Sorry for the absence of posts - I actually wrote a pretty long entry last night, tried to save it as a draft, and then found that it had disappeared into the ether. It was a fairly crabby post, so maybe that’s for the best.
I ran the warmup event yesterday. It’s always an slightly scary experience jumping into a new car - you don’t want to embarrass yourself yet you want to push the car hard enough to find out what it does at the limit.
Overall I was reasonably happy with how it turned out. David’s car doesn’t do anything weird and I was able to push it harder and harder each run. Brian John’s car broke a hub on course right in front of me on the first run, so I ended up getting 4 runs of course. My final time was 8 tenths behind Rob Carpenter in the old Cashmore MR2. Not that great, but I badly mangled up the final 3rd of the course on all my runs, which was probably worth about 1/2 second right there. That puts me in the ballpark, and that’s all I really hoped for. David was great, hanging around the grid and helping with the car. We added a little more toe in the front and also dropped the pressure a bit during the session and the car was pretty damned good on the last run. I think it’s definitely capable of a top 5 finish if I don’t blow it.
The surface is really a disappointment. There is fine grit covering everything, and the driving line is about 1 car wide and very close to the cones even in spots where you might want to take a wider line. Get a wheel off the clean line and there is no grip whatsoever. (This is similar to Beaverun on a poor day, but more severe.) The grip on the clean line is ok, but nothing special, even for asphalt. The surface is sufficently different from Forbes that I think that many classes will see the balance of power change - witness Jonathon Roberts ass-whupping of AS in the “uncompetitive” STi.