Mostly because a Civic Type R didn’t show up to stomp me again on Day 2, but I’ll take it. Anyway, on to the videos (now with fancy picture-in-picture):
Day 1
20th PAX / 30th raw overall (of 102), 2nd in DS (of 9)
D Street was among the groups that drew the Heat 1 short straw for the day, so cool temperatures and a fresh (read: pebble-y) surface made for a tricky start. After failing miserably at my first three runs, I mostly got my act together for the last two. Apart from running a little wide on some of the corners in the 2nd half of the course, I was content with my fastest run for the day. However, the aforementioned Civic Type R with a good driver behind the wheel still blew me away by ~1.3 seconds on this ~52 second course. I think even under more ideal circumstances, like fresh RE71Rs instead of a set that’s ~5 events away from retirement, upgrading from the OEM shocks, and cleaning up my lines a bit (worth maybe ~0.5), it still would have been a struggle. Oh well.
Day 2
14th PAX / 30th raw overall (of 102), 1st in DS (of 8)
The Day 2 course was reversed from Day 1 with minimal tweaks as usual for this venue. Thankfully the heats rotated forward for the next day, providing us with warmer temperatures and some clean driving lines. I got into the groove by the third run and held on with only a few hundredths of difference between it and the remaining runs (hence my reaction to seeing nearly the same result for the third time). There was probably another tenth or two to be found out there for me, but I’ll count any day like this where I can get the car to do almost exactly what I want it to do as a good one.
With MiDivs working like “nationals light” (Natty Lite?), overall standings were determined by combining the best times of each day. I have no doubt in my mind that the CTR would have taken the overall DS win, but without showing up the 2nd day to qualify, the victory fell to me by a margin of ~1.1 seconds combined.
Once the FR-S wears out its current set of RE71Rs, my husband (who was unfortunately out sick for this event) is wanting to bump it up into SSC to give us a better shot at Nationals again this year. Even with the forced downgrade in tire (Falken Azenis RT615K+), the suspension upgrades should keep things interesting. That, and we like the prospects of running against a truly “spec” class instead of the anticipated hot hatch / rally car (WRX, STI, Golf R, FoRS, and CTR) takeover of DS.