Yellow's Day at the Track Gingerman Raceway - May 27, 1998

John and I headed back to South Haven, Michigan for Lapping Days sponsored by Race Partners. Only 11 or so cars showed up, so we basically had the track to ourselves all day.

Learning from my mistakes at Blackhawk Farms, I made sure I had my bra on, just in case. I also brought an extra set of front and back pads. I'm really glad I did as I finally wore out the original pads at around 7400 miles. Since I have the 6-point harness installed, I might as well use it every chance I get.

I figured out my lap times were in the 1:52 to 1:53 range with my best recorded lap at 1:51.83. John did a little better with time between 1:49 and 1:51, with his best lap being 1:49.73. There was a guy with a Dodge Viper GTS who I clocked doing a 1:41.50 lap. Wow!

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Plus there were some really cool cars there. One of them was this 1985 Ferrari Mondial, yes the 4 seater! The car looks and sounds great on the track, but it's an older car, so I was able to pass it easily. The other cool car was this 1999 Doge Viper GTS. Let's see, it costs about 50% more than my car, has an 8L V10 engine, which has over 3 times the displacement of mine, a 6 speed manual transmission, yet it wasn't much faster than my car. Plus, since it's so heavy it went through a set of front pads about every 100 miles!

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Speaking of brake pads. John brought a brand new set of high-performance street pads ok for occasional track use. These pads were new when he put them in at the track. This is what they looked like around the middle of the afternoon. He put his regular street pads back in and went on the track a little more.

And finally, John's floor jack lost a wheel. That's about all that broke for John this day.

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I did have the camera installed in the car, so I am uploading some clips of in-car video. Here is what I have available so far. In this clip you can see me passing the Ferrari, but then getting dusted by the Viper GTS:

QuickTime Movie - Approx. 6.9M RealVideo - 56K modem or faster stream (2 minutes 9 seconds)