I again spent the day running in the yellow group. In hindsight, I
should have moved up to the blue group as the traffic jams in yellow
were fairly constant.
Due to the number of participants a few of us did not have
instructors on the first session. As I had been to Buttonwillow before I
fell into that category. I just took it easy the first few laps to get
the feel for everything. Conditions were different enough from the last
time I wanted to be sure all was OK.
The second session turned out to be my best. I was familiar with the
track and actually turned a pretty good time of 2:31. Still room for
lots of improvement however.
After a few laps had gone by in the 4th session I pulled into the hot
pit area to let some space open up as I wanted to press for a good time.
I started around the track and entered turn 3. I was actually taking
things pretty easy, or so I thought, in order to keep the spacing. While
exiting turn 3 I felt the rear end start to come around. Rather than
just ride it out and go OT I tried to correct the situation.
Unfortunately, I held the correction too long and without enough power.
Around we went the other way! After making sure all was clear I headed
back out onto the track and to the Hot Pit to get the car checked.
While going around I crested Magic Mountain on the normal line
(forgetting that the yellow had been out the two laps prior) and felt
the car sliding to the left. This is normally OK except that this time
there was no tire noise. Something was wrong but I wasn't sure what. I
decided to just straighten out and go off in a straight line (the
recommended way ;-). I again re-entered the track and headed into the
pit area. After a brief checkout to make sure all was OK with the car I
headed back out to finish the session.
Took me 3 1/2 hours to clean the interior of the car all of the dust
after I got home. Took another 2 hours to detail the outside! However
I'm not letting this stop things as I've already signed up for the 2-day
event at Laguna Seca.
