Rumble at the Oak Tree!

Great weekend  Back to back podiums in the Saturday sprints.  1st and then 2nd.  It's been a few years since I've been there and getting the essess right took most of Friday.  A few HUGE moments during practice :D  That section of track has to be one of the trickiest I go to.  If you make that second turn in a tiny bit late or early you are just screwed.

So I had a few great battles in an event filled sprint 1.  This Australian guy came up from Texas and we had a lot of fun.  I showed him all my speed secrets in sprint 1 so in sprint 2 he was able to defend against my assault and take P1.  Makes for some good videos though!

Here are the videos!

Sprint 1

Sprint 2

I almost forgot the best part of the weekend!  I wan the OGracing Replay camera at the raffle!  I was going to get a new camera to mount backwards to keep track of all the people I pass :)  Hooray for me!

Watkins Glen

Great Saturday!  Sunday sucked!

Saturdays sprints went far better than expected.  I missed going to WGI last year so I was a little rusty and had no expectation of getting out of mid-pack.  Well, surprise surprise! Thanks to at least one competitor's mechanical woes I saw a 4th in Sprint 1 and a 3rd in Sprint 2.  In sprint 1 I let a D car go by me in T11 and that was really stupid because right behind him was the 4th place SPB.  That SPB followed the D car right on by me and I was unable to get the position back.  I really should have picked a better spot to let the D car go.   Lesson learned.

Sprint 2 was a truly fantastic race.  I got passed by #200 early in the race for 3rd but we did a lot of side by side and very close racing.  It was a huge thrill getting squeezed up the esses flat out.  What a rush!  I kept pestering #200 so he couldn't forget me.  I had a better line thru the toe that allowed me to really harass him from the toe thru T10 but in T11 he just sailed away.  Then it happened.  Lap after lap I chased him until he hit the curbing inside T11 a little too hard and upset the car.  He had to get off the gas and that's when I was able to get the run on him down the straight away.  Once I got by him he stayed glued to me for a while then he dropped back.  I thought that maybe he cooked his tires and so I relaxed a little and thought I'd cruise to a 3rd place finish.  Then he was there!  On the last lap he suddenly appeared going very very fast and it was on til the checker!  Truly some of the best racing I've been involved in.  Nose to tail and side by side at Watkins Glen.  What a ball.  Here's the vid:

Sprint 2

Then Sunday happened.  Lap three, in the rain, I pitted because I couldn't see out the windshield.  I should have called it a race at that point but I went back out and BAM!  The hood flies up on the back straight.

Hood!

All in all a great weekend of racing with far better results than I anticipated.  My best lap time was a 2:15.04 which is pretty quick.  Still a little off the track record but getting much closer :)

Spring Showdown with NASA!

Great weekend!  Total SPB domination by the 611 Racing Team!  NASA is just a fun group to race with.  This event I entered the Time Trial as well.  That was interesting.  It made for a ton of track time.  Unfortunately I was much heavier than in SPB race trim but I ended up winning $100 Toyo bucks on Sunday!

The races were pretty fun.  My main competition broke on Saturday morning before the race even started so that left me to race with a rookie who had never been to Summit Point before.  He did a great job for his second race weekend.  For never having been to SP he wasn't too far off the pace.

I was pretty happy with my lap times as at a prior Audi Club DE I was slooooooow and I was starting to worry that maybe my recent alignment was bad or I was down on power or any other excuse besides the driver :).  It turns out that the limits you'll push in a race setting are exponentially higher than a DE.  That is for me anyway.  I saw may times in the mid to low 1:26's which if consistent is competitive.  It would be better to be consistent in the low 26's to high 25's.  I got a fantastic start in the Saturday Sprint!

I hold the current lap record for SPB at SP though :).  Turns out they are counting the new re-instated Spec Boxster class as all new.  Hooray for me!

Here are some videos of the weekend.

http://vimeo.com/41295465

http://vimeo.com/41295464

Redemption!

What a great weekend! It's a very long drive to get there so if you are thinking about making the trip I would suggest you choose your travel partner carefully. Very carefully.

On to the racing! Practice was good. I felt like like remembered the track pretty well. This is the first time I've been able to chase other Spec Boxsters which is great. I was over breaking a few turns for sure so my best lap time came in qualifying by chasing two other SPB's. My time of 2:34.1 gridded me 4th for the first sprint. The other two SPB's were gridded right in front of me which set up a very fun race where we were able to compete against each other from the green flag rather than work thru traffic.

Sprint 1 was awesome! I had a great start that put me up to 2nd. After that I didn't drive defensively enough and eventually found myself back in P4. Lesson learned!

Sprint 2 provided some big moments. Most notably Russell got beside me in T2-T3 and almost wiped us both out. Lot's of corrective steering input on that one!

On to the enduro. The enduro was a blast. Sebring is a war on your body. 90 minutes of those bumps are just brutal. How the pros do it for hours at a time I do not know. Maybe the paycheck makes it easier? Anyway, on lap 2 I thought I smelled coolant. That's a bad thing. I really don't want to be the guy that leaks coolant all over the race track so I pitted to see if anything was leaking. While I normally wouldn't run coolant I'm in a little bit of a conundrum with living in a freezing environment and traveling to a southern track where it was 80 degrees. So I pit and Charlie looks at my radiator, notorious for cracking, and says I'm good and to keep racing. I kept an eye on my temps and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. That set up a crazy drive from 70th place back thru the field to eventually finish P2 in class and 25th overall. The best part may have been while I was in the pit the course went double yellow. Unfortunately (or fortunately) the lead SPB had a pretty big shunt and retired which allowed me to catch up to the back of the field and then I remembered why I put a radio in the car. I was dead last and the field came to a complete stop just past turn 16. I wasn't sure if something else had happened or what so I stopped the car with everyone else and all of a sudden I hear Mark yell GREEN GREEN GREEN and off I went. I passed 15 cars in one lap trying to get back to the front of my class. It was a fun drive for sure.

Big thanks to Charlie Murphy and Intersport for getting my car there and the support. Thanks to OG's own Mark Francis for being the radio man during the races. If you don't have a radio or a radio man you need one :)

Here are the videos. Pictures coming soon.

Sprint 1 edited to make me look awesome!

Sprint 2

Why you need a radio!