The September 25th Homestead event was a pile of suckiness. Seems that the local indoor karting facility got shut down and Homestead tried to cancel our booking so the karters could have the lot. As a “compromise” we had to be packed up and gone by 3PM, which meant we had to finish running by 2PM.
Barely enough time for 3 runs. This sucked for me for several reasons. First and foremost, the third run is usually where I find the zone and my fourth is usually the best of the day. I’d also intended to burn two runs this time out — one pushing the car past control, and another with an instructor ride-along.
The other sucky thing is that with this group the D-Stock participation is highly inconsistent. With every event I’ve been confident that I had the last guy I lost to beat, but then it turns out that someone better has shown up. I stomped a guy in an SRT-4 but ultimately came in second-place 0.454 seconds behind an IS-300.
And my folding gazebo / canopy thingie broke. Mental note: Replacement must have tubular legs.
Oh well. Video from ER / Homestead is up. I’ve switched to WMV because most of my co-workers have lousy PCs that choked on H.264. They play just fine on a Mac with WMP9, dunno about Linux.
The next three weekends are going to be exciting. First up is IRCC, I’m aiming to get both days in this time. Want to burn Saturday mucking with the tires, still hoping to get the car out of understeer (I’m halfway tempted to run with the stock RE011s on the back), and Sunday I’ll try to get an instructor to scream at me from inside the car. Next is the Gold Coast PCA, they allow limited participation from cars that weren’t built in Stuttgart and the site is only about 5 miles from my house so I can prep the car the night before, sleep in, and drive there on my track tires. After that it’s ER again, at Hialeah instead of Homestead.
Then I’ll have a weekend off, with the chance to repeat the process again (IRCC, ER, GC-PCA) in November. If I were willing to drive a bit further I could probably run an event every weekend. I think I’ve finally found a reason not to hate Florida…
