Our 4th and probably final event of the 2006-2007 Winter season took place at Coors Field on Sunday. Snow threatened to get in the way on Saturday, but nothing fell at Coors Field, and the entire lot stayed clear and dry. After that, the only obstacle was how freakin cold it was on Sunday. It was in the 20s when I arrived to work for registration, and I don't think it got out of the 30s for long during the day. Even so, the weather was great for February in Denver, which allowed us to have a great event.
Unlike the last event, the course was much larger and more wide open, which was exciting, because it meant I would be allowed to use all of my power and use it quite often. Last week, I only went WOT once, and that was at the end. The good part of that was it forced me to drive a bit more technically instead of relying on brute force. I finished 4th overall but wasn't really close to the 1st place finisher.
This time, I went out and put down a pretty good run on the first try. My big wide tires were still cold, and I got surprised by a couple of sharp turns, so it was nowhere near optimal, but the time of 53.5 was a good start after hearing lots of 56-59s from the morning group. However, the downside was that Kevin Wenzel, the 2006 SCCA Solo Driver of the Year put down a 53.4 on his first try, and his car has a MUCH lower index than mine in hi FSP Scirocco. That meant I was about 2 seconds off his pace, but hey, so were most of us in X class.
2nd run, I cleaned up some of the 1st run mistakes and pushed harder, but that led to creating more, new mistakes. The run was a 53.3 with no cones hit, which was just a little better. By now, the other top driver that I was planning to compete with had blown past me by about a second in PAX (index times), so I knew the 53s were going to have to become high 51s or low 52s in a hurry.
3rd run, it felt much better and dropped down to 52.5, which would have been pretty close to the 2nd place guy, but AFTER I finished, the announcer said, "Ohhhh, and a late cone call means that run is no good!" So, the 52.5 didn't help, since it had a cone. On to the last run...
4th and final run, I have a passenger, but I'm not worried about. I felt good about reproducing the good parts of the last run while improving on a few more parts. Here's how it started out:
Run 4 - Launch
Pretty good start, and then I carried it all the way through until the very end until this happened!
Run 4 - In-Car Vid
I had blown my previous time away yet again by nailing a 51.8, which would have been about a tenth better than the 2nd place guy (still 4 tenths behind the top dog), but I was in 3rd gear at the end and going to fast to stop, so that final cone counted. Because of this, my 2nd run with a 53.3 was my best run (cones count 2 seconds). Despite having to use a run that was a full 1.5 seconds slower than my best, I still finished 3rd in X and 5th overall out of 143 cars. Not bad...
Can you e-mail them direct or try yousendit.com so I can save as to my pc? Nice write up and it sounds like you were oh so close.
