The San Francisco Region has published the entry list for the upcoming race weekend.

For me, looks largely like “same stuff, different day.”  I’m looking forward to another knock-down-drag-out with Doug, and hopefully with James, who kicked butt at the last Laguna race (which I missed).

269 total entries thus far.  That’s not very many for a double weekend at Laguna Seca, although most other racing groups would be thrilled to get that kind of turnout.  But this is the weekend before the Runoffs, which could be part of the reason.  I think the last double at Laguna had over 350 entries.

UPDATE 10/2: The revised entry list has 293 entries.  Rain is forecast for Saturday.  Too bad I don’t have rain tires.

As I mentioned in when I told you about my updated season schedule, the new plan includes running the 49th annual 4-hour RDC Illgen Enduro at Thunderhill on October 26th.  This race follows a regular SCCA race on Saturday.

Read the rest of this entry »

The NASA National Championships are taking place this weekend at Mid-Ohio.

I’ve just been looking at today’s results, and they prove my point that I made back in March about the way NASA runs the race schedules.

If you look at the actual schedule, it looks like today’s qualifying races are 20 minutes long.  However, if you look at the results, you can see that the checkered flag was thrown on most these races less than 10 minutes after the green.  10 minute races?  Come on, people!  It’s hardly even worth hitting the track.  It was raining today, so cars were a little slower than normal, but these qualifying races were only 4 laps long.

The actual National Championship races on Sunday are scheduled for 40 minutes, which probably means that they’ll be closer to 30 minutes in actual length. maybe 13 laps.  That, at least, is pretty much a real sprint race, although in my opinion a National Championship race should be a little longer.  When the SCCA held its National Championship Runoffs at Mid-Ohio, the races were each 20 laps.

Again, anyone who compares NASA schedules to SCCA and determines that NASA gives you more race time needs to really take a harder look.  It might still be true in some cases, but it’s not as rosy as a first glance makes it appear.  I think NASA tries to cram too much into each day, even at their premier race-only weekend.

EDIT: The event is over. With better weather, the 40-minute races did turn out to be more laps than I expected … between 15 and 19 laps, ranging from less than 29 minutes to over 32 minutes. But none of this takes away from the level of competition at the event, congratulations to all of the winners! Next year’s NASA Championships will be closer to home, at Miller Motorsports Park in Utah, we’ll see how that one goes!

All season long, I’ve been planning on trying out a couple of BMWCCA races this year. There is one coming up (with SCCA Vintage) at Infineon on September 20-21, and another at the same track October 25-26 (with NASA HPDE).  But … after consulting with the family, I’ve decided to change the plan.

Read the rest of this entry »

By now, I think a lot of you have already watched the video from the 2nd of the two Labor Day weekend races.  That one was quite the spectacle, a truly constant battle between me and Doug Makishima for the overall win.

I have also just added the video from the first race from that weekend.  It was a great start with a couple of passes on the first lap, but after that it settled out.  There were two full-course caution periods, so not much traffic to contend with (I think I only passed two lapped cars), but there was a nice moment with a big oil slick in T4.

Enjoy the videos!

EDIT: Just because I figured out how to do it, here’s the excellent Race 2 video, embedded right here on this page. To see it full size, click the link above. You’ll need Microsoft’s cool Silverlight browser plugin to see it.

Wow, what a weekend! Fantastic weather here in the bay area, a nice double race at my favorite track, and some intense competition … awesome, just the way I like it!

Read the rest of this entry »