National Corvette Museum Motorsports park report

[SSLance]

Things are starting to settle back down now that we are home, unpacked and trying to get back in a routine. My wife, two dogs and myself loaded up in a borrowed RV pulling Barney on a trailer and headed for the Ultimate Street Car Assoc event being held in Bowling Green, KY last weekend. Lotta firsts for this trip, and most of them went pretty smooth. The wife and dogs had a great time camping in the pits, Lance had fun thrashing on his car all weekend, the camaraderie at these events is top notch, even the guys with $150,000 cars and transporters hauling them are just as easy to talk with and share notes with as the little guys pulling their cars in on open trailers or even driving them in. Spent a lot of time chatting with Andy Hollis and his wife, super nice people, also finally met Jason Luebcke and his wife from STL and many others as well.

Enough chatting though, here are my fastest Speed stop and autocross runs...



The speedstop course was crazy, it was held on the East part of the road course and had elevation changes, a blind corner after the chicane and the stop box was on a portion that was heading downhill. I slid completely through the box on my second run and never really recovered from that, stopping early on all of the rest of the runs.

The autocross course was the same as from the match tour held there a few weeks ago and while not really to my liking, I learned how to get the best out of it eventually. It took adding ballast in the right seat to finally set a good time there, to offset all of the long right hand turns at the start. I finished 6th in class in the autocross portion, pretty proud of that given the big names up in front of me.

Here is my video from the 3rd session on the road course.



VERY technical and intimidating course...got to watch a good friend running from his 63 split window with flames leaping ten feet high from it on my second session. Sobering events like that will change your perspective in a hurry. This track will bite you in an instant if you aren't on top of your game, 8 or 9 laps at speed on it will wear you and your junk out. Super fun but I had to be cautious at the same time, call it self preservation... On the cool down laps after session 3 I heard a grinding noise...so I punted and put the car on the trailer for the day. Still haven't looked to see what it was, probably a wheel bearing or brake pad. Car was too damn hot to even touch, much less diagnose or repair.

Overall it was fun, can't wait to do it again. There are several of you reading this right now that I think would LOVE to go to an event like this. All the seat time you can shake a stick at, plus plenty of other watching to do between your runs...all for $500 entry (which can be half of that for first timers). You can't beat the deal...