Our week-long adventure wrapped up where it started, back at the Tire Rack in South Bend. The final competitive event was the dry skid pad. The wet skid pad had not been very kind to us, but the temperature was up, so now there were no excuses! I wanted to at least beat the magazine skid pad results for the Fiesta ST, since those would have been done on the stock summer tires and I had the sticky Bridgestones. I found online that Car and Driver had managed 0.90 G when they tested the Fiesta ST, so my goal was to beat that...and the little Fiesta did not disappoint - 0.962 G!
On Friday May 12 we rolled into Gingerman, the only track I had made a point of pre-driving before One Lap. Actually, it had been on my list for a while, but One Lap gave me an excuse to set a date in the name of "research" 😜. For some reason this was the only picture we got of the Killer Rabbit; we parked next to them at Gingerman. It really was a cool Rabbit, and we learned that there were some clever tricks underneath, just nothing in the way of power adders (yet). Apparently Joshua Paashaus from NLS had used an Audi TT transmission to convert it from FWD to AWD, using a rear axle from a Golf R32.
With the mid-30's finishes in the rain at Dominion we had jumped up into the high 40's overall, so were all but assured of the top-50 finish that we thought might be possible on Day 2. We were now in a very close race with one of the HHR SSs in the overall standings and our times at Gingerman would be incredibly close. In the morning, my total time was 5:39.667, which was a little under 0.3 seconds faster, and one position (5 points) better. I barely dropped any time in the afternoon, but the HHR got about a second faster, so they got us by one position. We left Gingerman trailing them by 10 points.
You could tell from the atmosphere in the paddock that some people were sensing the adventure was almost over...plus with the short transit that evening back to South Bend, nobody felt rushed. We walked around and chatted with a few other teams and took a closer look at some of the cars. There were a few talented autocrossers in the One Lap this year, including Chris in the VTAK MR2 and Matt in the Lazy Dog Corvette. It was another beautiful day. Overall, the weather for this One Lap had been better for any of our previous One Laps, and much better than 2016, which looked like it had been rainy for the first 3 or 4 days based on pictures from the event.
We wrapped up so early that Brock opened up the track for fun laps. This gave Chris a chance to see the track and led to our one mechanical issue all week. A few laps in, while shifting up from 3rd to 4th, the car suddenly lost power and the intake noise changed. I recognized the sound from popping intercooler hoses off in my MR2 years ago. In the MR2 with the MAF ahead of the turbo, this mean the engine stalled. The Fiesta kept running, so we drove it to the paddock, found the offending hose, and re-attached it. We couldn't believe how lucky we had been that it hadn't happened during one of the timed runs or transits!
That evening back at the Waterford Estates Lodge, Chris and I met Andy and Ann Hollis. Andy had driven an Econo car - the One Lap CRX - to 4th overall in 2014, but they were driving a bone stock GT-R this year. He writes for Grassroots Motorsports, and his articles on tire testing are generally the first thing I read when I get a new edition. Plus, he and Ann had been helping out as crew members for local autocrosser-turned-pro-driver and all around nice guy, Tom O'Gorman...so I had been wanting to talk with Andy, but the opportunity hadn't presented itself until now. We chatted about - what else - tires, One Lap cars, and TOMO. They were meeting up with Tom for the next weekend in Canada, which turned out to be an exciting one; it started with being collected in an accident on Saturday morning with no spare parts for repairs, but ended with a win on Sunday morning - check out that story here!
The morning of May 11 started with smiles as we pointed our little rig out of the 55+ community. Hopefully our sticker-clad, trailer-towing car didn't break any homeowner association rules...
On the way to the track, a few sprinkles began to fall...but there were some green/yellow/red blobs on the radar that were clearly heading our way. As the morning session got started, the rain really started coming down. Chris had done a track day at Dominion before One Lap, but he hadn't been on the track in the rain and we weren't sure how the Fiesta would manage on worn RE-71Rs in the ~55F temps.
It turns out we didn't need to worry - the track still had quite a bit of grip in the wet, Chris knew the track, 55F was enough for the RE-71Rs, and the combination of front wheel drive (and a little help from modern stability control here and there) help him go after it! In fact, he caught up to the last car in the run group in the morning session on his third lap, around 5:15 in the video:
Between the road course events there was supposed to be a banked oval track event at the same site. Unfortunately it just wasn't safe to run the event in the heavy rain, so it was cancelled. It was too bad, because it's always fun to try something different with the car...plus, I had been reading about front wheel drive oval racing (which apparently is a thing), and I had some ideas for how to set up the car.
Chris went out for the afternoon session when the rain was a little lighter, and got even faster:
We finished 34th in the overall in both the morning and afternoon sessions - our best finishes all week - which helped us quite a bit in the overall standings. I can't recall, but I think this was where we finally cracked into the top 50, and we had closed the gap on several more cars in front of us in the overall as well. With good results at Gingerman and the skid pad, there was a chance for the mid-40's.
Since the oval event had been cancelled, the afternoon session got started a little early, which was great since we had our longest transit that night; 750 miles to South Haven, Michigan. The route book took us west on some state routes, avoiding I-95 and DC traffic that GPS recommended. Even in the age of smart phones and GPS, the route book was handy to have - we drove through some areas with no coverage, it has tips and reminders for the route, and it keeps most people to the same routes in case of break-downs or other issues. So a big thank you to Brock for continuing to put these together.
