Friday, May 6, 2011

A Slow Start

How slow? 0.001 seconds slow. Perhaps if I had just sucked in my breath at the finish I would have found the smidgen of additional forward speed I needed to place second at the second points event. Unfortunately, I am in dire need of the points already. This was my first points of the season. I had been sick and unable to race the for the first event of the season. So after the first two events, SSM looks like this:


Don Kuehl(2 events)18 points
Camron Bosnic(2 events)9 points
Bill Sallie(1 event)6 points
Gus Heck(1 event)4 points

That's right, I'm in last place. However, in the broader picture vs my past performance this event was apparently my 4th or 5th fastest ever (depending on the stat you choose), and significantly faster than the non-points practice event. Another good thing is I had 3 times within .3 seconds of my fastest, so it wasn't really a fluke. So I was a lot faster in this race than the last time I ran which is good.

One thing that was a problem in this race, was the changing temps through the day messing with the tire pressures (Russ noticed it too). The last run of the morning and the first two run of the afternoon were mostly a waste because the pressures had gone off and I didn't realize it immediately. The car was pushing and then suddenly catching on the bumps making consistent cornering very difficult. Also the Hoosiers are getting old now with over 150 runs on them, so I'm at an increasing disadvantage there too. I have 2 practice events coming up (SVT club and Renegade Miata) so I will beat up the tires there and probably run stickers for the next points event.

One thing I can say is that it seems that I have managed to regain my speed from last year and it's time to forge ahead. It's pretty clear from the SS Pax statistic, that I'm more or less at the 50% mark as far as driving skill goes. Middle of the pack to start Year #3. The goal is to get myself into the top third by the end of the year. Top quartile is a stretch goal, since more than half of the drivers at that level are in double-digit years of experience. Top third is as much as I can expect realistically. This is also mathematically pretty... top 1/n where n is the years of experience.