The first official weekend of BimmerWorld’s entry into the Continental Tire Sports Car Challenge is over. It seems just like yesterday we were heading down to Daytona and now we are back at home in the cold weather. Overall the weekend was a great success. James and Dave in car #80 progressively got faster as the weekend went on. It seemed that the changes on the cars made them faster or better handling every time we went out. There were some stabs at making changes that did go the wrong direction but in the end we feel we came away with a good setup to start the official race weekend January 30th. Bill and my car will get the setup that James and Dave are going to start with since we didn’t get a lot of track time this weekend. With the crew working to get our car back together this is going to be a tight couple of weeks to get everything done for our first race. Luckily there will be some more track time for Bill and I as we are going down to Sebring this week for the PBOC Winterfest event. Bill is going to run the 6-hour enduro down there and I am going to ride shotgun with him in the Solo run groups. This is going to be a part of our coaching program throughout the year to help get us up to speed as a team. I can’t wait to get down to Sebring especially since we are not racing there in the BMWs this year.
My highlight for the weekend was getting a chance to drive one of the Rolex GT Porsches for a few laps in the last practice session on Sunday. WOW, that was a blast. I was nothing but smiles getting out of the car. I found it very interesting how driving the GT Porsche was similar to driving the BimmerWorld CTSCC car. And no our ST car does not have the power or the straight line speed of the Porsche. What I meant by that is how similar the braking, turn in, power down, and line coming out of the turn were all very similar. The behavior of the car was a little different with the rear end supporting a big flat-6 and the front end a big fuel cell but overall it wasn’t bad. The rear end didn’t feel snappy and the front end just dug and gripped. Adding power I could get the rear to step out a little but it wouldn’t be an uncontrollable slide. Little bit of steering added to the car and off you would go. The craziest part of the car experience going past the start finish line at close to 180 MPH and hitting the brakes close to the 100ft marker in the brake zone, going down 4 gears in the transmission and slowing the car to about 60 MPH for Turn 1. That was very addicting. I could get used to that speed and sensation. After that I had to head home with a big smile on my face.
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