haha sorry, I came home and had to eat dinner right away. here's how the day went:
12:30am - Finally got to sleep after a long night at work.
5am - dragged myself out of bed to turn of the first of 5 alarms
5:30am - finally got out of bed and stayed up.
7am - after finally throwing together the last of my things and finally having everything, i took off for the
autocross location
7:20am - arrived in the still very nearly pitch-black morning and introduced myself to a couple of the guys who were already there, then started pulling everything from inside the cabin and trunk that might have gone flying around if i'd left it inside. thought to myself,
myself said:
Hm, they sky is still pretty grey, i might want to put these things into the garbage bags i brought along, just in case
into the garbage bags it all went!
7:30am - went over to talk to a guy with a Mazdaspeed3 who i had arranged to get a ride along with for his first few runs, then went to go register and get tech-ed.
7:45am - took part in the novice walk-through lead by a guy with a GT3, who also happened to design and set up the course. He got interupted by a cell phone call, and a younger british guy (looked like a completely unassuming guy, nothing i'd ever have associated with cars if i'd met him on the street) took over. Found out later while in the Speed3 that he was one **** of a driver, able to jump into anyone's car and **** the entire field, first lap around the track. i did a couple more walk-throughs of the course on my own after that, and felt pretty familiar/comfortable with it.
8:30am - Driver's meeting.
8:45am - Jumped into the Speed3 for the first heat. there were 4 heats, with different classes distributed among them so that each heat had similarly classed/timed cars running together. the 3 was stock minus some lighter wheels and nearly-dead Hoosiers. Oh yah, it had started pouring with rain by this time.
8:50am-ish - 45seconds after we left the start line, we were done the first run of 3. :woohoo: that was fun.
did that 2 more times, then ran to my car, as i was in the 2nd heat.
9:30am-ish - pulled up to the timing tent, asked if i could get an experienced driver to jump into the car with me. I was super nervous waiting in the staging grid, but once i got up to the tent, i was fine, and i took off for my first run with a young guy sitting shotgun.
it was over before i knew it, didn't hit a single cone, didn't miss any gates, but man, did i slide around on the rain-soaked tarmac.
parked back in the staging grid to wait for my next runs, and the guy went over where/how i could improve my times/driving. thanked him, he left, and i waited for my next run. I did the next two runs on my own, and each felt a lot better than the previous. I think i got it down to a high 43, low 44 second pass on the 3rd run.
9:45am-ish - so its DUMPING down with rain by now, and i've got to do gate duty as part of the work effort. throw on my storm pants and start to really wish i'd brought my Crocs or something a little more comfortable to stand in puddles of water than rain-soaked shoes and socks. 3rd heat goes through and does its thing. GT3 is running slicks because the forcast was for a dry day, and was still not raining until the start of the first heat. quite a few cars spinning out in this heat. even though i was pretty far away, i was able to see some spectacular 360 degree spin finishes.
all of a sudden heat 3 is over and heat 4 is running and no one has come to relieve me.
So i go over to the timing tent to see whats up and they tell me to just leave it un-manned, it'll be fine. I grab a couple sandwiches from my bag and sit in my car to warm up a bit.
1:10pm - finish my sandwiches, recline the seat back and promptly fall asleep.
2:10pm - wake up, see that there are cars from my heat running, so i run over to some of the club exec and check to see if its ok if i jump into the line-up. find out the afternoon runs have been cancelled due to the weather (a lot of people took off right after their runs in the AM anyway), so they were just doing a bunch of fun runs. at this point, i've run through a solid 1" deep pool on the top of the tarmac, but i'd long stopped caring, cause my socks and shoes were already soaked. run back to the car and bring it over to the staging grid and line up. i get one run in before this group is done and finally hear a time. 43.8xx seconds. still sliding around quite a bit. the others in my class were running mid-42s on average, so i think once i get a better feel of my car, i'll be able to run fairly competitively.
2:30pm - standing at one of the cone runner stations for the final heat group. by this time, the timing system has long been taken out of commission due to people sliding into it and we're timing with stopwatches. get to watch a bunch of subarus, miatas and a couple of porsches and some other cars run. the GT3 spins out HUGE multiple times on his runs. a early 90s miata is more or less drifting around the big sweeper, but in perfect control and maintaining good speed, coming in a full second faster or more than some other miatas.
3:15pm - all runs are finally over, multiple SHREDDED cones, we clean up the tarmac and head our seperate ways.
Summary notes:
what a BLAST!! surprised how stable the SHO was, and loved the fact that i had a quaife (helped a TON in the sweeper sections), and the 3.2L. I will definately be attending the next one, and the next one, as many as i can until i leave.
i need to invest in a Rubbermaid container.
it was great to be among a bunch of automotive enthusiasts, no matter what car they were driving, and surprised to find out a bunch of them knew about the SHO vs a regular taurus. there was a guy who's car/stuff was next to me in the pits who used to drive a topaz, and know of Olympic and his SHOpaz from the topaz forums.
coolest car there? an old aston martin roadster. didn't get any photos of it because of the rain. next time i'll bring my point-and-shoot camera as well in case of ****** weather again.
Anyone got any ideas for el-cheapo home-made camera mounts? i want to put my point-and-shoot in there on movie mode to record my runs.
) my best official time was 45.552 with an indexed time of 38.993. my indexed time is 4 seconds behind the fastest car in SM which is a 91 BMW 325 running Hoosiers. I was watching him run during the fun runs, and he ran very smooth passes and didn't slide around like i was. i need to learn to drive like that. haha
