For you folks that endured my first post on these forums, I thought I'd follow up with an account of this weekends shenanigans.
First of all, I have to say that Motorsports Park Hastings (MPH) in Nebraska is an awesome place, owned by an incredible man, more on that later. Second NASA Rocky Mountain is a fantastic organization. The track is brand new and this was NASA's first, of many I hope, events there. Check it out at
http://www.racemph.com/
Those of you that need cliff notes better stop here....
I am running in the HPDE 3 group with aspirations of moving into racing, or more realistically, time trials next year. Saturday's first session found me and my 02 WRX wagon with the third fastest lap of the session, with only 2 ZO6's ahead. The subsequent three sessions put me down to stay in fifth for the rest of the day. I toasted the gasket on the downpipe side of the turbo during session 2 and ran the rest of the weekend with slow spool-up and down on power. The positive parts of that were, that it made me approach driving the course like I was driving a momentum car, rather than a horsepower car. Very educational, with a 180 spin into the dirt at turn 12, after overcooking 11 and trying to power the rest of the way through the segment. D'oh !!! We also ran sessions 3 and 4 with a side by side warm-up lap followed by a flying start. I never saw the porches again, Ha ha !! The other positive was right before we were being served the steak dinner that was free to participants, I asked George Anderson, the track owner, what parts store might be open. He asked what I needed, which was a nut for the downpipe problem, and said "hold on a minute" He dropped what he was doing, took me a mile or two to his shop and dug through his parts drawers to produce exactly what I needed. Did I mention he was the track owner, and an incredible guy !!
Sunday I was anxiously awaiting a possible checkout with the instructors to move on to group 4, also hoping that a tube of permatex ultra copper could restore my power. Sessions 1 and 2 found me at the same lap times as the previous afternoons, with a special third session for us aspiring racers. Between runs 2 and 3, I tore the downpipe off with some help from a great lowbudget GTI racer (fast as **** !) named Lael, gooped the crap out of both gaskets and crossed my fingers. The finger crossing, and the 1 1/2 hours of curing time for the copper didn't work. Oh well, power isn't that important on a road course. I posted my best lap of the weekend before attempting the kluge.
The special session had us running with group 4, a bunch of instructors, and lots of open passing. Cool.....We played lead and follow with the instructors pulling off some outlandish passing maneuvers and letting us by a lot to see how we set up our overtakes. Now aside from some between the sheets activities, this was by far the most fun I've had in a long time. We approached the last session of the weekend the same way, and I got my logbook filled out as a full fledged HPDE 4 driver. Cloud nine
Thanks for reading, and yes Chris, I'll post photos as soon as I've got some....
You knew I was going to say that! Wish I could have been out there with you guys.
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