Saturday morning rolls around and we put on our nice shiny new 949 Racing 6UL wheels. We have pretty close to full tread on the front and some slightly more worn tires for the rear. Not having tested this combination here before, we weren't sure what was going to happen. As it turns out, worn rear tires on the back was not a good choice. We had a loose rear end and while it was manageable, it did prevent us from being as aggressive as we would have liked in attacking this course.
Jeff Kiesel put together a course that looked pretty simple, but would prove to be difficult to drive. It was a speed maintenance course which was unusual in the speed that we had to maintain. It was higher than the usual autocross course and objects would magically appear in front of us a lot faster. You had to be on your game to get the timing down and stay clean - something that I wasn't very successful at.
This is the kind of course that I wish I had a different car setup and a lot more attempts at it to try and get it right. Wait till you see the big downhill left hand sweeper at 43 seconds on both of our videos. We had a high RPM stutter in second that would cause us to lose power and I ended up shifting into third to avoid the stutter. Not optimal, but much better than staying in second.
The difficulty of this course was illustrated by the wide range of finishing times that competitors had. With the largest class of the event (21 competitors) and no clean runs, I was still 9th and Jason was in the trophies at 7th.
Coulda woulda shoulda. Since I didn't do well, it's easy for me to do a little bench racing. My raw time would have been good enough for the 4th place spot for Saturday. It was my plan to stay clean for my last run to be able to race on Sunday, but as you can see from the results, that clearly didn't go the way I planned ;-)
Jason had a good drive and was definitely feeling the heat of the moment as well. I'm glad to see Jason enjoying himself.
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