Opinion on my priorities please

What kind of race car?

 

It was a cayman, but mac daddied out. It had just spent a 11 month overhaul and this was its first day back n track (new engine 3.8L), new ABS system, in car sway bar adjustments, new suspension, wide body modified (extended body work) for larger tires, converted from manual to paddle shift, $150K. Car had been painted all white and didnt even have its livery on yet. I'll see if I have a post crash pic I can upload.

 

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I was in the passenger seat where that door got ripped off. My son was driving, he came across start finish, normally you redirect the car towards T1 then put on the brakes in a straight line, however there was a slower moving car in the brake zone so he mistakenly put the brake earlier while he was still redirecting the car which caused him to lose the rear at 154 mph. We skidded sideways making impact on the inside wall just after pit exit on the passenger side. Anyone with more experience would have known there was plenty of room to still redirect the car, zoom by the slower car, and pass the slower car in the brake zone. We made impact at 124 mph and walked away.

 

Wow! Ky1e sorry for your loss and glad you are OK. Its money and time and probably a delay to get back to racing next season unless you got more racecars ready. I 100% agree with you and that's why I started racing. Very early in my trackdays I was already going too fast with too little talent. It was a cage and race school for me. The other thing is real race clubs have advanced trackside medical support you just don't get at trackdays. When a track like Indy has a medical center SCCA staffed it for us during the Runoffs. Either way at any race SCCA has onsite ACLS and a medical director, extraction crew etc.. People on the street get whiplash in crashes at town speeds around 35mph. I was just taken out at Sebring this year right smack up the back at about 80. Helmet, HANS, harness, full containment seat and I get out of my car no injury. I'm happy to have my racecar sacrifice its life for me. Pick a good one. A modern chassis with current engineered crumple zones is also a really good thing.

 

Regarding taking a turn/corner at 100%

I am 86 years old, I started racing in 1959, I have raced SCCA and Vintage almost continuously since my first race in 1960. I raced almost exclusively sports racing cars or formula cars, the last being a Brabham BT29 FB car. I finally gave it up about 5 years ago.

I have done literally hundreds of races, driven on tracks in Europe including two 3 day schools at the Nurburgring.

This means I have done literally tens of thousands of corners at all kinds of speeds in all kinds of cars.

That said, I can clearly remember doing only ONE corner only ONE time just exactly right at 100% out of all those turns and that was back in 1965 at Laguna's old turn four.

I only say this to point out just how rare a perfect 100% corner really is

 

Fair enough. Maybe so in vintage. It all depends on your level of racing.

I race against Matt Brabham, and he wouldnt agree with you. Every corner we take in pro racing is modulated right at 100% and for top AMs that is the case in some of the corners, if not, you wont be competitive. My times are more often slower from over driving corners beyond 100% than from driving under them (i.e. carrying too much speed in the corner resulting in being later to power). There are lot of drivers out there that do SCCA, PCA, Ferrari Challenge, Skip Barber etc that fit in this category. There are many at DE days that do not. All depends what your goals are.

 

I think the problem is I didn't do a very good job expressing myself. I'm taking "doing a corner at 100 percent" to mean that I or anyone else could not have gone through that corner faster in that car on that day at that time.

In other words, every time I have taken a corner I always think I could have done it better except for that one time at Laguna in 65.
That one time I believed no one could have done it better, once again, in that car, on that day, at that time.

Of course I may have been wrong, it's happened