Anyhow, the route took us off the interstate for the last part of the drive to the Kershaw, SC area and it was a beautiful, hilly area. Also a bit nerve-racking at night when you consider how many animals are probably lurking in the woods next to the road, waiting for their chance to jump out and crack someone's windshield or mangle an intercooler. We were lucky and didn't have any high-speed encounters with local wildlife. Some other One Lappers did, but nothing that disabled their cars.
Chris had been to CMP once before, so it probably would have been best to have him drive both sessions. However, splitting the sessions kept the track driving pretty even, and it was a fun, relatively safe track that we both wanted to see. In a nod to our new, competitive strategy, though, we decided he would do the morning session when an experienced driver would have the best chance of scoring several positions above normal, since most of the competitors would not have seen the track.
At this point we had a pretty healthy lead over the Killer Rabbit in Economy car, but we were hovering around 52 or 53rd place overall and were hoping to crack into the top 50. Our main competition at this point were the Dubler HHRs, a BMW 335, an E90 M3, a C5 and a C6 Corvette, and the Toyota Avalon.
This was not your grandpa's Toyota Avalon - it had a big splitter hanging off the front, was lowered on some nice coilovers with Motion Control adjustable dampers, and had front brakes the size of proverbial dinner plates. And although it's a 3500-lb car, from the factory the V6 makes something like 260hp; it turned in a 13.9 at the ET challenge. They pipped us by 2 seconds and one position in the morning and 2 seconds and one position in the afternoon at CMP. For in-class scoring, first place gets 5 times the number of entrants, then each position below that gets 5 fewer points. The overall worked the same way, all the way up to 340 points for the win. So the Avalon had put 10 points on us in the overall standings at CMP that we would have to get back at Dominion and Gingerman if possible.
Who enters an Avalon in One Lap? All types of cars are entered for One Lap, so an Avalon is not the most unusual thing you'll see. But, this Avalon and the FR-S/86 next to it were entered by a couple teams of Toyota employees based out of Georgetown, Kentucky. It was fun chatting with them about the cars and Toyota, especially since Chris and I had done all previous One Laps in MR2s, and we were all kind of from the Cincinnati area. They were the cars that passed me on the way to South Bend on the first day.
Back to CMP...it is a lot of fun and I'd like to return sometime for a full day. Turn 5, 6, 7 is a sort of carousel/slingshot onto the back straight that I'm sure is very rewarding when you nail it. The back straight is not really a straight...there is a fast turn that requires a little braking, turn 8, then turn 9 is flat for probably everyone, then there's turn 10, the kink. It's fast, and flat out for some cars, but there's a bump near the inner curb, and it can upset the car if you grab too much of the curb. Chris had encouraged me that the kink was flat out in the Fiesta, and I even thought I was flat on my last lap...but the video evidence says otherwise.
Around 2:40 you can see me navigate the carousel on my second flying lap with the Fiesta doing its lovely tail-happy thing that is extremely rare in a front-driver...one of the reasons I like that car. Then at ~5:15 is the proof that I didn't stay flat through the kink on my last lap...a little blow-off noise as a gave a quick lift before turning.
Our transit Wednesday night was the shortest one of the trip, only 360 miles / ~5 1/2 hours to the Richmond, Virginia area. We would stay at Chris's parent's house near Richmond for the night and enjoy a home-cooked meal. Our Carbotech brake pads were working well on the street and the track, but the pedal was getting a little squishy, so we took advantage of the early evening to bleed the brakes. We had already rotated the tires from front to back earlier in the day at CMP since the front left outside shoulder was showing only a faint remnant of a tread pattern. Performance Alignment had done a great job with the alignment, but this car is tough on front tires.
Cooler temps and thunderstorms were in the forecast for Thursday!
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