MY DE Experience

I was involved in racing on a limited basis in the 70s and 80s. I went through the Jim Russell program in the UK in the 70s and did enough school races to qualify for an RAC national racing licence (yes, that's how they spell it over there). When I got back to the US, I qualified for an SCCA Regional (SoCal) license and did a couple of FF and Showroom Stock races. At that time, I felt that my ability was at a pretty good level and I was moderately competitive, although I was definitely on the uphill side of the learning curve. The last race that I did was an FF race at Riverside Raceway (one of the very last events there) in 1987. That's the one in my avatar photo.

After that, I just let things slide. I got married and divorced, moved away from California, and eventually ended up here in South Carolina not quite 4 years ago. Last year, I and several friends got together and entered a car in a 24 Hours of LeMons event at Carolina Motorsports Park. We did two events last year, and I was pretty disappointed in my performance. I felt really rusty after so much time, and I also was very uncomfortable in the LeMons traffic.

As we have another Lemons event coming up in May, I decided to try for two DE events at CMP before then. The first of these was last Saturday. Since I did not want to subject the Dino to this, and the Morgan doesn't have the required tall roll bar, I took my daily driver (5-speed manual) Toyota, which has fully modified suspension and handles quite decently.

There were six twenty minute DE sessions, although I skipped the last one in order to get home at a reasonable hour with some tread left on my tires. These sessions are run on the full CMP course rather than the short course that LeMons uses. In the first session, I was pretty bad, but I improved in every subsequent one. By the 5th session, I was going smoothly and felt ready to begin working on speed. The "rhythm" that I hadn't felt in so long was coming back. My instructor, who was very good, was quite happy with my performance at the end and said that by the close of my second DE day he would most likely be ready to let me do a solo session. I plan to do this on the Friday (May 21st) just prior to the LeMons event.

What stands out to me is the way I could just feel the "rust" melting away as I racked up more and more laps. By the end, I was passing a few cars (including a Honda S2000), finding the old smoothness and taking the "Kink" at around 85 mph. It will be really interesting to see how this all plays out in the LeMons race.

Oh, and by the way, my instructor was somewhat blown away by the way the Camry handled and called it the "ultimate sleeper", so you can all stop laughing now!

Oh yeah, my tires are toast!

Dan
Image Unavailable, Please Login
Image Unavailable, Please Login