Sorry I've been slacking! After Charlotte, I was done and out of money. After I posted that on my FB feed a local shop stepped up and said they would help me get to NOLA! So me and two buddies (and a Dog) all loaded up in a borrowed RV attached the trailer and headed 19 hours south to run the NOLA Optima event. It really wasn't as bad as I thought, we swapped out drivers every 6 hours and drove straight through. It was a wet weekend for sure! AutoX was first, and all the cars ran in the morning because of the coming rain. I was able to hang in there with the GTV class, but I was no match for Jake Rozelle or Mike Maire. Hey I'm 350hp down to those guys, who knew it would make a difference on the autox course. With the IRS in my car, I'm losing time at the launch and with short courses, there's just not enough time to reel them in. I managed a third place finish behind Mike and Jake, and standing on the podium with those two guys is a pretty cool deal.
The afternoon brought rain and the speed stop, which was on the track. Again this was a very short (11.8 secs) run and in the rain. The GTV class was very close, I managed a 5th place spot. I was only .500 tenths out of a podium, that's how close it was.
D&E, throw that out the door, they hate my car for some reason. Maybe because it doesn't portray the aftermarket, maybe because it's just raw and has a little rust and a lot of dings? Who knows, the paint is 30 years old, but it still looks good in pictures and on TV! I even tried to add some bling to the engine bay to no avail, I finished last in GTV and 3rd from last overall with only 57 points. That's 34 points down from the 3rd place GTV car in D&E. That's mighty hard to make up on the track.
Sunday was my day! Road Course day! But we didn't get a lot of track time. The first session everyone was going off because the track was green from all the rain and still damp in some spots. The first session got red flagged when Mike DuSold went for a wild ride. It was finally drying out when our group went out right before lunch, but on the forth lap it started raining pretty hard at one end of the track, we had warning and we all slowed down to about 35 mph. Well if you saw the show on tv last Friday, you'll see me go for a wild ride! into the gravel trap I went. good thing it was lunch and no one lost any track time because of it, because it took 30 minutes to get me out! and another 30 to clean all the rocks off the track that were falling out of my car like a sand spreader in a snow storm. During the break we cleaned the rocks out and inspected the car and made sure nothing was damaged, then the rains came again! We were sitting in 3rd behind Mike and Jake. It didn't look promising, so we started to pack up stuff and load the car, no way were they going to get the track dry and no one was going to get faster in the wet. We loaded up and went over to the gift shop to get a NOLA shirt and some stickers ect... As we were grabbing lunch we heard them on the track running again, so I pulled up my laps on my phone and saw James Shipka just ran .1 faster than my time! Oh **** we gotta go back! We unloaded and got the car ready just in time for our last session of the day and the track was pretty dry. James and I had a battle for third place back and forth and as I beat his lap, he would beat mine. In the end James came out on top with the third place spot.
At this point I had enough points for the Vegas Invite, but there was one more event left to run in California and it would all come down to who did what and who won in and who didn't.
and let's not forget about Racetrack Ralph, getting ready to load up for the Big Easy!