This weekend I skipped the IRCC practice day but made it up to Fort Pierce for Sunday’s event. The location is much nicer / safer than Homestead — no trees on the course, no fences or other obstacles near the boundries. It’s also a much smaller group, perhaps 50 cars vs. 200-ish, and there were many familiar faces.
Not having my brother with me turned setup into an ordeal. I got to the site late, rushed through registration, emptied the car, hurried thru tech with only half of my wheels swapped because they were about to close, and only had time to walk half the course before the drivers meeting. Between the stress of having to work quickly and the physical exertion I half expected to collapse.
I badly need to get in better shape…
Naturally the half of the course that I didn’t walk was where I screwed up, twice in a row near the same spot. Luckily with this small of a group we had five laps to get it right and my next three runs were fantastic. I got decent video of the last two runs (13MB WMV). Next time I’ll try putting some foam over the mics to reduce the wind noise…
I would have taken home a 2nd-place trophy in Novice Stock had I known that option existed — the Homestead organizers do not run a Novice class. Instead, since there were no other D-Stock cars they bumped me down a class into E-Stock — home of the Mazda Miata in 1.6L and pre-1998 1.8L trim. Even if I had the full complement of STX upgrades it would barely be a fair fight. With stock mods I didn’t stand a chance in hell and I didn’t know what they’d done until it was too late to protest…
On the positive side my times improved with every lap that I ran yesterday. I’m feeling extremely confident about taking 1st in D-Stock at the next Homestead event, and if I don’t it will certainly be a loss to a competitor I haven’t seen yet.
