It's a beautiful day to go racing. Our class is not scheduled to run until the very last heat at the end of the day, so it's one of those rare occasions when I get to sleep in instead of being up at the crack of dawn.
It's bright and sunny at El Toro when I arrive. Jason is already on site with the Bridgestone tent set up in a very good location, right by Tech. There is plenty of time so we get to relax and hang out with folks for a nice change.
Lunch time rolls around and we get registered and go for a course walk. It's a nice long course, very typical for El Toro. There are some very fast sections and some slow sections. The course designers were also kind enough to leave in a few elements from the ProSolo last week. Good. We can try to do those elements better this time.
As we continue to experiment with car set up, we had discussed some new things to try for this event. I'm excited. I think that the changes for today will help the car feel better. We prepare the car with our new set up and settle down to wait for our turn to race. The sun is out and the tent is a very popular spot for many people.
As usual, I never look at the entry list and Jason tells me that both Leslie Cohen AND Gary Thomason are entered to race in our class to run Civics. Both Leslie and Gary are National Champions and usually run the PAX class instead. The surprise was that Ken wasn't running in our class. Leslie we already know drives like Ken and is incredibly fast. She will be driving her Civic on the 225 Toyos. Gary is the oddball. He's going to be driving Ken's Civic on the 225 Toyos also. He's usually seen cruising around the autocross course in his Porsche GT3. He's a multi-time National Champion, so even with Ken not running in this event, the bar has been set very high. It's a good time to try out our new setup.
It's finally our time to run and our run group is very slow with many delays - many novices, instructor runs, inexperience folks etc. Oh well. Nothing to do but relax. No point getting worked up about this. It's out of our hands at this point.
The course is fast in sections and slow in others as expected. There are quite a few sections that we will be at the top of the RPM range for the Civic. Jason takes his first run and confirms that the car feels better. I take my run and the car does feel good in the handling department, but we are plagued by what has been an intermittent problem, usually only seen at PCA events - the car starts hesitating and doesn't want to rev past 7000 RPM, which it usually does very happily. This continues for all of our runs where we are not making full power in the very fastest sections for several seconds. Not much else we can do except to focus on our driving and make the best of it.
It's a busy day for everybody. The delays in grid are also frustrating as we sit and wait, wondering what's happening as there has been no explanation on the PA. There were many DNF's and something like 101 cones hit in our heat. Jason had 1 rerun because Palero decided to single handedly destroy the course right in front of Jason - something about a big lens chasing him.
Anyhow, with the way the grid worked out, both Jason and I end up being the last to take our runs and other than the hesitating, the car feels really good. I have an idea of where Leslie and Gary are time-wise, but it's still a matter of being able to execute. I go take my last run and come back with a cone, but a time that puts me 0.05 seconds behind Leslie and 0.04 seconds in front of Gary. Despite the cone, I'm very happy. I'm confident that we are finally approaching the right setup for the car and that we will be able to compete straight up against the wider Toyo's. Summer should be even more interesting as it gets hotter and the other tires get chewed up faster.
Go Bridgestone. Jason has also been tireless working on the Civic to get it to, and keep it running in tip top shape. Thank you Jason for another amazing job setting the car up! Jon, thank you for your help too. Both of us appreciate your expertise.
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