It's been almost one full year since I decided to put a helmet on my seven year old son and put him into a gas-powered racing vehicle for wheel-to-wheel racing. As he climbed into a kart at On Track Karting in Wallingford, CT yesterday, I couldn't help being struck by how much has changed and how much we've both grown in a year.
While you are all planning out your summer activities, block off this day on your calendars: 7/19 8am to 5pm. We'll be headed down to the autocross at Quonset Point in North Kingston, RI to be instructed by ADSI's crew. The morning will start at 8am with lessons until noon. From about 1pm to 5pm, the full autocross course will be up and running for timed runs and refining the skills learned in the morning.
Should anyone have forgotten how much you learn and how much fun it is, I'll just leave this here for you to refresh your memory (link to video):
What a surreal weekend with the Porsche Club at Palmer Motorsports Park in Palmer/Ware, Massachusetts this weekend! I still can't quite believe it actually happened. We had Thompson Speedway's road course come online last year in this region and had the joy of working to figure out that new track. And now this! And this one is unbelievably complex. How you ask? Try adding about 150 feet of elevation change per lap!! Let's take a minute to explore why that changes everything.
A Driver's Education (DE) event with the Porsche Club has become one of my more favorite things to do. But it has been an evolution to get to that place. Despite my normal love of driving and, now, amateur car-control events, I'll admit that my first trip to drive my own car on a real race track in 2013 was a bit nerve-wracking. Everyone thinks they are the world's best driver, especially before they have ever been trained (where we learn we aren't nearly as good as we think we are...). So I at least had that going for me. Yes, I had driven other people's car on a race track before - Skip Barber High Performance Driving School at the historic Lime Rock Park track in CT - so it wasn't that I hadn't been on a track before. Tracks are certainly a bit intimidating, especially New Hampshire Motor Speedway with it's full NASCAR stands around the oval. You really just don't know quite what to expect.
As we go from freezing our nuts and bolts off to baking our coolant, it's a good time to look ahead and do some planning. The Formula 1 boys may take a few weeks off, but here in New England we're just getting started. In less than two weeks, ADSI will host it's second school and autocross of the season. The date is Sunday May 17th. My son has a karting event that day so I may catch the late afternoon at best (2-5pm??) or may miss it altogether. My grand plan to hit all the events again this year is being somewhat confounded. But that does not dissuade me from encouraging all of you to take advantage of one of our local natural resources!
Some days are truly better than others. Today was special. At the invitation of brother Attilio, a few of us lucky souls got to venture up to Thompson, Connecticut for a bit of fun doing circles around their Speedway road course today. I had been planning to go for some time, as I'm a bit of a "track [woman-of-the-night]", in family-friendly parlance. At the last minute I convinced Christian to make the trip with me and to bring at least one of his siblings along as well. With his brother-in-law, a car nut who makes me look quite tame, in town from California, I was sure it would be him, but instead I met Steve from Boston, his other brother, at the track. And Steve was a phenomenal guy.
Autocross early in the season can be a mix of frustration and freezing along with joy and elation. When we started up last March (2014), the day was downright inhospitable. Massive soaking rains. Rather cold. Against everyone's better judgement, we pushed hard to have the event anyway. And we were pretty glad at the end. The joy and elation came through despite the tough conditions. This year proved to be drastically different.
It has been a long winter. A very, very, very long winter. Not to say that I didn't have some driving fun on the low traction surface. But getting feet of the white stuff each time converted much playtime into time wasted moving the white stuff around, at least for me. I hope you all had a plow guy doing that instead! But we're starting to see temps in the 50's (F) and the snow is starting to become scarce. And we know what that means! Play time in cars!!
Like many great things in RI, the best are hidden away. Secret treasures that only reveal themselves to the select few who seek them out via their passion and dedication. Oxford Motorcars is one such example.
At the most recent ADSI high-performance driving school day on June 22, they treated us to a simple yet very effective (and humbling) exercise: drive through four cones laid out in a straight line 60 feet apart as fast as you can. Sounds easy, right?
