NASA @ Summit Point, September 18th-19th 2004

[white_2kgt]

awesome weekend. i can't wait til october and some real brakes (my drums are busted, all my braking was on the fronts)... BURN VISA!

highlight of my weekend: instructor from a cobra that was behind me an entire session telling me "that was one hell of a show" and he meant it in a good way... little does he know i'm just lunatic

bah, the only reason he didn't pass you is b/c he has an IRS lol

-c

[Mike]

awesome weekend. i can't wait til october and some real brakes (my drums are busted, all my braking was on the fronts)... BURN VISA!

highlight of my weekend: instructor from a cobra that was behind me an entire session telling me "that was one hell of a show" and he meant it in a good way... little does he know i'm just lunatic

bah, the only reason he didn't pass you is b/c he has an IRS lol

-c

haha chad never gives up. i love it

bonus on that guy, his daughter is a soph at jmu and he was wearing a jmu shirt. woot!

[Maengelito]

bonus on that guy, his daughter is a soph at jmu and he was wearing a jmu shirt. woot!

wonder if she's hot

[Maengelito]

an amazing weekend for those that werent there. i've been dreading the weather for a long time and we get there and it couldnt have been much better. a warped front rotor prevented me from doing a lot of things i wanted to and i went off in T10 on my first session sunday. word of advice though, if you go off in the gravel, dont try to get back on through the gravel. i got stuck and missed my whole session. i had to take apart my front passenger side brakes to get all the pebbles out, so i decided to source a new rotor and install it while everything was apart. braking hard without wobbling is so much better than using all your strength to keep the wheel straight under braking. i took navin out on my second session and jayray out on my extra long third and final session and had a freakin blast. but damn, i need more powa!

[Chris]

Oh man I am hooked!!! This was more fun than I ever imagined. I learned so much about my car and what I was capable of in my first track event.

Saturday morning was still wet when we first went out, but it cleared up and the track was dry by mid-day. Sunday was beautiful and all my fears of rain disappeared completely.

I had Jamie as an instructor, great guy and very good advice. As the weekend progressed, I felt my line was improving greatly. I kept hearing "perfect" and "textbook line" from my instructor. My P+ pads were amazing and seemed to always have more bite in them at the end of a braking zone (prob. due to the fact that I was still breaking a little early), but for what I'm used to in the car, these were amazing. The azenis felt good, got a little greasy towards the end but gave me plenty of notice before traction was lost.


I wasn't sure if I would like Summit because from a spectator's view, it seems somewhat boring. Very wrong... I just wanted to keep going at the end of each session. I had no offs, slides, or spins. I pushed hard to where I felt comfortable, and focused on learning the basics and keeping my car out of trouble.

My only complaint was lack of power for passing (F'ing Toyota Echo!!!) and cars that I would be all over for the entire track not lifting on the straights to give me a chance to pass (F'ing Toyota Echo!!!).

Jay Ray and I officially popped our HPDE cherry and lets just say: BURN VISA BURN!!!

[.RJ]

Another one bites the dust.

Congrats... i'll be out in october.

[ScottyB]

yeah it was great to see you guys out on track this weekend.

every time one of you guys would go by me as i was taking pics around 5/6/7/8/9 i just wanted to yell out "YOU'RE MY BOY BLUE!"

[Sijray21]

by far the best driving experience i've ever had.

This past weekend has been all that i expected and more. I had Gerry Chan as my instructor, i couldn't have lucked out in a better way. He was a great instructor; constant feedback, very approachable, and great advice. The first session was a little edgy b/c of the rain and wet track, but by the time the track dried out in the second session of the first day i was able to push it much harder. I definitely will be out there as soon as i can again. I also learned alot more about braking hard, weight transfer, rpm management, and maintaining momentum.

I'll see if i can do a longer (full) write up later regarding my first session in my specific car. Riding in Maeng's car for a 40 minute session really helped out with improving where i should be looking on the track.

Tack on another for the Go-Fast Crack Pipe...

[BLAIR]

the guy with the Si
is your car red. if so i saw you going back and forth with a silver 350z.
good job

chris
is your car just a sohc??

[Chris]

oh yeah... my car was soo silent out there, so we had to fix it.

we took out the all the air intake shit that silences it. so now I have a nice growl which can actually be heard!

[Chris]

chris
is your car just a sohc??

oh yeah, as slow as they come. It really didn't bother me though because I worked on carrying more speed through the turns and keeping the momentum as I exited, allowing me to gain on those who simply relied on power.

[navin]

uhh, i'd post a long drawn out story of my first track [non-driving] experience, but it would just be boring...

Anyways, just wanted to say it was nice meeting you guys finally, great putting faces to names. I had a great time, I swear I still hear cars ringing in my head...

Thanks to Maeng for the ride on the track, you couldnt see but underneath the helmet I had the biggest shit eating grin on my face, except the first time through Turn 4

Cant really think of anything else to say, except Mike is a pussy and cant drink Steele 211's!!

Hope to see you guys back in October

-Navin

[.RJ]

I had Gerry Chan as my instructor

:thumbup:

[Feersty]

I am glad everything turned out alright fellas. Props to b00bies and JRay.

[Dragon]

Well it definitely turned out to be an amazing weekend. Jes and Jon called me to let me know they had gotten stuck on 81 so were running late so I checked into the hotel and was off to the track to help out and let Laura know. When I got there I was greeted by weather that made me wonder why the hell I was there. There was actually a river of water running through the tech shed. I helped out at the track and was told by Laura that due to the light load that night Jon and Jes didn't need to show up, but by the time I got a text message (not enough signal to make a call) through to them they were already like 5 min from the track. After finishing up I realized that I in fact didn't have my rain gear in the back of my truck, so it was off to Wally World. The following morning the clouds looked like it was going to be a repeat of the previous night, but thankfully it held off and turned out to be a beautiful day.

By the way all you guys driving can thank me for the weather cause I kept my rain suit on all day long to ward off the storm daemons. Both days had their problems from the officiating side, but thanks to a spectacular crew on Grid all the ones that we were presented were easily remedied.

Many many thanks to Jon and Jes who worked their asses off for me this weekend checking bands, stickers, and gridding race cars, I couldn't have done it without you two. Jes I got numerous comments from racers telling me how nice you were, and how it was great that you kept them all informed of times and any incidents. This once again prooves my theory that racers respond better to women, cause Jon and the rest of the male staff did the same but no comments were made about them.

Oh and thanks to Mike, Maeng, Navin, John Sedon, Furball, Drew, and the other NASA Chiefs who helped almost kill the Keg that I dragged back to the hotel room from the track. I'm sure if the rest of MM hadn't pussed out cause they had to drive the other day we woulda killed the last of it. We did it respectable though took it from 2/3 down to less than 1/4.

[Mike]

jayray is my bitch in halo

oh yeah, i did the little tire size corrector and apparently i was hitting 123ish on the front straight. weeeeeeeeeeeee!

[JohnC]

Well I guess I'll throw in a few words about the weekend...

The drive up (and around the Winchester area) on Friday night was pretty wild. Constant rain and wind, and of course radio announcements every 5 minutes about tornadoes touching down mere *miles* away. Interstate 81 was shut down just north of Harrisonburg - we (Jess and I, Dave, Jason, and Chris) were able to bail out onto 11 and continue north slowly. Just south of Winchester, fortunately on the other side of the highway, two semis flipped over and took out a couple of those big overhead signs. And then on the way from the hotel to the track (before finding out we didn't have to show up) we tried to take a little shortcut and ended up in Berryville just ahead of yet another tornado. When we finally made it to the track we just hung around for 30 minutes and discovered that no one was gonna register or tech that night. Crazy stuff...

On Saturday I had the unique pleasure of taking the "MM WRX" out as the pace car for the Legends race, so that was cool. If I'd known about it more than a few minutes in advance, I would've gotten the MM banner to display as we went around. And, I would've taken Jess along too (I'm sure she'll chime in :roll: )

Sunday brought absolutely beautiful weather and an abundance of NASA grid workers. There were like 8 people in the grid area, so I decided to try and score some rides. One of the instructors there had a black RX-7. When I first asked for a ride he mumbled something about the suspension being tuned for the driver only and he didn't want to screw anything up. Whatever - so I said "Thanks anyway" and continued down the line of cars. Well, as the group was leaving grid he yells at me to grab a helmet and meet him after a couple of laps. Sure enough, he pulled back into pit lane after a couple of minutes and I jumped in.

Holy shit.

Holy fucking shit.

Going into turn 1, I actually closed my eyes because I thought we were going to die. I didn't see where he was braking because I didn't think it would matter - the wall would stop us quickly enough. But a quick jab of the brakes and then a quick turn in and through the apex. Passed 2 or 3 other cars before another quick stab at the brakes and full throttle from the turn in at 3 all the way to 5. Yes, that's turn 5. Maybe he lifted a little bit before turn 4, but I don't remember because all I could think about was not soiling myself or his nice seats (because the car is apparently a daily driver as well). The car stopped surely and rotated quickly through the carousel. We passed another 4 or 5 cars between turns 8 and 10. The front straight flew by and I made a point of looking at the speed-o-meter as we were coming into turn 1.

One hundred and thirty eight miles per hour. It was cool. hock:

I got a couple more laps of this and then he dropped me off back at the grid. So, ::thumb up:: to the FD driving instructor who had a change of heart and let me ride along.

I also got a ride with Mr. Maengelito. While not *quite* as speedy as the FD, Christina made a pretty decent showing. Frankly, the ride with Brian was probably far more useful to me as a driver, because I wasn't too blinded by speed to concentrate on the line and how B was using the track. And the little detour at turn 10 was no big deal at all - I was really impressed at how controlled and calm Brian was through the whole thing. Well, except for trying to drive back out to the track through the gravel :oops:

So, all in all a fun weekend. I can't wait to get the Z out to one of these events! (by the way, the guy in group 3 with the 280Z - he just bought a Z32TT w/ 23k miles :evil: )

[Mike]

mmm you got a ride in the fd.... soooo hot!

[Dragon]

Sunday brought absolutely beautiful weather and an abundance of NASA grid workers.

Heck yeah that was sweet I had lots of minions this weekend, I was able to catch a couple rides myself as well as take a short break to watch Kim Ratcliffe's race DVD. In total we had 9 of us at one point of the weekend, and it never dropped below 6 (including Pit Out).

[John]

I had a great weekend myself. Picked up some more speed throughout the entire course, and had fun rolling the field in HPDE 3 and 4. Unfortunately, I'm down to my backing plates on my front pads, but I can't complain since the Cobalt VRs lasted 1200+ track miles. I was also disappointed that I didn't find any squirrels to mangle on track. :wink:

Thanks to Chad for letting me borrow his camera. I will try uploading a video from a session of mine on Sunday.

Well, as the group was leaving grid he yells at me to grab a helmet and meet him after a couple of laps. Sure enough, he pulled back into pit lane after a couple of minutes and I jumped in.

Holy shit.

Holy fucking shit.

Yeah, that's Fritz, who owns several FDs. He was the only person I gave a point-by too the entire weekend with the exception of Jeff Curtis' spec racer Toyota. Fritz is also the guy who owns the crazy yellow FD that was at VIR last time. Great driver...