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Familiar Stomping Grounds. Everyone's favorite (well, mine
anyway) test track, Talladega "Gran Prix" Raceway (TGPR) lies stone's throw from the big oval in Talladega,
Alabama. It isn't the longest track at 1.4 miles, but it has a nice variety of turns and is a real test of your
brakes and will definitely expose any incongruities with your car's balance. I've had some half dozen days of
practice on this track but I learn something new every time I go. The epiphany this time involved a way to take turn 3 that didn't feel horribly awkward and/or slow. A second
revelation manifested itself in the form of a Mitsubishi Evo doing something ridiculous into the 6/7/8 chicane (reference
~11:50 in the first video below.. That, I'm sure, will provide hours of entertainment on my next visit. I did bring back some video. The first session is probably the more entertaining
of the two since it contains other cars. The second contains my FTD on lap 5. |
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Recent Articles
Southern Discomfort: LeMons racing with the Squirting Coronas.    I journeyed back to Carolina Motorsports Park (CMP) this past weekend, but this time to do some actual racing.
Several of my autocross friends had put a team together with a...what's the politically correct term these days?..."Southern,
pseudo-Hispanic" theme that drew inspiration from a particular beverage of choice. The beverage in question should
be fairly obvious from the team name if not the livery on our Mercedes 300E "LeMon". Our motley crew consisted
of five drivers, all autocrossers (three with prior road-course experience), and one significant other who took pictures and
talked sense (Thanks Jordi!). We started fast and our lead-off driver Keith even competed for the lead at points...for about 20 laps anyway. At that point we got black flagged because the lawn-chairs bolted to the trunk apparently obscured our brake lights (pshh, we were braking later than anyone else anyway). The chair problem only took a couple of minutes to fix, the issue with the brake lines however...that took a bit longer. In a classic "it came from E-Bay" moment, we had installed some stainless brake lines before the race, aaaand 3/4 of them had utterly failed. Not sort-of/kinda/maybe failed, I mean they blew their fittings and were dangling in the wheel wells. One was only held on by the cosmetic shrink wrap. Mercifully, Gary (our team captain) had left the 20-year-old rubber Mercedes lines in the toolbox and we managed to turn it around in 20 minutes. Back on track, our second driver managed to work us back from deep in the 70s into the 60s in spite of a minor agricultural moment early in his stint. The car ran flawlessly for two hours as Aaron picked his way through the field and ticked off the laps. Dry of fuel, we came in and I jumped in the car with a full tank of gas. After a few tragically slow laps where I couldn't find 2nd gear on the automatic box (there was a dog-leg and I couldn't turn my head far enough between the HANS and harnesses to see this), I started to find the pace a little and had gotten the Corona/Good-Beer/AMG mercedes (always wanted to say it like that) down into the 50s (out of 84 cars entered). Tragically, just as I'd ticked off several of the fastest laps of the day on a now-dry track, the head-gasket let go. We tried literally "everything", but to no avail. For giggles, we put a bucket under the tailpipe
as the car was idling (we were adding some stop-leak), and in 20 minutes of idling, the bucket had collected about a gallon
of water....thus metaphorically representing the fork denoting exactly how "done" we were. Ah well, there's
always next time. Even with a short day it was a blast. Apologies to Gary and Derek, who weren't able to turn
a lap. Winter Meltdown Indeed: 3-Zero moves into 2012. You'll find some video below from two of the more entertaining sessions of the weekend. The first consists of me following an ex-racer in a blown S2000 around whilst dodging antique mustangs. The second is a busier session, but I get to chase down a not-so-antique Boss 302 pony. The last lap of the second video is a 1:51.xxx and the quickest I have recorded for the weekend. Comment/Critique is welcome. |
