Damn that was fun!
What a great weekend of racing at Sebring. I had a great time. The FL crowd was awesome!
It was a combined BMWCCA and NASA weekend. I had intended to only do the NASA Friday sessions to learn the track, having only been at Sebring for 30min 8yrs ago, then just do the NASA races. But when Sat race 2 got cancelled due to track clean up, I bought into one of the CCA CR races Sat afternoon. Then on Sunday Jon Felton let us vote on turning Sunday Qual into a race so we had 3 NASA races on Sunday. As a result I had 5 total races for the weekend!
Even better, I got to hang out with the FL SpecE30 crowd and get to know them much better. Dang, they are terrific.
The only other SE guy that came was Chuck Taylor and he was helaciously fast. People were asking me “Who is this Chuck Taylor guy?” I was not helaciously fast.
I jumped almost every start. Was really embarrassing.
My video is going to be hilarious. Diego (Mad Motorsports)car was loose and he spent a lot of time sideways. I spent a lot of time laughing.
I could not for the life of me slow down enough for the “hairpin” such that I could hit the inside gator. In race after race, lap after lap, I failed to properly calibrate my turn entry speed and understeered like a pig. On the cooldown lap after taking the checker in the last of 5 races, I finally executed the turn pretty well. This was the COOLDOWN LAP. I was driving at prob 5 tenths I thought to myself, “ah, so that’s what those gaters feel like.”
I don’t think I did turn 17 well even once. I tried it lots of different ways, none of which really worked. I really wanted to delay braking until I got beyond this big wall that’s on the right. But then I’d be screwed. At ~120mph I had to a) get the car turned and b) stand the car on it’s nose. There was no way I could brake hard and simultaneously get the car turned a little bit so I could be in the right place at the right angle to really turn-in. Trying to do both mean really doing neither and then I’d end up in the marbles with the wall rushing right for me. There were some “uh oh” moments when it looked like missing the turn 17 wall had deteriorated to a “maybe”.