M3 PINK: 2/7/2010 Track Day Big Willow @ Willow Springs!

Well Sunday the 7th was the first track day for this car. Having only owned the car for 2 months, I wanted to get it on the track to see where its limits were. I signed up for NASA's HPDE (high performance driving event). This was their first event of the season with clear skies projected for Sunday.

I originally singed up for Saturday, but with rain in the forecast I moved my spot to Sunday. I got the car teched, went to the driver's meeting and got ready for the first run. My instructor was pretty laid back, maybe a little too laid back. First time around I just got used to the car and listened to the instructors input on what lines to take. He was pretty quit, and I found myself asking him more questions than he was correcting me. Overall I was pretty slow first run out.

Second time out my instructor forgot to put down the bong and didn't show up until I had already gone out on the track. It was a beautiful day with just about 6 people in my class and no one on the track. After all, it was Superbowl Sunday. I began to remember how to drive a car fast.

After lunch I had John Matthew? I don't know, I forgot his last name, take my M3 on the track. He tracks an e36 as well and I figured he would know best how to race it. He asked me if I wanted a medium or fast run. I told him to go all out.

Seeing how John took the corners changed everything. He was in much higher gears than what I was doing. I had down shifted to 3rd on run 1. Totally unnecessary. 4th all the way. Also turns 3 through 6 were done all in 3rd. Made sense to me....shifting down to 2nd just screwed everything up for me. Seeing John first hand made it much easier than figuring it out myself.

He was in 5th gear going into turn 8, which....well, I left that up to him. No way I needed to be in 5th at turn 8. I was topping out at 4th getting up past 100-105 mph range. Turn 8 was probably my favorite corner of the track. So much speed but just holding on felt good.

Turn 9 was confusing and everyone had a different approach to taking this corner. My first instructor let the car die out and then dove in near the apex. John, the more experienced in my opinion, took the corner all at once. He described it as a decreasing radius. Slowly turning in at the correct speed throughout the corner yielded the fastest way around. The braking point was blind, the exit was blind, the turn was a little to advanced/technical for me to really worry about it. I didn't really try to gain seconds here, but learned nonetheless.

Turn 1 kept throwing me off. It's a classic banked corner. I couldn't seem to get it right. I really wanted to stay and just do corner 1 over and over again. Being a simple corner I couldn't understand why I wasn't hitting it faster. But then again I think I just knew I could go flat out through there. There was a lot of room for gaining speed. Turn 1 has more speed than I and others were giving it credit for.

Well that's about it for Big Willow. My instructor was a little bit of a stoner and didn't fill out my passport. I asked him to just move me up to HPDE2 and he was like, "well do another weekend."
I like the instruction but I went without him twice which is the same as HPDE2 so not a big deal. I drove home trying to stay awake, next is California Speedway.

Here's a few pics from the race.

My setup

Rune Gliffberg, the skater, Rune Gliffberg's e46. I thought, "wow, that dude has the same rare name as that skater. Then when I got home I realized it was him.