I’ve been a bad blogger – no updates in ages. Meanwhile I’ve been telling everyone who will stand still long enough all about the last two weekends of racing. So – here’s the long overdue update.
It was a long and painful drive to Millville New Jersey on Friday afternoon, July 30th. Beach traffic backed up the Jersey Turnpike for hours, but I finally got there. Millville is about 40 miles from Cape May. I stayed in a little, fairly dumpy, but clean and serviceable motel. It was about 20 minutes from the track.
Mid-summer in Millville was HOT! It was about 80 when I got to the track at 7:30AM and warmed up to well over 90 during the course of the day.
Practices went well. The Lightning track was new to almost everyone so all of us had the same learning curve. The first turn is up-hill and a sharp right with not much run-off room. Turn five takes you over a hill so the car gets really light just when you’re supposed to be turning. This makes it really easy to spin off so you have to be really careful not to add too much power at the wrong time. Turn 8-9 is the other interesting one. It is a long, looping right hand turn with some banking leading onto the long front straight.
Both the Saturday race and the Sunday race were close, hard fought events. On Saturday I was in second following the leader closely when I didn’t take turn five quite right and slid off the left hand side of the track. You don’t lose all that much time, but it was enough. That put me into third place and quite a ways back from the leader. On the next to last lap the leader slid off going into the long looping 8-9 complex and I passed him for a second place finish.
Sunday was even better. No one spun out and we just had a really close race for the whole 13 laps – it was shortened as we waited for some folks to get to the grid. I led several times but one of my competitors has more power and so he was able to pass me again every time we went down the front straight. I could usually out-brake him going into turn one, but I couldn’t open enough of a gap to hold him off the next time we went down that front straight. Then the third place guy got really racy and was able to pass me. We all swapped places several times for the remainder of the race and it was just a matter of where we were when the checkers finally fell. I was the loser finishing in third place, but there was less than a second covering all three of us. It was one of the closest finishes this series has ever had.
AJ told me that sometimes the best race you have is not one that you win, but one where you race close with your competitors and have the opportunity to dice throughout the whole race. This race certainly proved that to me. I had a terrific time passing and then getting passed, maneuvering and setting up passes tested my racing skills, my endurance, and my patience. We raced wheel to wheel for many laps, often at well over 100 MPH. We all learned that we can trust each other not to do anything foolish that would endanger the other guy and we all had just a great time. After the race was over we were high fiving each other and toasting each other with post-race Buds. I will remember this one as the race where I really learned how to race. There’s still lots of learning to do, but running in close competition like that was the fun that I signed up for. It was terrific.
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