This weeks 24 Heures du Fun looks like it’s going to be excellent – 46 car fields at Laguna Seca, and mixed class racing! The Legends, Skip Barber RT2000 and Solstice are going to be on the track all at the same time for an unknown number of laps.
I’m definitely going to try and get into the first race session seeing as that might be the easiest one to get a large grid. I can’t imagine how crowded the track will be with (potentially) 46 cars on it. I hope to see a good split of drivers choosing all three cars.
I would initially choose the Skip Barber but maybe not, as most people will probably do so. Instead I might go back to the Solstice but I fear that it’ll not have many other cars to race.
For the last time this season I returned to Laguna Seca to complete my week 11 race. As previously explained my target was to beat 109 points (my lowest contributing weekly score at present) for the week.
I got into the 22:30 race on Tuesday evening and was gridded second (outside line to turn one). I had a good start and moved over to cover the inside line, but this turned out to be a mistake as the polesitter didn’t have a great getaway and eventually I had to back off the throttle a bit which allowed the third starter to get a better drive around the outside and put me to second.
The close racing at the start damaged my steering geometry ever so slightly, which was hurting my speed on the right handers, but I carried on racing and the top three runners (I was running third) were very closely matched all the way through to lap eight of the allocated eleven.
It was on this lap that I was closer than ever to the second place runner, so much so that I botched my turn in to T3 and put a rear wheel in the dirt, spinning the car…. dejected with the unforced error (and incident shower) I soldiered on, dreaming of missed opportunities and a third place finish.
That was the idea until I came up to begin the final lap….the F3 screen indicated that the second place runner had made a mistake somewhere and his previous lead of ten seconds was coming down significantly! I set about the chase to the end and these are the edited highlights of the race (beginning at lap one).
So an eventful race, second place with 119 points and 6 incident points (little bit peeved at getting 4 incidents for the contact after the line). A result that improves my season score of 999 points to 1009. My lowest contributing week is now 110 points, and it will take a good effort to make an improvement on that in week 12, at Summit Point Jefferson layout….
More a test of Vimeo than anything else, here is a lap at pace around Laguna Seca in the Advanced Solstice. Not a perfect lap by any means (in fact the line I use in the first three corners is quite different to the line I used in this video), but just a quarter of a second off my current PB.
