Publishing the BLOG

Friends and relatives – When you heard that I bought a race car and planned to actually race it, several of you encouraged me to start a Blog so that you could follow my adventures. So – with a little help from my friends I figured out how to do it and put up my first couple of postings – this will be my third. I’m not likely to be a daily blogger as some insist you must be in order to be interesting – there’s just not that much going on and I generally approve the notion - when you have nothing to say you shouldn’t prove it by talking about it (Hi – I’m in line at the Giant now). 

Frequency and richness of material will probably improve once the racing season begins. I plan to go to Summit Point on Monday, February 15 (President’s Day) to do some fitting of the cockpit, installing a few instruments, and laying out a new paint scheme. After that it’ll be a fairly long dry spell till I get on track – currently scheduled for a practice day on March 15. I hope to have some video from the practice day to post. Activity picks up after that. Here's a link to a schedule - it looks like a couple of weekends in April, one in May, two in July, and one each in August, September and October. There are two races each weekend – one Saturday, one Sunday – so – a total of 16 races. I kinda doubt that I’ll participate in all of them but we’ll see how things go.

For anyone who'd interested, here are a couple of write-ups that I did after a few schools. The first one, Three Days at Derek Daly Speed Centre, is from my very first school when I went to Derek Daly's school in Las Vegas.  The other one was kind of a summary after I'd been to Daly, Bertil Roos, and Skip Barber.

Accumulating gear

It’s been a long time since my initial post, but there hasn’t been much action. I’ve been busy getting my personal gear together – you gotta have NOMEX underwear, socks, balaclava, boots, gloves, double layer suit, and of course a helmet. I got lucky with most of the stuff but getting the suit to fit right took several tries.
My car builder found a web site where a retiring racer was giving away some of his old NOMEX stuff so I got several sets of underwear, t-shirts, balaclava, and about 8 pairs of socks for free. Now, it might seem unseemly to be using used underwear, and if it had looked “used” I would probably have passed. But this stuff looked to be brand new. I’m sure he washed it before he sent it to me, and I washed it again when I got it – I have absolutely no qualms about using it. And since this stuff sells for about $90 a piece (that is – per T-shirt or boxer) free is pretty darn good price.
I’ve been waiting to get all my gear assembled before going back out to FormulaHaus for a “fitting” of the cockpit. In the meantime I’ve purchased an in-car lap timer and a roll-hoop mounted video camera. Current plans are for me to visit Summit Point on Feb 15th – we’ll discuss the new paint job, make cockpit adjustments, install the timer and vid-cam, and generally get the car set up to my liking. On March 15th there is an open practice day. If all goes well, that will be my first day on the track. Should have some video from that to post.
I’m guessing that as the season gets going I will be posting a lot more stuff – so – stay tuned.