While the life of a typical Whitman first-year has its hazards, they generally tend not to expand any further than broomball injuries and ill-advised experimentation with facial hair. Not so with first-year Cameron Benner. When not catching up on sleep and Encounters readings, Benner immerses himself in a life far removed from the typical Whittie experience: the world of competitive auto racing.
When Benner turned 16, an age which found many of his classmates struggling to understand the intricacies of using turn signals, Cameron began attending a school for high-performance driving.
“It started out as a love of driving,” Benner said.
The same feeling of freedom that so many associate with getting their first driver’s license eventually drove Benner, a Portland native, to Track Days, a Portland-based program that caters to driving enthusiasts. Benner says it was his experiences at these casual events that started him down the road to competitive racing.
“At Track Days, you get in different cars and drive them on a racetrack; I got to drive Porsches and Audis, just cruising cars for fun, but I quickly found out I kind of had a talent for it. I was just faster than everyone else, and from there it was sort of a natural progression into racing,” Benner said
Barely two years after Benner stepped out of Driver’s Ed, he found himself in the winner’s circle.
Last summer he won the Oregon Region ITE championship as well as the Oregon Wheel-to-Wheel Rookie of the Year award. It was then Benner knew he had found his calling.
“I really love racing,” Benner said. “I always say, life moves slower at 160 miles per hour.”
As of this month, however, Benner says things are going to start moving a lot faster.
“I didn’t know I’d be driving this year until two week ago. COBB Tuning has been informally sponsoring me for a while, but a few weeks ago I got a call from one of the sponsors saying he’d submitted a projection of costs for the season, and that this year for the first time they’d be putting together a three-car national team, and he offered me a position,” said Benner.
After a negotiation process that included stipulations that Benner appear at press releases, write summaries of his performance and give interviews for the company Web site, the deal was finalized: Benner and the number 21 car he has driven for the past year will be competing in 10 races from California to Florida.
Keeping up with his schoolwork and his racing has been no easy task for Benner. When asked how he juggles school and racing, he just smiles.
“Oh boy. It hasn’t been easy, especially because racing isn’t a Whitman-recognized program,” said Benner. “I’ve had to meet with the dean and my professors, but luckily this semester I’ll mostly be racing on weekends, flying out of Friday nights. My priorities are education first and then racing a distant second.”
Benner has also had to deal with the reality that very few Whitman students care for professional racing, let alone know how it works.
“Most people think, oh, you go in a circle. That’s NASCAR,” he said. “The tour I compete on has cars with 550 horsepower going 165 miles per hour through road courses that have turns all over, left and right, along with elevation and terrain changes, all while competing wheel-to-wheel against other cars going just as fast.”
Red Line Time Attack, the nationwide tour Benner will soon be racing on, is among the first competitive circuits to completely make the change to biofuel. Benner says the switch to biofuel makes sense on a competitive level as well as an ecological one.
“The chemistry behind the biofuels actually generates more horsepower because it burns much more efficiently than leaded fuel,” Benner said.
Benner is also familiar with the hostility felt toward motor sports by environmentalists.
“I always hear people say that racing is horrible for the environment, with terrible emissions, et cetera,” he said. “The reality is that the car companies like Porsche or Audi make for professional racing are the pinnacle of their technology. All the advances you see in new cars for public consumption, all of these technologies were presented in race cars first. They’re looking for that upper edge, stretching their legs, flexing their muscles, getting recognition. That’s why I’m so interested in biofuel. The motor sports industry taking on biofuel will eventually trickle down to the consumer market.”
While he’s more than content enjoying his first-year Whitman experience for the time being, Benner can’t wait to get back on the racetrack.
“You just get in this zone, the driving zone. If you’re worried about risk, you can’t do it,” he said. “If you let the idea of risk integrate its way into the race craft, you might as well not be driving.”
