Pics 71Autoxr (Rick Guisto) posted on Facebook from today's event!

2 Hellcats present.

Frankenduster. First timer newbie. Had a great time! Maybe he'll chime in later.


Moparts members ntstlgl1970 and JimDiesel scrutineering.

Couple of Vipers

Pan shot

Looks like fun! Will be there next year!

The Dart should be ready for that!

A moparts member came up to me and said..."Doesn't drag racing seem boring after all this?"
YES.
What a kick in the pants this was. I can't recall the total amount of laps that I made, but I'll take a guess: 5 in one run, 5 or 6 in another, 4 parade laps at 60 mph with the wife, 5 laps with "Dave" the instructor driving the car and 8 laps as a passenger in Daves car.
I thought that I was a decent driver, capable of squeezing a lot from a car.
I did okay. Dave did much better.
My biggest flaw is entering turns too early on an early apex line. This caused me to have a limited exit speed, hurting lap times. My max speed in turn 2 was 66-67 mph. Dave had it at 80-81. The Challenger has a guage feature to allow a large digital speedometer display which helped there. Turns 3 and 4 were difficult to get right too. Several sources agree that turn 9 is the most difficult for newbies to get right and I was certainly in that group. Instincts tell you to turn in early to get to the inside of the radius and hang on, but that limits exit speed. When Dave rode along, as I tried to turn into turn 9, he pushed the steering wheel back to make me turn in later. The later apex allowed me to exit faster without edging off to the left so far. My fastest speed in the straights were 110, Dave hit 122.
Back at home I have watched several YouTube videos and found Daves advice to be consistent with others online. I took the Challenger because I had hoped the wife would also drive. She wasn't feeling well and decided to spectate instead. She was feeling better later and went for a few medium speed laps with Dave at the wheel.
I want to take the Charger sometime, but this surely is not a poor mans hobby. There is no way I could afford to do this as much as I'd like !
I live near Thunderhill and Infineon raceways, so I might consider looking at their track day rates. I highly recommend this to anyone that has considered it.

Love the pics, but I want MOAR of that 66 Bcuda!

more

passon 5 speed.

This was a weird one.

Might be been from old age or just a fluke. But someone pointed out chroming can make the steel brittle. Running at speed put a lot more vibrations and stress on about everything.

Evan had the can on his power steering come off right above where it's soldered/fusion welded/?? on. The weld didn't fail if you look closely, it was the metal right above the weld.

Must know about his endlinks?

That is day ender stuff there, daaaang.

It was in the afternoon. So only a couple hours left at most.

Evan got the long distance award!

I just went back and noticed those. Those look interesting.

How much caster does he have in the car?
That first pic shows quite an outward top lean on the front tire. Gives the impression of quite some good caster in the setup.

In a crappy series of events, my buddy had to bow out of the track day last week. His car burned out a wheel bearing in Tulare and he had to tow the car back home. He was really jazzed to run the car too.

Couple of low buck guys showed up too....