Yellow's Day at the Track Blackhawk Farms Raceway - May 1 & 2, 1998

On May 1st and 2nd, 1999 the Chicago chapter of the PCA held a Driver's Ed event at Blackhawk Farms Raceway near Rockford, Illinois. My wife Lily decided she's heard me talk about how much fun this is too often so she decided to do it as well. This was also the first that that the Chicago PCA had a woman's only group.

First, here are some pictures of my Boxster at the infield. The black Boxster with number 986 belongs to Jason.

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Here are some pictures of Lily driving my car around the track with her instructor. I took these while helping work corner 5.

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Here is some video of Lily in the Boxster with her instructor. This was taken as I was helping work corner 5. The video is of her coming through corner 5 and into corner 6.

QuickTime Movie - Approx. 2.1M
RealVideo - 56K modem or faster stream (22 seconds)

Here are some pictures Lily took of me coming around the track with my instructor. The first two shots are before and after corner 4. The third shot is me coming out of corner 3A.

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Here is some video of me coming around the track. This has me coming out of corner 4 and into corner 5, then shows me coming out of corner 3 into 3A, then corners 4 and 5.

QuickTime Movie - Approx. 3.6M
RealVideo - 56K modem or faster stream (39 seconds)

I had a camera mount in my car and I put some of that in-car video on-line. The following is 1 lap around the track on my second session out on Sunday. These weren't some of my best laps, but the video looked best. The QuickTime video is very high quality but quite large. If you have a slow connection I highly recommend the RealVideo version.

QuickTime Movie - Approx. 8.1M
RealVideo - 56K modem or faster stream (1 minute 36 seconds)

My lap times were mostly between 1:35 and 1:39. My best lap was 1:34.71. It was difficult to get a lot of good laps due to constant traffic. I only seemed to get 2 or 3 hot laps in a 30 minute session. Lily's lap times were mostly in the 1:46 to 1:49 range, with her best lap being 1:45.00.

Here are some other cool pictures of cars on the track. The white 914 is owned by my instructor, John. We still don't know why there was a VW Beetle on the track.

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Amazingly enough there was a VW Beetle on the track. It was the only non-Porsche allowed on this event. We're still wondering how that happened. Anyway, here is some video of the Beetle coming around corner 5 and into corner 6:

QuickTime Movie - Approx. 1.8M
RealVideo - 56K modem or faster stream (20 seconds)