NCM Time
We made a few tweaks to the setup after NOLA, including stiffening the front swaybar, some tweaks to the alignment, and the usual between event maintenance.
The plan was to get some quality seat time after making the changes and work on both the setup and the driver. The driver part consisted of hitting the Mineral Wells Evo Driving School (which I highly recommend).
Sometimes you need to get back to basics
Thanks to an uncooperative weather forecast and some other life events, the car setup part turned into 5 autocross runs with Texas SCCA, and an aborted trip out that ended up being a wet event which wouldn't have told us anything.
Second-gen parking only
SO, we loaded up and headed to Kentucky. Arrived at the track early enough to get through tech and have some time to do some tourist-ing that afternoon.
We were sweating rain the whole week leading up to the event, but lucked out with just a quick shower during our afternoon autocross session. Pretty quickly in the morning session, we determined that a familiar foe was back.
Cody's 79 Camaro, that we did battle with in NOLA last year, has also undergone major surgery and -surprise- we were right back to running within hundredths of each other.
Nemessisssssss
In the end, I had one run that would have closed the gap, and one that would have won, but both had cones. We swallowed the slightly bitter pill and took off for the road rally.
Sunday morning it was time for the big boy track. This place is a ton of fun, but pretty overwhelming with 24 turns, tons of elevation change and blind corners, and some pretty big speeds in 3 different places.
The first session got me turned around trying to drive faster than I needed to, and I ended up pulling off early to regroup. Hit the speed stop for a few runs, and just nothing was feeling right. Things turned for the better during session 2, and the day started to look up.
As the day wound down, we were sitting 2nd in Speed Stop behind Joe Gregory, and needed some time to get around Dan Ballard on the road course. An open track and some help with the line from a kind GT350 helped find the time and the road course win.
Kudos to Greg for the clutch beer delivery after the last session!
Heading to the awards presentation, we were optimistic but not counting our chickens. Thankfully GTV gets announced first, so we didn't have to wait as long as some others. Vegas, here we come again!
Super excited to keep developing this thing through the summer, and continue to get my driving up to its level. It's an outright blast to drive both on the autocross course and the track, and I think/hope we're just starting to scratch the surface.