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For the very first time Susana and I will be taking a winter vacation to
a warm weather location. We’re headed to St Martin where we’ve arrange
to rent a small villa right on one of the island’s many beaches. My work
responsibilities normally limit my ability to be out of the office during
the first few months of the year. Seafood sales are really strong during
the Lenten period, which then requires ramping up our production and building
inventory to support this high seasonal sales period. This year Lent falls
later in the year so I’m trying to escape for 8 days of vacation, of course
all hell will break loose while I’m gone. By the time you read this column
we’ll be back, hopefully having enjoyed lots of sun, sand and surf.
We’ll have even more fun to look forward to when we return, as our first driver education event of the year will be only five weeks later. We’ll be headed off to VIR in Danville, VA for the annual Zone 2 three day DE event. We really enjoy that tracks blend of high and low speed corners, and monster straights. Between now and then we’ll have to get the cars serviced as they’ve been sitting silently in the garage since last July. Hopefully between now and then the snow piles in front of our trailer will have melted! I’m getting revved up again for the driving season, having watched the 24 Hours of Daytona race off and on last weekend. I’m not a big fan of Grand Am racing in general and think the Grand Am prototype concept lacks much fan appeal. But I did spend several hours in front of the television getting a “motorsport fix.” The Grand Am rules makers have done everything they can to slow down the Porsche Cup Cars to make sure they don’t screw things up by winning overall. The shots of the Cup Cars racing down Daytona’s long straights showed how ridiculous the rules have become. They require that the Cup Cars to race with raised ride heights to reduce any ground effects benefit. On the straights this causes the cars to look like they are about to take off. It must be a bit scary in the driver’s seat when you feel the front of the car getting light when you’re traveling 160 mph. Despite the numerous handicaps imposed on the Cup Cars, they were still capable of lapping within 9 seconds/lap of the Grand Am prototypes. The racing was pretty amazing with a number of very hard crashes, numerous axle failures, and some overly ambitious overtaking. The Porsche powered Crawford car, that was qualified on the pole and lead the race on two different occasions, suffered two axle failures which apparently cost them $100,000/axle (at least that’s what was reported). Those are very expensive axles needless to say, if that cost estimate is indeed correct! My renewed motorsport interest even translated into my visiting the Motorsport Gallery website to purchase some new items for my collection of Porsche model cars, and a couple of books. Not that I really needed a 996 GT3 RSR model, or a 996 GT3 Cup Car bearing decals from the 2004 24 Hours of Daytona, and a 996 GT3. And to make sure my collection of Porsche Sport books remained current I order the 2004 and 2005 editions. Speaking of books, one of my Christmas presents was the “Speed Addicts” book put out by Speed TV. It’s a wonderful photography book covering the history of Formula 1 racing. Packed full of color and black and white photos going back to the early ‘50’s, the book is fascinating to page through. I even charged up my remote control Carrera GT and drove it around my home office for several minutes. The room isn’t big enough to really get up to speed and my skills certainly aren’t that well developed, so after a few too many crashes into furniture I parked it! I’ve also asked Susana to look through my pictures that I took at Laguna Seca a number of years ago when Porsche was celebrating its 50th Anniversary. Now that she can print poster size images, I want to finish filling up my garage with car art and photography. On the subject of printers I have a few summary comments on my HP printer repair saga of several months. I mentioned most recently that the printer had come back from repair missing the installation discs and the power cord. I’ve subsequently learned from my son that it also lacked the paper feed trays. He was resorting to manually feeding paper into the printer as a result, and that the original problem that caused me to seek repairs had in fact not been repaired. So $250 poorer for the experience I told him to trash the printer – no point in trying to seek redress from HP as I’m not that much of a glutton for punishment. I promptly ordered a new Epson printer for him (that arrived the next day from IT Supplies!). The new printer works perfectly and will no doubt for some time. I’ll never purchase another HP product given the lousy service and unreliable performance I got out of this high end printer. Finally if you’ve got any doubt about the strength of the economy, put that concern to rest. The Barrett Jackson Collector Car Auction in Scottsdale in mid-January ended with over $100,000,000 of total sales. Several late 60’s muscle cars (primarily Hemi equipped cars) went for sums in excess of $1 million with one car selling for $2.1 million (a ’70 Plymouth “Cuda” two-door convertible). A General Motors ’50 Futureliner Parade of Progress Tour Bus went for an amazing $4.3 million. Oh I regret parting with my ’70 Boss 302 Mustang for $2100 as a trade in on an Audi 100 Sedan! |
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