Track Days

It’s kinda like when I was in high school and playing water polo. You’d be looking over at the football players sweating away and wonder, why?

When I see the golfers in this shot, I wonder if they’d like to come for a ride. For me, it’s just more fun.

I participated in the Santa Barbara region track day at Laguna Seca. I was assigned to the blue group and had a great day. Got a new personal best by following a faster guy in a Cayman.

On occasion, you get asked about the number of track days when going out with a new group. This is a log of driving events from 2020 when I started doing more HPDE track days and the car used.

2020 Days
1011-1220 NASA Sonoma 2 day
0905-0620 GGR DE Laguna Seca 2 day
071920 Hooked On Driving Laguna Seca 1 day *

* Hooked on Driving 071920 - cleared to drive Solo at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca.
* Drove Solo with GGR per recommendation to CDI

I went with Hooked on Driving to Sonoma Raceway April 12th. Very windy and cold. Lots of downtime and black flagged sessions due to fluid leaks and a Corevette that hit the wall going out for a session. Got Covid at this event... even though I was vaxxed.

Session 1
I got out in front of the group and had lots of space in front of me. Session was black flagged due to fluid leak around the whole circuit.

Best lap: 2:04:73

I attended the GGR DE #1 this past weekend 3/5-6/2022 up at Thunderhill. I had run the West configuration 2 years ago, but never had done the East.

I used a combination of Assetto Corso, Ross Bently course walks and some onboard video from Andy Lee to prep and memorize the turns.

On Saturday I ran 2:25, 2:24, 2:19, 2:17 best session times. On Sunday, I ran 2:16, 2:15.9, 2:15.1.

I participated in the Diablo Valley PCA DE event this past week at Laguna Seca. A well run event with about 70 participants. I was in an intermediate group with about a dozen cars. Had some traffic in a couple of sessions. Clear and dry weather that got up to 80 during the day.

I had been working with Andy Lee's coaching comments at both the 10-18-21 and 11-22-21 dates. The plan I created for the day looked like this:

Prior to a track day with the Central Caliornia Region PCA at Laguna Seca on October 18, I had been through a coaching session via OpenTrack's Andy Lee. During that session, we worked on some opportunities at both Laguna Seca and Sonoma.

I got to drive the first session on a wet track. It hadn't rained around here for nearly a year and things were a little slick till mid-morning when it cleared.

For Laguna Seca, Andy's suggestions turned into my plan for the day that looked like this.

Turn 3

Coaching Consult with Andy Lee

As part of buying track day insurance for a year via OpenTrack, I've been offered a consulting session with Andy Lee. 

I was getting my gear ready for our next AutoX and was having some problems with connections between the Kiwi ODBII Bluetooth, GoPro 7 Bluetooth/Wifi and TrackAddict Pro on my iPhone 7.

I started by resetting the wifi connectivity on the GoPro 7 (Preferences > Connections > Reset). The result was that the GoPro then creates a camera name and SSID/password credential. Because I had done this a few times, I had multiple entries for the SSID and Bluetooth connections on my iPhone. I deleted all these to get a clean slate.