04-28-2005, 10:08 AM
G.Irish Wrote:I still wanna hear about turn 10. I had a big moment there in RJ's car once (with Thayer riding shotgun).
I didnt hear about this one! :lol:
I've had more than one "moment" there, one of which had me sliding from the entry of south bend, across the grass, to the back straight.
G.Irish Wrote:RJ is one my close friends and I thought he was headed for a crash in his R the way he was driving. Doesn't mean I'm dissing RJ or anything. Even RJ admits he was pushing it too hard for a car he didn't really want to wreck.
Yep. By the end of the year I had picked up a lot of speed and I was starting to probe the limits in some interesting places. I had quite a few offs, but it didnt bite me too hard. One thing that did work in my favor is that I was not biting off huge chunks of speed - just small increments, and I think it helps that my car is quite a bit more forgiving of operator error than a GT3 (electronic gizmos not withstanding).
That said, I did sell the car (Integra Type-R). I owed the bank $$ on it, and even if I didnt I still didnt want to crash it. I just picked up the new track car (95 Integra RS), its paid for, and i'm going to have a race shop build a cage for it - I am going fast enough now where I think I need to have better safety gear than the bolted in rollbar I had in my ITR and I can race it next year if I can get my shit together and get a race license.
Thats another thing that maybe you should look into Matt - if you have the coin to do DE's in a GT3, then why not build/buy a racecar and race? Its relatively affordable and its a lot of fun. One of the guys racing Honda Challenge used to race in Ferrari Challenge and is having a lot more fun with the hondas.
Even though I'm a little late to this party, I'll go back to what was said in page 1 about crashing due to inadequate equipment. I completely disagree with that, and you make your own choices and you must drive accordingly. I've certainly done some less than ideal prep/setup choices with my cars over the years and you just have to drive around them. You equipment is hardly ever at fault when you crash unless you have some sort of component failure (tire puncture, brake line failure, suspension part falling off). Its way too easy to blame the tires, blame the track, blame the brake pads - but ultimately, when the dust settles, you were behind the wheel providing the inputs to the vehicle and there's no way to get away from that. Instead of blaming your equipment, take a hard look in the mirror, look at the video and evaluate the situation to determine what happened and why. I had a crash 2 or 3 years ago on track and while there were a lot of contributing factors, it was ultimately 100% driver error - I fucked up.