Day 1 – Mid Ohio Practice Day
This is my first time at Mid Ohio…what a beautiful facility! It’s out in the rolling green hills and farmland and accessed only by two-lane country roads. I would hate to be trying to drive in during a major professional event here. The track itself is hard to see from the paddock…you have to wander out to specific vantage points to see the racing surface but there is no one place to view the entire track. The weather has been cool drizzle all day long. The track is always damp…never fully drying out but also never accumulating standing water. I went out in the Honda pace car this morning with Jeff Lepper to experience the track first hand. What a fun and very technical track! It feels to me more technical than Infineon. Like our Turn 10 at Infineon, some runoff areas look like they will bite you big time especially if you go off in the wet grass.
We had about 10 or so SE30s out getting practice time in. Some very nice looking cars are in the field. No problems on track with the SE30s…but Matt Harness blew a head gasket and will miss qualifying tomorrow it looks. After practice we had a big driver’s meeting at the hospitality tent…NASA gave away a boatload of cool gifts to racers…they first called up about 8 or so racers to the front of the crowd of 400 or so racers. Come to find out each racer had participated in all the National events to date. NASA rewarded each racer with a brand new Traqmate. NASA’s Sponsorship Manager, Jeremy Croiset then tossed out small nerf footballs…each football was a gift…free set of Toyos, free set of Hoosers, free set of Yokohamas, a free Traqmate, several $100 OG Racing gift certs, 3 HD GoPro cameras…all-in-all probably $8000 worth of gifts just tossed out to the crowd of racers in 20 or so seconds. We had a short SE30 racer’s meeting after that then free beer and hotdogs/brats followed. A very nice introduction to what I hope will be a great weekend for SE30 racers.
Stay tuned for Thursday’s action.
Cheers.
Scott