This race was too much fun to not make a blog post about. This weeks 24 Heures du Fun was an unusual pair up of the VW Jetta at South Boston. With a fixed setup (for road racing!) the entire field was incredibly close, with mere tenths separating the fastest from the slowest.
In this race I led the field of 18 cars to take the green and enjoyed 50 amazing racing laps with my fellow competitors. Lots of side by side racing that went on for 4+ laps at a time, and some really cool passes on the outside.
This is a short highlight reel of some of the side by side action.
This week has the Late Model racing at South Boston, and this was a great opportunity to get my four races done (that will allow me to get my oval C licence).
I had been waiting a long time to get into a Late Model race so was really eager to get started! Qualifying was tough, and I hadn’t had a lot of testing with the car or the track, so my qualifying time was really off the pace. I managed a 16.2 whereas most people seem to get 15.9 or 16.0 without much effort (not sure how yet!).
I joined a low strength of field race (as it gave me car #1) and was starting 7th of 13th runners.
The race was a total blast! It had the potential to be a wreckfest as the track is really small (0.4 miles), and the turns come around really quickly. The straights are over before you realise it! I had a cautious start, and was even bumped nastily going into turn one! I dropped back to 8th before getting comfortable and starting to reel in a few cars.
I managed a few passes for position and worked my way up to fifth place, with some great side by side racing along the way.
Towards the end of the race I really started honing in on 4th placed runner at a really fast pace – I can only assume his tyres went off and mine were still there. It was really good fun taking huge chunks out of his lead with each lap, but alas there weren’t enough laps to really catch him.
An amusing end to the race was seeing the second place runner spin on the very final corner of the 50th lap and go down from 2nd to 5th – catch this and the rest of the highlights in the video below (using fraps for the first time).
I managed a fourth place finish and incident free – the Late Model is an excellent series.
We returned to Jefferson for week eight, and I still had mixed feelings about this track. Last time around I led most of the race and had some mistakes late on which saw me finish third. This time I spent a lot more time practising and trying to get my laptime as far down as I could before entering a race.
It took some time to get back to my earlier pace, but eventually I managed to beat my qualifying record and so I felt ready to take a race on.
It was the 8:30 race on Tuesday evening, and I saw 16 entrants to the session. It wasn’t so much and I was a bit unlucky to be entered into a race with a lower strength of field that I expected. Still, I had to try for a good incident free finish and thankfully everything went fine this time. I led from pole and managed to find a good consistent rhythm which ensured I had no pressure all race. I think I made just one small mistake near the end (which was just a minor missed apex) and finished with a win, and zero incident result.
Only 117 points but it hits my goal and is better than my week four result at Jefferson.
So this means I have completed the maximum eight results for season three, and I currently stand 1st in division three, and 6th in the overall standings. I have a few poor results to ‘knock off’, such as my 80-something at Laguna (week three), and my 90-something at Jefferson (week four) so hopefully I can get two or more good results in the remaining four weeks that means I maximise my season.
When I finish up this season I probably won’t be returning to the Solstice all that often, so I hope to race a little bit more frequently in these last four race weeks.
After that, I fancied a bit of oval action, so I picked up a setup for the Advanced Legends for South Boston and entered my very first Advanced Legends race!
It was an impulse decision so I didn’t have a quali time, and started 9th. It was a good fun race, and much more difficult to drive safely thanks to the extra horse power. Unfortunately the race wasn’t incident free as someone came down across my nose on lap one :
After that I had to chase down the field and managed to get in a few really good side by side passes, and finished fifth. Good fun.