93FD

Well, another weekend, another track event. This one was at Blackhawk Farms raceway, on the Wisconsin/Illinois border. Thankfully this time I had (new) proper track brake pads and everything went real well. My RA-1’s are still holding up, and since I left them full tread when I bought them they came through huge when it rained a bunch on Sunday. My lap times in the semi-dry were nearly the same as the totally dry Saturday, and I was able to lap as fast as the NASA race cars in the wet. Normally I’m off their pace by 5-10%. It was also amazing that even in a total downpour I could hit 100+ on the main straight and the car felt pretty stable.

Here’s a pic that Bruce took Saturday when Damian and I went out for a HPDE4/TT session in the afternoon. I’ll post the rest of Bruce’s pics in the gallery. (Thanks Bruce!!)

For those that don’t know the NASA weekends have alot of different groups all running in one day. They have everything from completely new people on their first track day running with instructors to full out 750hp race cars in sprint races. It makes for a really interesting group of people and mix of cars to watch.

I had talked to Bill Marquardt about running the Time Trials via email and he had told me that NASA requires people to move up from HPDE1-4 and then progress to time trials. Since I had run a HPDE3 day already, they would let me start there, and if everything went well, then I’d be able to progress to 4 and TT the second day. Well, it all went really well, and by the third session on Saturday I was in 4 already. The 4 and TT run group is combined and also open passing so it’s about as close to racing as you can get, without actually doing it. The funny part was, the timing/scoring people thought I was in TT already, so I ended up with a trophy (for 2nd place behind Damian) even though I was not actually competing. Oh well, the second day I did beat him up, because I got a dry run in the morning and he only got to run in the wet in the afternoon because of his competition school classes.

All in all, another successful weekend at the track.

I of course have another 6 hours of footage, and no time to spend turning it into a cool video, but hopefully at some point I’ll get that together. I do have that second Autobahn video that I promised a while ago nearly complete, so that will be up fairly soon.