Devens Tour 2017

With the ongoing saga of my engine upgrades, I am in Nick's STR car again (Thanks Nick!), but this time we're on Justin's 5 year old Hoosier A6 tires (Thanks Justin!). Day 1 was cool and cloudy, but generally dry. The weather just barely misted a little bit on us for the last run. Sadly Panda being driven by Todd and Stephanie was not working well, and had one less piston by the end of the day. Also, though a couple tenths faster, on his best run, Nick was dirty. I managed to take advantage with what I consider my best run in his car thus far (still some spots to improve of course), and I leapt out to a 1.8 second lead going into the second day.

As is typical for cool mornings on prehistoric Hoosiers, my first run of the day was a mess, but helped me sort out what to do where. The sun came out, things began to warm up, and I dropped a second on my next run, with clear room for improvement. I was too deep on every major corner, too slow in slalom 2, and got the car out of sorts at the start of the taxiway, making that entirely too sloppy.  Unfortunately, I seem to have nicked a cone, probably at the box on the taxiway.

The raw time on run two would have been plenty good to nail down the third place trophy. With warmer tires and so many easily fixable mistakes on that time, I felt quite confident that I'd have no problem fixing things up on my third run.

But this is racing, nothing is a sure thing. Yesterday Stephanie's car blew up on her, on Sunday she had a nice 59.1 run to jump into 3rd by 0.33 sec. Still easy for me to beat given my day 1 lead, warmer tires and a previous raw time 0.7s faster than I needed. None the less, the pressure was on... Here's the video of my final run. I think it speaks for itself...

And of course if I had had my actual SSM car...