the pavement itself. And I didn't realize
that a bunch of Georgia clay had run down and gotten into that particular lane, which is why
other people weren't going out there. And I thought I was being sitting smart going out there.
And as soon as I went out there, I hit this motor, whatever you want to call it. And I was
a goner. I spun and hit the inside guard rail. So it wasn't necessarily that your teammate told
you you could go flat out. It had more to do with you thought you could get around with that clay.
That morning of the race, the car would not start for us for some reason, never really figured it
out. And so there are a couple of cars had spun in the what they call the dip toward the end of
the long straightway around Atlanta. And there's a slight kink. He probably don't remember what
Mark Donahue, when he was around the 91730 managed to flip his car during a practice session there
had a big crash and it was hurt. So everybody knew, okay, gotta be careful in the what they call
the kink. So it was my teammate at the time. I went up to him and asked him if he could go through
in the rain, go through the king flat out again, he told me no, but he gave me the wrong information.
This was on the first lap of the race, but I think I was either second or third in position.
I came to the kink and I lifted just for a moment. And about six red cars must have passed me.
I don't tell you what I thought, but I was not a happy hammer.
Yeah, I mean, I remember asking the first part of the question where I was like,
you lifted and then you tried to make it back. But then yeah, you were second and then you wrecked
at the very end, then you were telling me that story. Okay. The lift occurred in the kink on the
first lap of the race. And the spin out on the turn after the can go after you come out under
the bridge was probably two or three laps before the end. Lee Mueller was the guy that I was following.
Okay, this is another spot where I had to take out the driver's name because
if I didn't, it wouldn't have made sense. The other spot I was able to take it out and
it didn't sound too awkward, but this would sound like the guy he was talking about previous
got disqualified. But no, it was his co-driver that he wanted me to take the name out.
He was leading the race at the time, but he got DQed because the frame tires he put on were mounted
on rims. They're wider than the rules allowed. So he actually got DNFed because he didn't fail.
And Mueller ended up winning the race. If I had passed him, I would have won the race. Okay.
I have another fun story. Did I tell you about the Mazda when I passed three times in the middle
of the night? No. I did a triple spin in the middle of the night, particularly 914. A lot of the cars
put lights up on the deck lid at night, so you had a lot of lights. But the 914s, as you know,
pop up headlights. So I decided, let's not open them unless we need them. They didn't have all
the lighting on the infield section. Anyway, there was a Mazda and I don't know who the driver was,
but I came up sometime behind him in the infield section and I flipped the headlights up. And if
you were in a car at night, none of it was, you immediately thought, oh, that had to be 934, 935.
And they pulled over. Well, we were in the same class and we were racing for position.
And I flipped these lights up. The guy pulls over and lets me go by. I said, thank you very much.
And oh, I don't know, somewhere, maybe in the second step, came up behind him again,
flipped the lights up. And I could see him. He hesitated and then he pulled over and
let me pass him again. And the third time I came up behind him, flipped the lights up.
I saw him lift his middle finger, giving me the finger. And he stayed on. He didn't let me pass.
And after the race was over, he came up and we were chatting about it. But the third time was
not the charm. But it was going up on a fun thing. So when you got the lap record at Laguna
Seca, what year was that? That would have been 71. And that was in the Speedster. What class?
E production. How long did that record stand? Well, I don't know. I really don't. I know that
nobody beat it in 72 or 73. That was set when there were no slicks. And when people start putting
the slicks on, everybody went around and flat out. I don't remember. I know it was not broken
one of the 914. I was raised to the 914. Nobody broke it then. Because I think the first year,
the 914, there were no slicks. And the second year, 73, they aligned it to Flare's offenders.
And we had slicks in 73. I thought for sure, I'd break the record. And I never did.
Even with those slicks. I have this little threat that a lot of people caught up on later. But
in qualifying, SSA qualifying, you lined up at a pre-grid while the group before you was on track.
And what I learned fairly on, that the best place to be is the first place in the line on
pre-grid. Because nobody can pass you on that time. So I would go out and I'd go really slow and
back all the traffic up. And when I, like, as we're going to get up the top of the hill,
and then I'd nail it. And I had a clear track for probably two-thirds of the session with no
traffic at all. And everybody else had a deal with traffic. A lot of people were not happy with
what I did. But it worked. And it's all part of the game. So they used to have racers to see who
could be the first one on a pre-grid. There was something about when you do get a pole position
and setting up for the race, and you're the first car in line for the race to start. And people
would walk up and look and look and look. That was a good eagle-filling feeling you got
in sitting there, being the first car in line for the race.
Yeah. That's all my questions.
Oh darn, I was just getting warmed up. You've put up with me for quite a while. I'm impressed that
you have. So I thank you for the time you've taken and the honor that you've given me by
having me on. And some of the names that you've spoken with, as I included amongst those names,
is a real honor for me. You've got a very, very attractive smile and laughter, which I appreciate.
So how far have we done? I'm having a good time. And I'm telling you, I intentionally did this with
you because it got me off of crying and thinking about my life. You've been a big help in helping
me do that. And as I'm speaking to those words right now, I'm afraid I'm going to tear up.
It's been very good help for me. Good. To me, it's probably the best three and a half hours I've
ever spent. I mean, that sincerely, you've made me feel comfortable. You've made sense. And you let
me talk, help me as I was trying to get through the most difficult time of my life. Yeah.
That counts for a lot. I generally enjoyed our time and look forward to giving you as a friend,
maybe we could talk again from time to time.
Thanks for joining us for today's episode. If you enjoyed the show,
please subscribe, comment, like and share with your friends. Feel free to send questions or
suggestions to the email in the description of the show. Special thanks to our sponsor,
Circuit64. 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.
About this episode
Dwight Mitchell shares captivating stories from his racing days, including a humorous mishap at Cal Expo involving a 914 and a miscommunication with a fellow driver, Bob Peake. The episode also touches on Dwight's sister, a renowned sailboat racer, and their shared competitive spirit. As the final installment of their conversation, Bracken Helms reflects on the emotional journey of conducting this interview amidst personal challenges in Dwight's life. The episode is filled with nostalgia, racing anecdotes, and a heartfelt connection to the Porsche community.
Dwight Mitchell is known in Porsche circles for his dominance in PCA AX and as a 5 time SCCA Champion. 2 ASP Solo 2 National titles. 2 Class SPI Pro Solo Championships.
In this episode we talk about: -Terry Zaccone -Race at the Cal Expo. -SCCA National Championship and a teammate that gave bad information. -Funny story at Daytona.
