Edge WSIR National Report
Hi All
Just got back from WSIR about an hour ago. I'm a bit tired but I'll do my best to put this together. Excuse me if I make any spelling or grammatical errors.
Friday Test Day:
Arrived at the track ready to put in a full day of testing. Rolled out onto the track at about 9AM for the first of what we had hoped to be several 8 lap sessions. On lap 3 of my first trip out I passed a car on the outside of T2 and on the exit of T2 I found myself about a car width offline. For those of you that have never driven WSIR, T2 is flatout in 5th gear 115mph exit speed 2.2 lateral g's. I could see it was pointless to fight my way out of it so I kept my foot in it and drove off the edge of the track and dirt tracked it for 50 feet and got it back on the black top. When I came back on I knew I had done some damage but I could tell the front wing was ok and the car seemed fine. I stayed out until the session ended. When I rolled into pit lane I could see from the look on Tony's face that there was some damage I couldn't see from inside the car. I had torn the bottom off the spliiter on our keel and ripped part of the left pod floor off. The damage was too extensive to fix at the track so we made the 3 1/2 hour haul back to our shop and fixed all the glass damage. Then we turned right around and drove back late Friday evening.
SATURDAY QUALIFYING:
Once again we were the lone FB out of 31 cars in our race group. We did a mid morning warmup session and all went well. I was running down in the high 1:21's which was were we thought we needed to be. In qualifying we knew the traffic would be a problem...lots of cars with about a 12 second time interval. In qualifying I made 2 fairly clean laps with not too much traffic and was able to get in a decent lap....so I shut it down and came in. I was 9th out of 31 cars....4th thru 9th car seperated by about 1 second or so.
SUNDAY RACE
Showed up at the track about 9am and it began to sprinkle rain. Our race wasn't until 2:10PM so we did a nut and bolt on the car and prayed that the rain would let up for the race...it did. On the pace lap coming down the OMEGA T4 to T5 Duder spun his brand new WF1 into the side of the hill and got stuck. They paraded us around one more time while they got Duder unstuck....which put him at the back of the pack. Came around one more time and for some reason Les Phillips was lined up on the wrong side of me so they made us go around one more time. Next lap the green came out and we were off. On the start got around Les in his Super Zetec Mygale and began reeling in a Pro Mazda in front of me and a Radical in front of him. Got around the Pro Mazda but could only hold him off for one more lap. So the rest of the race I glued myself to the back of a Radical SR3 and filled his mirrors. So that's pretty much where the race ended...I believe I was 6th overall.
So another National Win which means really nothing at this point except I'm doing my part to keep the car count up.....As you can tell I'm dissappointed that at least someone from NorCal didn't show. I did field lots of questions from curious onlookers about the car and the class.
FULL RACE VIDEO COVERAGE:
Ok this is where I need to say my apologize to Nick Woodman at GoPro. I'm a knuckle head and didn't read the Micro Fine Print on the back of my GoPro Wide Angle lens camera. I sorta tossed GoPro under the bus in my last post because at Fontana I couldn't get the camera to record more than about 3 laps. Well turns out because of the vibration you MUST USE Lithium batteries. So this time I put the correct batteries in and wow it stayed on the entire race. The video is super clear, audio is outastanding and for less than $180 bucks you can't beat it. Thanks Nick for the use of the camera...it's awesome...GoPro user for life!
I'll post the video to Vimeo tomorrow...please come back and check it out.
my laps link http://www.mylaps.com/results/showru...891&perclass=0
Time to sleep now
GH
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