NASA Texas |
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NASA Texas |
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Pics!
NASA Texas hosted a DE/lapping/race event at Texas World Speedway this weekend. In conjunction with the Corvette club, NASA also hosted time trials for the Vettes in the late mornings on both Saturday and Sunday.. which was interesting to watch unfold. As always with NASA Texas, we were running the TWS 2.9 mile configuration.
Although I tried to get some more Supra owners to go, I was the only Supra in attendance this time. The car was running good and I was chasing my previous best lap (2:00.433) and, as before, trying to reach my goal of breaking under 2 minutes on street tires. With attendance being much higher this weekend than before, I had to deal with traffic almost every lap so I had few opportunities for perfect laps. On Saturday, I hit 2:01's and high 2:00's a few times but no 1:59's.
Sunday was the big day.. In my first session in the morning, Becky rode along with me to advise me on what parts of the track I could negotiate better. Then in the early afternoon, with less traffic, I had a few more opportunities to get good laps in. And although I thought I had a few good laps, I guess I need to try even harder. My best lap was a 2:00.134. That's right, two minutes around the track and I'm one tenth of a second off the pace I was shooting for. Sigh... :-( I'll try again next time.. the cooler temps should probably give me that tenth.. :)
Oh, I almost forgot to mention.. in one of the afternoon sessions on Saturday, I had a severe boost / power loss just like I described in my previous track weekend report. This time it was the silicone hose connector at the beginning of the first intercooler pipe. Luckily this one is accessible from underhood (rather than having to jack up the car), so I went to O'Reilly's and fixed it, and was back at the track in under an hour. The ruptured hose connector is shown in the pictures above. I also took a picture of my new triple gauge A-pillar. I used to have a dual-gauge pillar, but now I've added a coolant temperature gauge.
My most fun session was, of course, when it rained on Sunday afternoon. With the wipers and headlights on and the passenger's window up, I went out to have some sidways fun. Perhaps I should've been trying to improve my wet track racing line, but it was just too much fun to see how far and for how long I could hang the tail out. Twice I found out where those limits were. First, on one of my very sidways powersliding exits from turn 6, the tail went past where it couldn't be recovered. I slammed the brakes and the car's spin stopped at just over a 90 degree angle of yaw, still on the track. Whew! Same happened in the carousel a couple laps later, with a simple slide to a stop at a perpendicular angle to the track. Hey, at least I kept it on the track and got the hell out of the way before the other cars got there! :-)
BTW, if you're wondering how far off the pace the fun sideways rain laps were, my best rain lap was 2:45. I figure I wasted at least 10 seconds with my sideways playing around, not to mention how much more I could gain by learning the proper wet line around TWS.
See you at the NASA Texas event at Texas World Speedway on October 6-7!
Comments? Questions? Email me at andi@airmail.net