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.
Archive for the “Schedule” CategoryAll 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. NASA NorCal published the schedule for the April race weekend, and I have to say, it’s pretty lousy. Each day, there’s a 10-minute practice, a 20-minute qualifying session, and a 20-minute race. And those times are TOTAL, including pace car laps, cool-down laps, etc. The SCCA weekends have 30-minute practices, 20-minute qualifying, and 30-minute races — and those are the actual durations of those events. SCCA includes a buffer between each race group to get one group off the track and another one on. NASA includes no such buffer so the published times have to include those group setup times. The preliminary entry list for the upcoming SCCA race was published this week, and I’m very pleased to see 3 ITR competitors for the season opener! In addition to the two regulars from 2007, a big welcome goes to Michael Courtney in an E36 BMW 325. Bring ‘em on, I’d love to see more! This weekend was the 2008 season opener, and it was a lot of fun and a little bit exciting! The weather was absolutely fantastic for any time of year, but especially for February. It was only in the low 40s early in the morning, but 70 in the afternoon, and bright and sunny all day with a very gentle cool breeze. Beautiful. This morning I replaced the 2007 version of the home page with the all-new 2008 version. The significant thing is what I’ll call the “final draft” of the 2008 race schedule. It includes 10 race weekends, from February through November. Pretty full season. For 2007, the first year for ITR, we’ve been racing in group 1. I had originally hoped that we’d be in group 5 with the rest of the IT classes. Well, the San Francisco Region has decided to move us to group 5 for next season. This is good news, in my opinion. Group 1 primarily consisted of ITE and ITX. We were faster than ITX but stuck amidst the slower ITE cars. Now, we’ll be among the fastest cars in the group, so I’ll have a reasonable chance of being on the pole of the entire group! And since our cars are also legal for ITE (although not competitive there), this means that we’ll be able to do dual entries, and race in both group 1 and group 5 in the same weekend. Anyway, you can now look forward to some different scenery in the in-car videos for next season. All three clubs where I could race have announced their race schedules for next season (here are the links): One thought I’ve had, given how hard it is to leave home for a long weekend, is to find a way to do more races at Laguna Seca and Infineon (which are only about 90 minutes from home), and fewer at Thunderhill (which is about 3 hours from home.) Only way to do that is to skip the SCCA races at Thunderhill, and instead, do some NASA races at Laguna and Sears. I’m a long-time SCCA guy (been a member for over 19 years!) and really consider the SCCA to be my club, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t partake a little bit in the competition. |
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