Pocono, North course April 21

I was by myself at the NY BMW CCA day on the Pocono Speedway north course, BadBAdM was at Lime Rock, CG out of the country, Stee stuck at work....and Adil? where is Adil? At least I had Jason to shoot the shit with though he was driving in a different run group. It was also the first event I've been at in while that was 100% incident free, and that is something to commend the organizers for.



The North course at Pocono is not the most exciting thing in the world but hey... Its one redeeming feature is that it has a really fast turn coming off the NASCAR banking into the infield. We figured that Jay and I were somewhere around 130 and slowing to maybe 110 to take that kink. The turn has a nice hump at the apex and it's quite exciting to drift over that at that speed and straightening the car before the braking zone for the first of the over 90 degree turns. You definitively need good brakes to do what you have to do for a good lap time.

It was sparsely populated track day...only 14 people in my run group, it was really about lapping by myself. The only real competitive fun I had was chasing down a really nice 996 club racer car....I had no business hanging with that car in the little M Coupe but I did, though I blistered my tires in the process. I think we both had a lot of fun playing and that Porsche looked fantastic at speed, digging it's rear and lifting the inside front in the tight corners. Bummer that the damn tape in the camera ran out right as I caught up to it. Oh well, next time.

My car is not geared very well for the track, It has the stock 3.15 rear end and as you can see I'm in between gears coming onto the main NASCAR section and it takes forever to wind third out. I tried going to second, but in the end it's just slower to do so. On the plus side, the relative lack of torque allowed me to get on the throttle super early and way before the apex in some turns without much worry about the rear stepping out too much.

in the video below are a couple of laps from the last session of the day my best laps were in the low 1:01 range which is decent.



Pocono north course