Peter takin' the tight left hander to the start-finish line. He told me that he did a regular street start
and immediately noticed that the tach rose to 5500 rpm. Doh! Those of you who autox know of the infamous
Hoosier holographic tread face. Obviously, they're not the greatest rain tires out there. Peter
held onto the MR2's reins like champ, tho--he never got close to looping the car around. I managed to flag
down Peter while he was on his way back to the pit area. Even though he was still wearing his full face helmet,
I could tell by the look in his eyes that it was slick on the course. Great... That's George's Spyder in the
foreground.
George was uncharacteristically "sane" at this event! No big, twitchy movements from the car, or so I'm told!
=) He was running on some old Kumhos that were fairly hard, but he still ran fairly competitive considering it
was so wet out there.
See all of the beads of water on my car? Yep, that's how wet is was. I'm on deck in this pic. When I got the
green flag, I flicked the windshield wipers to the "medium" setting and took off. My car looks like it's riding
awfully high in this pic. In reality, it probably is, but my current suspension limits me to this ride
height--otherwise, I would've dropped it another 1" or so.
In the middle of a fairly open righthander with a decreasing radius. I just lifted off the throttle to get the
car to rotate, but the increased rear camber nixed that idea. Since this was my first time on race tires in a
wet autox setting, I gradually increased my limits as I took each turn. Once I barely exceeded the tires' limits,
I felt the steering wheel vibrate a little bit as the tires just scrubbed across the wet surface.
The same turn as in Peter's shot (1st pic of this page), but right at the apex. It looks like the camber up
front is pretty good because the outside front tire doesn't look like it's scrubbing the outside shoulder nearly
as much as before. Check out the inside front tire, though--there's a decent amount of daylight underneath it!
I was fairly happy with the car at the event, considering I'd never really tried it out with the new alignment
settings and race tires. I think I was the fastest FSP car in the wet (good for 4th place), but I was still 4-5
seconds off the pace of the three FSP cars that ran in dry conditions. Watch out, cuz next year, I'm taking no
prisoners!
Most people were struggling to get into the 60s while it was raining. I somehow managed a clean 69.970. Then, of course, the track dried up as the last handful of drivers took their turns. Vic Sias turned out an amazing 60.xxx run in his familiar BSP 240Z. Yikes! =)
Download My In-Car Camera Footage (7.36 MB)
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