buckle-up

It really doesn’t matter how well you prepare for a weekend at the track, it’s not until you roll out of the hot pits and onto the track for the first session before you can tell whether the preparation was worth it. You can watch a lot of videos of other drivers, and feel as prepared as you can be, but there’s never any substitute for getting in the car and just “having a go” by yourself. It is the first weekend of the new calendar year and the setting was the main track at Willow Springs – better known as Big Willow - just a little to the west of Rosamond, CA. It’s on the edge of the Mojave Desert and with spring still weeks away, the daytime temperatures were on the chilly side – perfect for any “forced-air induction” engines. And the C6 ‘Vette we take to the track has a very big forced-air induction engine. Conditions couldn’t be better! The picture at the top of the page is of cars in pre-grid prior to one of the afternoon races and it was the first time I could recall s...

When one year’s program comes to an end and there’s a break between the last event of year that’s ended and the first outing of the New Year, there’s scarcely a time when you are not thinking about your car, and about your own capabilities as a driver. Will the experience gained in one season automatically carry into the next? When you return to the track, even a familiar one, will lessons learnt be forgotten or will it just be a case of picking up where you left off the year before? I sure hope it will be just like with riding a bicycle: somehow it all comes back to me each time I pick one up! If it were only that easy! I suspect that with just one year of experience under our belts, and with so much more to learn, it will be slow going for the first couple of sessions. There’s a reason why the High Performance Driver Education (HPDE) program conducted by the National Auto Sport Association (NASA) starts with a Novice program (HPDE 1) before you move on up to the Beginners program...

We have been in Boulder, Colorado for almost three weeks and first thing tomorrow morning, we will head back to Southern California. The picture above is of Margo alongside the other ‘Vette – the C5 Z06 that is our “other car” when in Colorado – but no longer playing the part of an “umbrella girl”, having swapped the T Shirt in favor of something much warmer! For some time we have been contemplating driving the Z06 back to Southern California, and taking it to the track for ’09. We had been reconsidering whether to continue our driver education in the C6 Z51 ‘Vette, or to try the Z06, as the Z06 chassis is pretty good and the 6-speed manual affords a lot more control over power delivery to the rear wheels. All we would need to do is to replace the tires (still the original tires from 2003), upgrade the brake pads and swap out the brake fluids for something with higher temperature tolerances. Could be the way to go! From our first outing, under the tutelage of the National Auto ...

I am a little disoriented – but I can see the wall approaching rapidly. I can even see the protective tires surrounding it – it’s the wall that divides the track from the “hot pits” and has proved to be a very strong magnet over the years, pulling in cars on regular basis. I am not completely sure of what driver input I am providing to any of the controls and the wall continues to get closer! If I destroy the car on this wall, I will be pretty upset. Before leaving Simi Valley I had driven out to A&A Corvette Performance at Oxnard as Andy had wanted to give the engine software a quick check to make sure there were no new “codes” showing or any strange entries in the tables that manage the fuel mix to the engine. But it all checked out OK, and he made sure the computer was providing us with a slightly richer fuel mix. I had already added a measure of 100 octane gas to the tank to bring up the overall octane reading to 95 and, for good measure, added a pint of oil as well. Even th...

Track sessions this month were held at ButtonWillow, a difficult track favoring the “technicians” of our group, more capable of wringing the best from their “momentum” cars. This would be the first time out for the new, supercharged Corvette, and from our previous experience at ButtonWillow, we couldn’t have picked a worse track! This is where the agile Honda Civics, and Mazda Miatas, drive everyone nuts – swarming behind the more powerful “torque” cars. The track serves up uneven surfaces, turns with changing radiuses and corner sequences that simply don’t reward those who try to follow conventional "racing lines"! So the question really was – could a 580 bhp supercharged ‘Vette even stay on the track, let alone be fun! But before heading to the track, preparation began on Thursday, and the picture above is of the ‘Vette on that hoist at A&A Corvette Performance. Andy, of A&A, had shown me an enhanced air-to-air intercooler for the supercharger that had fins add...

This weekend we managed to fit in a trip down to Anaheim to visit the Orange County Auto Show sponsored by the magazine Motor Trend. I have developed a liking for some of the editorials in this magazine and given the chance of a one year free subscription, just for attending the show, I couldn’t resist. Even though this meant navigating more than fifty miles of LA freeways on a Saturday afternoon, in light rain – the first for the season, getting the chance to look at the new Corvette ZR1 up close certainly seemed fair enough compensation. The trip down was uneventful except for the slight detour we took through a Disney parking station, when we should have been at the Anaheim convention center, but the helpful folks at Disney soon had us headed out of the garage and in the right direction. As we had bought our tickets online, and had an e-ticket receipts, gaining entry to the event went very smoothly. And without any fuss at all, or lengthy queuing, we were standing on the floor of th...

It was only a week or so ago that my good friend and former boss, Chris, emailed me about his latest outing on the track. Chris was back east and he was clearly lapping the course in a Lotus Super 7 – or one of the many derivatives of this well known model. Racing a Super 7 just has to be a whole lot of fun and a return to the early days of motor racing, when all the cars were roughly the same and it was the superior driver skills that won on the day. When I moved to London in the early ‘70s I had the good fortune of being able to go to Caterham and to the small workshop that existed there at the time – I have no idea what it looks like today, but back in those days, it was just a very small village operation. It had been only a short time before my arrival at the garage that Lotus had decided to leave the Super 7 market, and had handed over the rights, as well as a lot of supporting technology, to the garage at Caterham. From that date, the car was renamed the Caterham Super 7. I w...