Unnatural Acts

Buttonwillow Raceway, originally uploaded by drtaxsacto.

Over the weekend I took a try at club racing. Unfortunately, my S-2000 was not available so I had to exist on the kindness of strangers including this 911 and a Shelby Mustang. When you are a rookie you get an instructor to help you go through the course. Many of the things you do on a race course seemed unnatural to me. You go far out on a curve and then turn into it, for example. And the width of how far you go out on the curve is pretty far - at least at first, but when you get up to speed - it begins to feel natural. Depending on the configuration of the curve you do slightly different things.

There was a lot to take in on this - beyond simply when to accelerate and when to brake. So I suspect that to get comfortable you need to have a lot of time on the wheel. In this venue, I got to drive a total of four times - I could have done two more but wanted to do one session where I took pictures. Each session you are on the track for about half an hour. I think my top speed for either day was over 70 miles per hour but not much more.

One other interesting thing - today one of the instructors took me out on the course and showed me how he would drive it. The most natural feeling when you get on this kind of track is to act quickly - but his moves were calculated and actually gradual. There were a range of cars on the track and if you would like to see some of the hotties you can go to my flirkr site. By the way there were a couple of S-2000s on the track. In the race on Saturday - which had a whole lot of Vipers and Beasleys and other things that were pretty hot - the S-2000 came in near the top.