Rearin' to go... That's Pelicanite WolfTurbo's monster 993TT peeking in on the left. There is simply no catching that car on the straights.
I went to a DE on Thursday at California Speedway sponsored by the San Diego PCA. It's not often that clubs can afford to rent this facility, and this event offered six (that's right, six) run sessions during the day.
The bad news? Well, I made one particularly dumb move on the track, which led to my t-boning a tire stack at the end of the course's biggest braking zone. Watching the footage of it, I'm amazed at my own stupidity, and very grateful that I didn't damage anyone else's car.
Damage to my car? Surprisingly minimal. I need a new piece of door glass, the chrome trim piece that goes at the top of the door, and a new rear-view mirror. At the moment when it happened, I thought it would be much worse.
Fiberglass has one fantastic characteristic that steel lacks. When you push it in, it bends, burps, and bounces back. The tire stack I hit pushed the door skin into the (rolled-down) window, shattered it, and even pushed the interior door panel flush against the cage.
And then it all bounced right back, without even cracking the paint. There's a small tear, though, at the very top, which I'm going to have to take to pelicanite KevinP73's shop to get fixed. But that's pretty much it.
It could have been much worse, and I hope repeated viewings of the clip will help me to avoid getting into a situation like this again.
Here are some stills of the impact, for those of you without high-speed connections (or a lot of patience).
And here's the 2-megabyte Quicktime clip of the spin. You can see from it that I'm very lucky I didn't cause more damage to my own car or -- more importantly -- someone else's. You can see me chasing the white car, and unwisely passing a silver car right before the braking zone -- and then braking too late without the car straight. No surprise, I got sideways.
I'm just glad I didn't get in anyone else's path.
Here's the clip.
Here are some other clips, all 6-7 megs.
Here's one of a signal orange early Targa courageously holding a big-displacement crowd at bay.
Here's one of Dave Buhain (Pelicanite MSRoadRace) running a very fast lap in his 3.6-liter 69S.
Here's my fastest lap, a 1:58, from when I got some free space in the fourth session.