7/02/02 Took a half-day 'intro to racing' school at ProDrive. The school's purpose is to acquaint students with driving race cars. As such, perhaps my experience with track days had made it redundant, but it was fun anyway. And I did pick up some refinements on weight transfer, so it turned out useful overall. The school starts with a session in their skid car, which I had done previously, and follows it up with three sessions in Ford spec racers - an autocross, a lead-follow session on the track, and then an open track session with only 2 other students on the track at the same time. Each track session is 15 minutes, although I wish the lead-follow was 5 and open 25.

I brought along my helmet camera and got some video of the open session. The spec racers are reasonably quick and very forgiving (no doubt set up that way for the school). They run on street tires, which were quite beat up on the car I was driving. This makes the cars quite fun as the limits are not TOO high and it is quite easy to play with throttle-steering the car at the limit. I started the open session with 1:33 laps (no chicane) and got it down to 1:28 by 9th and final lap. Track record for these is about 1:19 - but with a whole lot more seat time than 8 laps and I strongly suspect on fresh tires and different setup. Still, I thought with another 10 minutes I would have gotten it down to 1:25 range. Oh well.... I enjoyed it just the same.

7/13/02-7/14/02 Historic races at PIR. I don't have a historic car to run, but took the Elise to show it in the collector area. The Lotus hates traffic and on this hot day it was overheating. Hopefully no damage done. I should really hook up a manual switch for the radiator cooling fan, as the thermally controlled one kicks in way too late. The second day I took the air-conditioned M Coupe and it was a much more comfortable experience...

As for the event, the pictures say it all :)