Aaaand for the second time this year I did track days two weekends in a row (back to back), though this time the first one involved a 1,000+ mile round trip and the 2nd one was 400+ miles round trip! I'm racking up the miles on this car!
This past Sunday I hit Buttonwillow. This is the first time I've been on this track since 2011 and personally is the track I've been MOST looking forward to running V3.0 of my car. Buttonwillow is one of the more varied tracks in SoCal IMO and offers a fantastic comparison of my new and old setups.
Sadly, I only got a couple of traffic free laps but I managed to run a best lap time of 2:05 which was about 9 seconds faster than my old best. In reviewing the video of my best lap there is at least a few seconds available just cleaning up my driving so I think I might be able to run a 2:02 or 2:03 on my 200TW Falken street tires!
Here is the video of my best lap. I had gopro malfunctions so this is just my iphone's camera set to 480 resolution.
I did manage to capture a cool shot of my first ever off track excursion on Truck Stop.
This track day was also impacted by two negative experiences. One huge one. There was a serious wreck coming out of the esses towards sunrise corner which resulted in one fatality and one person with major injuries being air lifted. It was a very sobering reminder of how dangerous track days can be. Especially since the car involved was was fully caged, fixed back seats, 5 point harnesses, and was being driven by a "professional" driver who has operated a tuner and builder shop since 1995. Due to the violent passenger side impact against a concrete wall (corner worker station), speculation is that due to lack of a containment seat the driver suffered a lethal sideways injury to his neck/head while the passenger who was in the impact zone had a passenger airbag / door to stop the helmet movement.
The second negative which is totally minor in light of the accident was that I lost my dash, marker, and tail lights and despite playing with a multimeter and fuses for a few hours I wasn't able to figure out until I got home that the Horn fuse was the culprit. Painless wiring runs the power for the driving lights (not headlights) through the horn fuse!!