April in review

Road Atlanta has come and gone, and I was far to slack to write a blog about it. Suffice it to say I started 26th Saturday, finished 27th and 4th in class. Sunday I started 26th again, and finished 16th overall. My tire conservation strategy paid off, even on nearly corded Hoosiers. It was enough to get my 3rd in a class of 6 ST-2 drivers, for my first podium finish in such a large field.

Two weekends later, I attended an event at Seat-Time to instruct. Jon puts on a fantastic show and we got over 4 hours of track time in two days. If anyone hasn’t tried it out yet, you are really missing out! Seat-Time.com



Which brings us to Rockingham. With three races down, I only needed one more to complete my Provisional and earn my full race license. Lucky for me The Rock offers 4 races that weekend to choose from. With no one else in ST-2 that weekend, I threw on my street tires and brought the RX-7 out for some fun. Saturday’s first race was a total crap shoot on my part. I started in 9th and took the track for my warm up lap. The Rock is just too short to get enough heat in the tires and brakes, and my brain is a bit to dense to put that together. On the start lap, I passed two cars in the oval, and took a Cobra under braking into turn 3. Unfortunately, as I dove down and hit my brake marker, I realized that the temps just weren’t there in my brakes or tires to make the corner. I should have known better, but I ended up spinning in front of the Cobra, and off the track. In three turns I managed to go from 9th to 6th, then 10th. The rest of the race was spent trying to catch the rest of the field to finish 9th overall.

The second race of the day was much more fun. Combined groups gave me a starting position of 16th in a field of 30ish. With more of the cars in front being E30’s, I wasn’t too worried about getting by. I knew my car was faster coming out of turns, and very slow in them (thank you street tires), so I played the “dive and stuff” to get by the 8 Lightning cars I needed to and catch up to the CMC guys. The rest of the race was a fantastic battle with me in the middle of two CMC cars. While the RX7 has the power to weight advantage, the CMC cars on RA1’s were considerably faster in the turns. Finally, the battle was decided when both cars dropped out, netting me a solid 7th place finish. Unfortunately, the Megasquirt decided to act up and the car was unable to make Sundays races.

But fear not readers, for I was not to be car-less on Sunday. Chris Fairchock brought his 1995 M3 out to spectate, and it was a perfect TTD candidate. After a quick tech, we swapped the transponder and started to go after the TTD record of 1:11.3 at The Rock. The day was a fantastic mix of torrential rain and drying out periods that assisted my in some beautiful drifts. During the rain sessions, I gave rides to a bunch of workers and brushed up on my slide techniques.



As the track dried out, I started clipping out some fast times in the borrowed car. The last session of the day was the only really dry one, so I ditched the passengers, and started going for the record. My previous best of 1:14.5 from the last session soon melted to an overall best time of 1:11.1, good for the TTD track record. Unfortunately, with no way of knowing I already had the record, I continued to push the car until I finally buried it into the sand trap at turn 3, DQing my times from that event. Oh well, we’ll have to try again in June.

Next up is Roebling, hopefully with some new tires and horsepower to boot.