Marc's Public Blog - Cars

I took a slight gamble on the weather, but in the end the forecast looked good enough to give it a shot.
Unfortunately, we were greeted by ground fog, and the first sessions were delayed by about 90mn because the overall visibility was just too bad. Then, we had light rain, making the track quite slippery.
It made for a good exercise in light driving, and seeing how your traction control and ABS worked if you had any. That's where mine came in very handy, I set it to sport mode, which did a good job of cutting off before I got in trouble with the power. The corvettes however probably had a traction control that was so bad that they turned it off right away, and of course the next thing that happened is they ended up outside of the track.
By the afternoon, my third and last session was the only relatively dry one, and I was able to switch the traction control to race mode and get better times. Yet, wet tracks always make me nervous :)
I did have an instructor's session at the end, but I was just too beat due to a bad night, and decided to quit while I was ahead, instead of too tired, and off track, and headed back around 15:00 :)
Oh, I did get my butt kicked by a very fast Evo. That guy definitely had more balls than me. My times were around 2:19 in the half wet, and 2:13 to 2:15 in the somewhat more dry. Not stellar, but probably the best I could do that day :)

Yet, since I was there, I still made the best of it. Might as well :) (oh, and the best part is that the brakes held up. My new brake pads are definitely much better)

The rest of the pictures are here

Along the years, when going to track events, the guy from gotbluemilk.com took pictures of all of us. I recently bought a CD with all the pictures he took at different track events I've gone to betwween 2004 and 2006 (Laguna Seca and Thunderhill in my Miata, M5, and F430).


Let's start with a few pictures of my turbo miata:

Then, my one track day with the M5:

and a couple of recent track days with the F430:

All in all, some nice pictures. You can find the other gotbluemilk pictures here and especially the best of gotbluemilk .
Thanks to the fine folks at gotbluemilk for the great pictures.

When done visiting the Dallas, we has extra time which I thought would be well spent by visiting an intriguing park they had: SpeedZone. It's the first amusement park I know that is entirely based on motorsports. They have 3 different tracks and kinds: one somewhat lame many vehicle, somewhat slow speed track, a faster slick track where you get to practise oversteering (and oh boy do many people suck at it), and a higher speed autocross style track, where you go for the best possible laptime. Those were much fun.
That said, the unusual part was the dragster track with 300hp propane powered dragsters. The setup is quite nice: you are on a rail and they automatically stop you at the end so that you don't hit anything :)

See more SpeedZone pictures
or the SpeedZone web site