Earlier this year, broadcast announcer Deryl Morley at RLMtv.com started referring to Mark Howland as “Two Sheets” during a televised Sim-Race at Daytona. The reason for this odd nickname was because, as Deryl put it, “His racing bio took up two whole sheets of paper.” Well, no one can argue with that. Since 1995, Howland has raced Street Stocks, Late Models, Limited Late Models, Open Wheel Modifieds, and even some 4 Cylinder Stocks. Prior to his days as a racecar driver he was racing snow mobiles, with a modified championship in the books and a 14th place finish at the 1995 I-500 International Snowmobile Race.
So how did he make the jump from snow to asphalt? “I had been racing snow mobiles circle track for about five years or so when my cousin moved up from Detroit. He was into stock car racing at Flatrock. My cousin asked me if I was interested in going in halves with him on a car. A guy at Onaway had a Bomber for sale, which was an entry level class. I hocked a couple of guns to get the money to buy it. When I got it home my wife said that I couldn’t race both. The car seemed safer than the snowmobiles, where your butt is always hanging out there and someone can run over you if you fall off, so I went with the car.” The deal was for Mark and his cousin to trade off driver duties week to week.
Mark laughed when recounting his first time at the wheel. “I chickened out! At Onaway you basically have an embankment that goes right up into a cement wall. I saw a car get towed back into the pits all smashed to hell and that was it. I couldn’t get in the car.” Howland fared a bit better the next time his turn came up and when it was his third time behind the wheel, he won. Not too shabby for only his second actual start.
Although he got his start at Onaway, there is no question that Howland calls Kinross Speedpark home. He has been racing there since it opened in 1995 and he has had at least one first place finish there every year since. Howland’s favorite Kinross memory is winning the Flagman 50 in open Wheel Modifieds. The featured event was a fifty lap invitational, with a large field of drivers from Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin and both Upper and Southern Michigan. The purse was $2,000.00 and Mark was starting on the outside front row. His crew chief, John Mayer, had been telling Howland just to save the tires and keep the leader in sight. Mark did exactly that and it paid off big time. “I was running third and this guy from Indiana comes shooting past me. He was sideways, this way, that way, all over the place and there was no way I was going to try and race him for fear he’d wreck me. He caught the leader and at that point I knew what was going to happen. Pretty soon it was just a big cloud of smoke and dust. One car went high, one went low and I just picked the right line that went right through the middle of them.“ When the race restarted with twelve laps to go, his tire conservation efforts allowed him to easily pull away from the rest of the field and take the checkered. Besides the $2,000.00 purse, he received about another $1,000.00 worth of prizes, which was the highest paid win in Open Wheel Modified for the region that year.
Howland has been racing on line for almost six years. He purchased NASCAR Racing 2003 when it was released and did lots of off-line racing originally. “I really didn’t know too much about computers at the time, so all I did was put in the CD and drove. After more than a year, I finally figured out how to go on-line and began racing on some open servers. Those open servers were pretty frustrating,” Mark said about his introduction to Sim-Racing. An open-server is usually a host machine with no on-track supervision, that anyone can connect to and race on. The good thing about an open-server is that they provide many folks with their first opportunity to race against other people instead of the computer. The bad thing about an open server is the unlimited supply of whiz-bang, Ricky Bobby wannabes that have more fun wrecking people than they do actually racing. Eventually Howland hooked up with the Red Dog Racing League (reddogracing.net) where you can find him racing every day except Thursday, when he is over at Blazin’Pedals (blazinpedals.com), who are the hosts for the Michigan Circle Track Sim-Racing League.
When asked what he thought about the MCT-SRL short track series, Howland says that he loves it. “Folks should definitely come over and try it out. Caution flags have been a bit of an issue as some new comers have been learning, but there is an excellent core group of guys and when we are racing, the competition has been great! But, I’ve got to say that running these short tracks in “hardcore” mode is going to be tough for a lot of drivers.” What Howland was referring to is the fact that the short track series will eventually be as close to driving a real car as you can get while sitting in front of a computer. There are various settings for things like how much damage a car gets, steering assistance, or being able to drive the car from an arcade-game point of view, where you are looking down at the car from above. Over the next month, all of the “game” features will be phased out.
These days Howland Sim-Races almost exclusively so that he can spend more time at home with his loving wife Alivia and 2 1/2 year old son Garrett, although he still makes a couple of appearances a year at Kinross for fun. He really enjoyed his experience in a 4 cylinder stock last year, saying that it was kind of like a restrictor-plate race short track style. Howland, who was driving a car he borrowed from Don Dangler, had to start at the end of the longest line in an invitational race with a large field. He won a heat race and finished in the top ten in the main. “If you messed up in a corner you just lost so much speed that it was a lap or two before you could get back up to speed because they have no power. It was so much fun! You can talk about the big V8 cars that have a lot of grip, but those little 4 cylinder cars were more fun than driving my Late Model and there were a lot more of them to deal with.”
I did take away a bid of advice from our conversation: Do not attempt to take it three-wide in turn three at Northern Michigan Speedway. If you do try it, be prepared to get towed out of the woods.
