This weekend was probably my only Thunderhill race of the season. I wanted to make it good!

I’ll bottom line it for you: weather was hot & smoky, earned my first ever overall pole, led the race flag-to-flag, made a couple of new friends in the paddock, and was still home by 1:30pm on Sunday. But keep reading for the details!

About 30 miles from Willows on Friday night on the drive up, the air started to get very smoky. Unfortunately, the weather changed enough in the last couple of days to bring the smoke from the still-active California forest fires into that part of the central valley, and it was fairly unpleasant, especially when combined with the 90+ temperatures.

I arrived at the track at about 8pm on Friday. The sun was low in the sky and was quite brilliant through the smoke. I should have taken a photo. I found a place to park between two other drivers who had apparently set up camp earlier in the day, since no one was around. Since I was due to be on track for the first session Saturday morning at 8:15, I unloaded the car, detached the trailer, and basically got ready to go until it got dark. Less to do really early in the morning keeps me happier

Saturday morning I got to the track at about 7:00. I registered and prepared for the session very quickly, and really had plenty of time before the practice session at 8:15, the first session of the day. The session went well. Based on the entry list, the only competition I really had was Doug Makishima in his E30 BMW. I never actually saw him during the session, but saw on the results sheet that he did have a faster lap than me. Darn! I later saw him in person and he said that even though I didn’t see him, he saw me and was trying pretty hard to catch me. Hard enough to run some fast laps, apparently. I was a little bit disappointed because my fastest lap was slower than my previous best at Thunderhill, despite the fact that I now have considerably more power than I had then. Oh well.

Sometime shortly after that session I met my paddock neighbor, a Spec Miata driver named Dean, who also had gone to the track totally solo instead of with his usual family and friends. Since we were both on our own, and he’s a super-nice guy, it was easy enough to spend time with him, talk to him, etc. It was nice to have a friend there in the paddock.

Qualifying happened right after lunch. Doug got to grid early and was the first car on the track. I was 4 cars behind. It took the first two laps to get by everyone, and then I stuck to Doug’s butt for two laps, then got by and ran my fastest lap. As it turned out, I qualified almost a second in front of him, and for the first time that I can remember, all of the ITS and ITR cars qualified in front of all of the ITA cars. Usually things are a lot more mixed up than that.

So it was early afternoon and that was my last session for Saturday. Since I was spending the night up in Willows, I had plenty of time. Fortunately, just before that session, Mike U. showed up and hung around to chat. I met Mike on-line when he was asking about the ITR class locally — he has a Honda Challenge car that he races with NASA, but is considering converting/building a car for ITR for 2009. Naturally, I’m all for more cars in ITR, so I hosted him for the afternoon and enjoyed talking to him. Mike, please get that project going! You and your wife will both really enjoy the SCCA and IT racing in SFR, I’m sure of it!

After a few hours chatting, Mike headed home and I did the minimal work necessary to get the car ready for the race Sunday morning (again, at 8:15). Ordinarily I’d hate the early morning sessions, but at Thunderhill it’s great! It’s cooler then, and it means I can leave the track earlier. The work didn’t amount to much. I decided to leave the tires where they were, so all I did was check the oil (it never needs any) and washed the windows. As I told Dean when I lent him my impact wrench, apparently the only reason I tote around that huge trailer with all of the tools is so that I can lend them out, because this car is so maintenance-free it’s scary. Of course, now that I put that in writing, something is sure to go wrong next time

I won’t go into all of the Saturday evening details — but the other Mike, Mike M., can share it with you in the comments if he wants. He’s actually still in the hospital in Willows as I type this Monday afternoon. He’ll be fine though! Nothing to do with the race, it’s a complication from when he broke his leg 15 or so years ago on a dirt bike.

Anyway, Sunday morning dawned and it seemed a little cooler and less smoky, which was great! It was actually really nice weather-wise. But I had a complication with the video camera. See, my old JVC Mini-DV camera that has taken all of the videos that I’ve posted on this site has been acting up, refusing to load tapes sometimes, and being very finicky when it comes to getting data off of them as well. I really want to buy a nice high-quality solid-state high-def camera, but I’m too cheap, so to tide me over until the prices come down, my brother gave me his old Sony Mini-DV camera. This was the first time I tried to use it. It worked great for qualifying (let me know if you want to see those videos, but of course they are less interesting than the races) but I somehow failed to recharge its battery overnight, and it didn’t have enough to get through the race. So I resorted to my old camera.

It was going to be great. Since I qualified on the overall pole, I was sincerely hoping that I could race with no one (except for backmarkers) in front of me. So I faced the camera backwards. But when I went to start it just before the race began, it crashed and told me to “press the reset button.” Arggh. Unfortunately that was going to require more effort than I had time for, so I did the race with no working camera.

So you’ll have to take my word for it that Doug got a great start. He started outside me on the front row, and the official results show that he was actually ahead of me when we passed the start-finish line. But of course I had the inside line for turn 1 and he slotted in behind me. He pushed very hard for the first couple of laps but I was able to open up a lead of 4 or 5 seconds by the time that there was a wreck on the track and we went full-course yellow. He later told me that after my lead seemed like something he couldn’t overcome, he tried to keep his tires cool and hung back, and got out the voodoo dolls and prayed to the race car gods for a full-course yellow to bunch us up again. So I blame him for the wreck. (No, not really.)

Anyway, after half a lap under the double-yellows and then another lap behind the pace car, we took the green flag for the restart. Doug got a fantastic restart (from P3, there was actually a backmarker between us) and actually got alongside me by turn 1! But our tires had cooled a little bit and probably had some crap on them and we both had some traction issues in the first two turns — but fortunately, him more than me! I got another gap on him and the race finished only two laps later, so I led flag-to-flag, for my second overall win in a row and the first time from flag-to-flag. Oh yeah, also set a new track record, 2:06.6, over a second faster than last year but still not where I think I “should be.” But the track’s repaving starts immediately, so next time the track will likely be considerably faster.

It’s only a few weeks until the next race and I can’t wait! It’s a double regional at Infineon. I think the turnout will be much bigger and Infineon’s my favorite track. I’ll have fresh tires and hope for another great couple of races!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 9:41 pm and is filed under IT, Race Reports, SCCA.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.