My wife and I spent valentine's day weekend outside Savannah at Roebling Road Raceway doing my first HPDE with the Florida Citrus region PCA. Obviously my wife is a very understanding and supportive type, and I owe her for two days of standing in the freezing (literally), windy cold to watch me burn up tires and gas. I have a good friend who's been running HPDEs at Roebling for several years and instructs, and he's been pushing me to go try it for a couple years. I finally caved.
Track map:
I spent most of my weekends since the first of the year throwing parts at my Mustang and getting the maintenance up to date. New tires, lowering springs, caster-camber plates, adj. panhard bar, ball joints, tie rod ends, pads, rotors, and Ate Typ 200 brake fluid flush. It was a lot of work, but a good bit of it needed done anyway.
I had a great time. My wife had a better time than she thought she would, so that's a plus.
Loaded up and driving to Savannah, about a 2.5 hr ride:
I'm driving here, we're on I-16 I think. Not sure how she mirrored the photo - selfie settings, I guess.
Friday evening we showed up a little early to try and get a good spot for our pit in the infield. We parked the cars outside the track gate a couple hours before opening to get a place in line and visited a nearby winery for a tasting to kill time. Butterducks winery if you're in the area, very good stuff and only about 5 miles from the track. After the tasting I put the numbers on the car waiting for the track to open:
We set up paddock at turn 5 and pulled all the crap out of the car for tech inspection. Once teched it was off to hotel check in and dinner.
The two Otters in the photo below belong to my friends, a husband and wife pair. He instructs and drives the gray one. He bought her the black one so she could start driving - this was her first event too. Both the Miatas are well-dosed with Flyin' Miata parts. The gray one is frighteningly fast and built to the hilt. Keith will probably recognize it as it was kind of a problem child initially and got trailered from GA to CO for some advanced tuning sessions. Now it regularly harasses the GT3s at the track, much to their chagrin. The black one is pretty well outfitted too and likely much faster than my pony in the right hands.
Proudly flying the GRM decals:
The old Mustang performed admirably and by day 2 I was pushing hard. I never got it loose but I was right on the edge several times. When the instructor says "okay...that was a little hot coming in..." you're finding the edge. I seemed to be running with the fastest folks in the green group in the turns, although several of them had the juice to walk away on the straight if they wanted to. I was fast enough in the twistys that I got a lot of point bys from cars that were much faster in a straight line. There was a guy there with a 2015 Z06 with the full aero package that I chased hard on sunday. He could pull away on the straights but I was all over him in the turns. I'm sure I was pushing my little pony way harder than he was pushing, but it was really fun to chase down that beast and listen to both of them open up down the front straight. I was touching 130 before braking, so he was probably pulling 140. On one of our chases I saw someone leaning over the start line shooting cell phone video - I really want to find that video.
Transitioning into turn 5:
My lovely wife shot some video of this section too, I'll post it if I ever get her to share it with me.
Lunchtime track walk on Saturday, led by Ron (I think) from Zotz racing:
In this you're at the turn in to seven looking back uphill at 6.
The instruction all weekend was really good, but I found the track walk to be one of the most valuable things we did. Maybe that's from my days walking autocross courses. In fact, the entire event was well run. If you have a chance to track with the Citrus Region, I highly recommend it.
My overall impressions of HPDE is that it is really, really valuable for learning car control and smoothness on a different level than autocross. It's also a lot of fun, and very intense. But I'm not sure I'm really "hooked." Cost wise it's certainly not something I can do more than once a year - if that. It's also more serious than I may want in my motorsports activities. Part of what I love about autocross is the ability to show up with whatever I'm driving and hoon the hell out of it. HPDE is understandably more rigorous in prep and equipment. OTOH, If I have an opportunity to get to a track and I'm in a place to do it financially...I probably won't turn it down!
