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That picture above is from the grid before Saturday's final TT run group, session 7, which began at 3:45 pm. As you can see the bad weather really rolled in and the rain was eminent, and we even felt a sprinkle or two in grid. I had no windshield wipers (pulled them for less drag!) so I applied two coats of RainX to the windshield prior to going out. I was hoping to drop another 2 seconds, to maybe "get in the hunt", but that was a bit optimistic. I had watched some previous in-car videos and noted several of my driving mistakes, so I tried to clean up my lines, and again - my first lap was going to be the most crucial.
I dropped back a bit on the out lap and tried to gap Nagel, but I caught and passed him again in the braking to Turn 1 on the first hot lap, which threw my line off for this high speed corner, and my entries into T2 and T3 were slower. Rest of the lap was relatively clear and was a 2:06.6, with a pass and several compromised corners. I went ahead and took a 2nd hot lap, where I caught and passed a TT1 Corvette on the main front straight, then got held up a little by a TT2 Subaru early braking into T1 (so many cars brake early there). He pulled ahead in Turns 2-4 but I caught him a bit in the heavy braking into Turn 6. For the rest of this lap he stayed ahead and pulled away on the main straight. Hot lap 2 was a 2:06.111. I had a little more gap to the TT2 Subie so I took a 3rd hot lap in the row.
Braked a little late into T1 (155 mph) and got a little sloppy, then borked the high speed Turn 4 a bit, too. Felt like the rear tires were getting greasy, and they were. I watched the predictive timing off and on through the lap, and and it was only showing a 2:06.3-2:06.4 towards the latter 1/4 of the lap. The rear tires were really overheating by Turn 12, car was getting too loose, so I bailed on this hot lap right before Pit In and came into Impound. The 2 tenths improvement was at least something but I was still a 1/2 second behind Nagel's previous 2:05.5 (he ran a 2:11.3 in this session).
I guess because of the weird weather, higher winds and darker visibility only 2 cars dropped time in our class - I ran a couple of tenths quicker at a 2:06.111 on my 2nd lap and Bezard dropped from the 2:08s down to a to a 2:07.5 in his E46 M3 to close up behind me in 5th place. Smith was slower at a 2:03.9 and Mayfield was a second slower at a 2:04.1. So on only my 2nd session on "sticker A6" tires I was still dropping time, but I still felt there was more left to drop still.
Click above and skip to 5:57, where they spend a minute on our Mustang
One difference from this year's NASA Nationals was the "SpeedcastTV" coverage. There were cameras up on man lifts at a number of corners around the track and they were showing video live online at
www.speedcasttv.com/nasa. There were also two announcers giving color commentary on the live video feed. They had a director who would tell the cameramen to switch from car to car and they'd stay with them for 30 seconds or up to a minute. The linked video above shows some footage from TT session 7, and at the 5:57 mark they cover me driving the red Mustang. One of the announcers was even a follower of
this very forum thread and a fan of the car (thanks!). They talked about the car for a minute, which was cool.
Saturday night was a lot more upbeat, as I was at least within a 3 seconds of the 2 drivers who were trading the class lead (closest I had been all week) and I was only 1/2 second out of a podium position. We had 2 more sessions to go on Sunday and anything was possible. But it started to rain as the sun fell and it rained pretty much all night. We knew this meant another green track (no rubber down) for Sunday, so it might all be over for fast laps in TT. We had no more tuning tricks left up our sleeves so it was all down to the track/weather conditions and my driving on Sunday. Great...
Day 4 - Sunday
It rained all Saturday night so we were treated to a wet first session on Sunday, with drops still coming down. Only 7 drivers from the entire H group of Time Trial racers took to the track, but they got some extra SpeedcastTV time, so kudos to them. I skipped that session, as I didn't bring any rains and didn't see a point, with 8 other dry session's worth of times to fall back on. Don't need to stuff the car off track, either. So we waited for the 9th and final TT session, which began at 2:45 pm, and it was the last race group to run the entire week of the 2013 NASA Nationals. The track was green but dry, temperatures were down to 79° after the rains had blown through, there was a good wind again (which dried off the track quickly), and it looked pretty much like the best conditions of the week.
In the last TT meeting before this session we were told by the TT Director, "If you go faster in this last session, be prepared to be dyno'd". The top 2 in TT3 had already been dyno tested more than once this week, but almost nobody else in our class had, including me. We had all been weighed many times, and as far as I know there were no under-weights. We were told if we weighed under, or dyno'd higher than our claimed numbers, we'd get a session DQ. They would then take our weight and divide by the power test number, and if our ratio was under what the class allowed, ALL times prior to that would be thrown out, back to our last legal dyno/weight check from this event.
Final two Time Trial sessions were run on Sunday. Session 8 (at left) was raining but Session 9 (right) was dry and fast...
I went out on the same fresh-ish Hoosier A6 tires that we installed on Saturday morning (I saw more new sticker sets in this last Sunday session than in most others), with several heat cycles now acquired on them. I was sitting in 4th place out of 12 in class, 6 tenths behind Nagel in 3rd, with the two of us gridded side by side. We talked before going out and agreed to a point-by on lap 1 if I was closing down on him, like we had been doing most of the week, since he doesn't get tire heat until lap 4 or 5. He knew I was close to his times and was pushing to pick up some time cushion, too. He had a sizable crew with him including spotters with 2-way radios to communicate his and my times during the session. I really wished we had radios at this point, because I would have no way of knowing if he went faster. Amy and Ryan told me to STAY OUT THE ENTIRE SESSION, to make sure I got the most out of the car, but I knew my best lap would likely be my first. We fueled up heavy to give a bit more range and out I went.
Last TT SpeedcastTV video: http://www.speedcasttv.com/nasa/#/races/358
If you watch the above video it gives you some good action in TTU and TT3 during this session. The Godzilla GTR in TTU dropped 2 seconds in this final session and leaped into the lead by nearly 2 seconds over the Subaru powered Radical. That car's 1:55 lap times for a full bodied car were amazing. In the 9th TT session Nagel had dropped another tenth down to a 2:05.454, but spun it on course and on camera, late in the session - at approximately 21:20 on this 2nd linked Speedcast video, you can see him sitting crossed up and stopped on track. So that spin caused a session DQ and his new 0.1 second faster time was thrown out. So we have to look back at his previous best of a 2:05.562 from TT session 6 on Saturday. That was the mark I was looking for... mid 2:05s. So when I ran the lap below, I didn't know if I had beat him or not.
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