Saturday, February 11, 2012

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.