i found a program on the net called Easy Recorder. the way it works is that any audio that is played through your sound card/windows media player can be directly recorded to your hard drive as either a wav. or mp3. file . i have tried the trial version( only records for 40 seconds) with the archived salt lake city supercross and it worked great. 40 seconds takes up 1.25 mb as an mp3,6.89 mb as a wav. , so my calculations are 4 1/2 hrs approximatly 504 mb, the whole program can easily fit on a cd-r. now i can record the race and listen to it on the way to the races the next day.
this program works for all audio utilizing windows media player , winamp and a few other applications.