NASA @ Hastings

Today is Saturday and I'm working. In Connecticut. Tomorrow I'm flying home. I'm flying back to the East Coast (Wahington, DC) on Monday. I'll be there until Friday. Did I mention that I'm working next Saturday too?

This is a pretty brutal couple of weeks. The only thing sustaining me during these trying times are memories of the excellent track event last weekend at Motorsports Park Hastings (MPH) in Hastings, Nebraska. I made the 6 hour drive to Hastings with Scott Friday afternoon. Saturday was a mixed bag, the downside is that it rained the whole day, the upside is that I really like driving in the rain. In fact I LOVE driving in the rain. It essentially make all cars equal. Traction is so limited that no one can put any power down. This means that even a relatively stock car like mine can be the among the fastest cars on track. During one session I lapped nearly the entire Group-4 field. Only a Porsche C4S was faster.

Unfortunately Sunday was rain free so I resumed my place well down the order. With a little more negative camber I wasn't as far down as usual.

I still struggled with the HeroCam. It's hard to get it to start reliably. In one case I missed capturing a big, bad Shelby Cobra spinning just in front of me and Scott. Instead I got 435 consecutive .jpg images of the session, including one just before and one just after the spin.

Here is some friendly advice for all new driving school attendees. If it's your first time at a track consider starting somewhere other than NASA Group-4. If you miss the first session, don't grid up first for the second session. But, if you insist on gridding first, don't start lapping at 35 MPH in an attempt to learn the entire track during the warm-up lap. Finally, and this one is key, don't then spin the car on the first hot lap. None of these things will win the hearts and minds of your fellow drivers, (especially when done in combination) it will only make them bitch about you to the NASA Officials during the post session download meeting.

One thing I found at Hastings was my missing horsepower. Hasting is ~1800ft so I gained back much of power I lose at high-altitude tracks like Miller and Pueblo.



Here is a dry shot from Sunday showing my M3 and Scott's very fast Pontiac, at least I think it's a Pontiac -- I could be wrong.