Getting dirty!

wastintime · 02-23-2008, 07:25 AM

Hey everyone,
First of all, I'm probably a terrible person for posting this, but this is just one of the funniest pictures I've ever taken in my time racing, and I had to share it. I guess it's funnier for me because I was in the car before the pic was taken, but I still think it's great.

I feel really bad too because this is my students car, which was actually a great handling very fast car, but he got spooked in the rain and spun on his 2nd lap of the day. He wasn't even going fast, just nailed the brakes at the wrong time, and around we went. The spin was glorious! This is the car after some light cleaning... my helmet was covered in mud and grass.
He got so freaked out about the spin though that he never went back out even when the track was drying out for an hour or two. I kept trying to convince him that he wasn' a bad student, he didn't do anything stupid, he just made a rookie mistake (I think there's a huge difference), and he'll probably never make it again. He didn't even make me nervous when we spun, it really wasn't a bad one, just a messy spin.

The car was fast though, 450hp full race setup from mongoose - Jon K. is the driver of mongoose's GTP car, so I guess that's how we hooked up.

Lol, as much as I love driving in the rain, I will say the new surface at Roebling is dangerous. water pools everywhere and you get rivers running across the track at points. It was fun though.

jester911 · jester911's Garage

My second day of SCCA drivers school was rain the entire day. It didn't seem like it at the time but I learned quite a bit that day. Those pics of the infield look much the same as Feb 06 when I attended.

Too bad the he scared himself away from some of the best opportunities to learn car control at a lower speed than in the dry.

wastintime · 02-23-2008, 02:58 PM

Jerry, lol, those pics are from when it wasn't raining. Honestly, it was raining so hard that we should have cancelled the event. I'm not sure how much there actually was to learn. It got to a point where visibility was dangerously low, and we had people almost lose it on the parade/familiarization laps (which I led, so I know we never went above 40mph).

barney911rs · barney911rs's Garage

Where on the track did he spin? I recognized that rain soaked paddock the second I saw the car.

I've been off track there 3 times over the years. First time was in my Eagle Talon AWD. A friend at the time gave me a free set of the Firestone Firehawk race tires. That weekend was the first and LAST time I ever used them. I was pushing the car pretty hard into 3 when all of a sudden and with no warning, the rear broke loose and I spun to the left. Left a nice spray of dirt on the track, two ruts in the grass, and a car full of dirt. That was the only time that car EVER had oversteer. The other two were both at 5. In my first 911, I had a friend in the car to give me some pointers on how to drive this new to me car. He kept yelling go go go, and I got on the power way to hard to soon and looped it. The last time was on purpose, I was driving my buddies 911, and I was working on my line through 4 and the entry to 5, and I really nailed it good and got in WAY to deep to try and brake and make the corner, so I just drove it straight off.

Spoke to by friend from Orlando, Florida Citrus was up there last weekend, and they had three Carerra GT's there. One was an instructor and the other two were his students. I don't think I've ever seen more the one at a time, and they had three as the same track event.

ErVikingo · 02-24-2008, 06:02 PM

At least you didn't post a pic of his underwear

wastintime · 02-24-2008, 07:09 PM

Yeah, I hate missing events with Citrus, lol, they always bring big money cars that are fun to bum rides off of.

He spun going into 1 actually. Basically, what happened was he went fairly fast down the straight, broke too gently going into 1. I've noticed that very rarely do people realize just how hard their cars can brake, and think they're going to lose control if they brake hard.

So, he brakes gently, and didn't really slow down too much. Honestly, he could have made the turn, but he freaked out a little and just stabbed the brakes, and the back end immediately came around pretty violently.... then he did an even worse thing and turned back into it, and was starting to make the car come back across the track. so I'm steering back into the spin, and we ended up doing like a 540 in the infield between 1 and 2