Playing with Porsches in Camarillo

I went down to the PCA Santa Barbara autocross held at Camarillo airport. I didn't want to miss any event that is being held so close to home. However, from the sound of it, it sounds like the practice event at CSW would have been a great time too.

Anyway, back to this event. On the first practice run, the car in front of me goes off and then the starter waves me to start. I give him a funny look and wait a second before I go because he is waving me to hurry up and go. By the turnaround, I am catching up with the car in front and by the finish, I'm only seconds behind the car. On the next round, I tell the starter to give me a bigger gap. I think he almost fell over when I told him the time I was running - almost 15 seconds faster than many of the other cars.

It seems like the airport gets faster in the afternoon when it is warmest. I ran 59.1x in the morning session and in the afternoon practice, I was able to cut that down to 58.1, but by the time I ran the competition runs, the best I could do was a 59.1 again. Are the tires going away? Possibly. The rear tires already have about 200 runs on them.

This was a fun day. PCA SB made instructors available, so I had a chance to ride with a whole bunch of people and George was very cool and asked me to drive his GT3. What an awesome car! Unbelievable handling and instantaneous throttle response - a little too sensitive in my opinion, but wow! Dave Miller was there with his roll cage and Sport Cup equipped GT3 and he was running in the 58's, so I was in very good company time wise. Mike Furnish was the fastest guy overall in his race tired and modified Boxster S.

I also met Allan who is a very cool guy who runs the Barber Driving Experience. I'm going to explore doing some track events with Allan to learn more and broaden my driving skills.

We tried running the MaxQ to test and see if it worked. In this case, it didn't collect the data properly, so it's good that we had a chance to test and make some adjustments before the Champ event on Sunday.