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I have been Club Racing for few years now and have a couple of dozen races under my already stretched belt. Our typical year’s race schedule has 5 Sprint races, 3 Enduros and 5-7 practice days. That works out to 350 workdays a year to drive 15 days. I think we’ll start a bit earlier next year with a trip down to Sebring. But in the meantime we have to deal with a very different schedule for this year’s season. In years past by this time we had already raced at Lime Rock and the Glen but this year the Lime Rock race has been moved to September because PCA National thought there was just too much going on with the Rennsport Reunion at Daytona and the Mid-Ohio race. So our schedule over the next few months is going to get very hectic to say the least. On the first weekend in August we have the Mosport race in Canada, in mid-August we head down south to Summit Point in West Virginia, Labor Day weekend finds us trekking to Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin for the Road America race and 2 weeks later we all get together at Lime Tock for the rescheduled Race into Spring (now Fall). This means if anything, the least bit serious, happens to the cars we could miss a good part of our race season. But racing is racing so we can’t spend our time worrying about what could happen. If something does happen (and let’s hope it is small) there are a lot of reasons to try and fix it. As an example a few weeks ago a bunch of us headed to the Glen for the Hudson Valley DE. This is a great event to make sure everything is working on the car before the Glen race. It is 2 open track days divided into 30-minute session. So you can potentially drive all day except during lunch. The first day started out great. The cars were living up to our expectations. New suspensions, new sway bars, better breathing for the engines and brakes, they all were working wonderfully but the day ended on a less than pleasant note. After repeatedly telling ourselves we were just there to get a feel for the car changes, Andy and I found ourselves in a couple of good chases later in the day. One thing that I like to practice and something I think is very important in any type of racing is the anticipation of when your opponent will get on the throttle. If you guess right, and get on the throttle sooner, you may have a better shot of getting by them or staying in front of them. Since Andy has more torque in his Carrera than I do in my 944 Turbo I really have my work cut out for me. I sometimes find myself in the corners a tad out of control just trying to keep the boost up and then there is also the overwhelming feeling that if the guy in front of you bobbles there could be some fancy dance steps out on the track. Well, this Wednesday afternoon in June, at the Hudson Valley Glen DE, I found myself in my best pair of dance shoes. I was feeling pretty quick as Andy and I swapped the lead a few times. Things were going really well when the back end of Andy’s car got loose at the apex of Turn 11 headed onto the front straight. Fortunately we had just worked through some slower cars so I wasn’t as close as I had been in a couple other corners. Turn 11 is a pretty fast corner to have someone sliding perpendicular to the flow of traffic after I had already gotten off the brakes. So for the next few seconds I found myself looking for a way by. There was no way I could get by the front of Andy’s car without spinning myself so I headed for his back end and the wall. My initial thought was there is enough room between his bumper and the wall but then he started to slide back a bit. The perfect situation would have been to have about 6 feet between the two closing obstructions. I ended up with about 4 which actually worked out to be the smallest hole I could squeeze through without coming to an abrupt halt and ending our season or seasons. As I squeezed through my right front wheel messed up his B&B exhaust as his bumper caught behind my right front tire. At this point Andy got a decent push to continue his pirouette. Then my driver side front fender caught the foam blocks lining the guardrail and I came to a stop in a blast of white foam pieces. I am still finding foam in the car. How did it end up? Well, I drove out of the foam blocks with my left front fender cutting a nice groove in my Hoosier while Andy dragged his bumper behind him all the way to the trailer. When I got back to my trailer a guy was there waiting for a check for the 2 foam blocks I broke. They were $150 each for foam blocks. So after loading the cars and going back to the hotel to clean up we went to dinner with our friends. Racing teaches a lot of people a lot of things some good and some bad. What it doesn’t teach us is how to make your buddy understand that you care more for his friendship than your own car. Having a racecar doesn’t do me any good if my buddies aren’t there racing with me. Andy felt pretty bad for spinning in front of me and I felt bad for not missing him. But after a lot of work and stress filled days we both had our cars all fixed and realigned 2 days before we had to leave for the Glen Race. He is still about 1.5 seconds faster than me at the Glen but I am getting closer all the time. Unfortunately Andy has a little motor work to do before Mosport in 6 weeks. But we will both do what we can to get it done. That’s racing with friends! That’s good racing! |
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