For the last few years, my top 3 goals at the beginning of the year are: don’t break anything, track more, and to reset my personal best (PB) at the all the tracks I frequent. This past weekend marked my 4th and 5th trackdays of the year and 3rd unique track, I had already managed to set new PB’s at 2 of my first 3 events and both of the configurations that those events used so I was on a bit of a roll (I even managed to improve on the course that I thought would be the toughest to improve on!).
The challenge was that last weekend’s course is the longest circuit that I run on (3.1 miles) which means that you get the fewest laps during a session and there are the most opportunities to make mistakes or lose time to traffic. I was expecting to find some time though since the long course is made from combining the two short courses and I had dropped time on each of them since the last time I ran the full 3.1 mile course. I managed to lop off 2.5s from my previous PB and get well below the “2:30 barrier” (the delineation between fast times and slow ones for that configuration). I was able to put down a 2:28.7 on my best laps both Saturday and Sunday, which I was more than happy with.
One of my favorite parts of the weekend was giving my Blue (intermediate) student a ride in the Yellow (advanced) group. He was struggling with getting anywhere near the limits of his Viper and was painfully slow for the first day, but after his ride he started picking up the pace. But what really impressed him was when we passed a GT3 RS in my 178whp BRZ (earlier we took an entire straight to pass a Spec Miata, straight lines and power are not the BRZ’s specialty).
It was a great weekend, the rain held off until just before the end of the day on Sunday and the spittle was just enough to turn one of the expansion joints into a slip and slide. Not the best way to end the weekend but nothing was broken and the only damage was to my ego.