BigKeyserSoze wrote:
[quote]The quote of the weekend, for me, came from Scott Gress after Saturday’s race. It went something like this:
“I didn’t fill out a body contact report because I couldn’t remember it all. All it would say was I got hit by a bunch of cars, the color and number of which I do not know”
[/quote]
Highlight reel of Saturday’s Sprint at http://www.vimeo.com/16659164
I have a whole new video set up. The rear cam ran out of power early on and the driver cam needs a wide angle lens.
I chased handling problems Friday and Saturday. A week or two ago I’d finally gotten around to removing the pre-load out of my sways and had to loosen my FL 2 turns and tighten my RL 2 turns. To my surprise, that made my car really tailhappy. 3X over Friday and Saturday, I reduced rear sway until I’d gone from 10mm to 1mm.
The tailhappiness wasn’t really eliminated until Sunday afternoon when I put my best remaining tires on the rear.
It was a mistake to try to get 1 more weekend out of my year old race tires. I’d had hopes of being 1sec behind the leaders like RA, so being 4sec back was a pisser.
I’m grateful to the Palacios for letting me rack out in their RV. I was able to pay them back by hitting Julio twice. I felt pretty lousy about that.
Video highlights.
I’m leaving most names out of this commentary because there were a lot of bonehead moves made. If a bunch of name calling starts, I’m staying out. The video speaks for itself. If I mention your name here, it because you weren’t one of the boneheads.
Greatest start of my (somewhat hapless) career. Passed 6 cars when I happened to be late on the gas and everyone else was early on the gas. That forced everyone in front of me to check up. Then Green was thrown and as luck would have it everyone herringboned outboard and that left me a gap up the middle thru half the pack.
58sec. Julio and I went thru 4-6 together. He was a little ahead of me for some or all of it. We connected in 6. I was trying hard to play nice while holding the roughly side-by-side position. I feel strongly that I didn’t turn into him. But the bottom line was that he had position so the turn was his.
2:10. I rear end Julio, putting my warm sleeping spot in his RV in jeopardy. I feel bad about this one. There was a pack going into 14 and I should have predicted that they’d have to check up a little early. After the turn you can see Julio’s hand and arm signals suggesting that instead of being a dumbass, perhaps I could leave a little more space.
3:54. I am passed under yellow.
5:10. I block Herrington going into 8. He was annoyed with me over this. If you have a little overlap on me on the inside, I’ll give you the turn unless it’s the last lap of the race. If you are close enough to me that you’re in easy divebomb range, I will often give away the turn. But I will not predictably roll over like a patsy every time. The rules allow one move to block and sometimes I’ll take it. The way I think about it is, if you have or almost have overlap, you’re in a good position to take the turn from me so I’ll just give it to you rather then fighting the inevitable. But if you are farther back in “tricky divebomb range”, than you might be tempted to try something risky to take the turn. I don’t want you to do something risky with my car so when I move over a little, it’s my way of telling you, “don’t take this risk”.
I think that when Herrington and I discussed this later, he was dissatisfied with my lack of apology. I point out in my defense that I gave him turn 11 that immed followed. Of course, another driver had a say in that.
5:39. To the surprise of me and Herrington, a third driver wanted turn 11 also. He hit Herrington who was thrown into me.
8:10. Hit and passed under yellow.
9:21. In my rear view mirror you can see a Miata trying to punt an E30.
10:28. In my rear view mirror you can see one of us punting a Miata in turn 4.
Subject change: Fred hit himself. I know that’s not something a guy normally talks about much, but as long as it doesn’t get out of control I suppose there’s no harm done.
