Mid-Ohio 7/15

bacolmm · **Posted:** Sun Jul 18, 2010 8:25 pm

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. OK, let’s get the worst of times out of the way. Due to my own stupidity, my new car took a beating on Thursday. Since John was driving out and back on Thursday, I decided to do the same. I left my house at around 4:15 am and followed the GPS to Mid-Ohio. It took me via RT 70 to RT 77 and then some Ohio back roads. On one such road I came around a blind corner and there was a dead deer in the road. There was a car coming the other way, so I couldn’t go around it. I forgot for a moment how low my car is to the ground and figured I could straddle it with the tires. Of course it bounced around the underside of my car, trailer hitch and trailer. It blew rotting deer juice all over everything and it didn’t smell too good as it baked in the sun all day. My car is now making some new noises as well. Maybe a hole in the exhaust? I crawled under the car and looked around and I can’t see any damage, but something’s obviously up. I guess I’ll take it to the shop this week.

As I was leaving the track on my way home, Mid-O was a zoo. All the AMA Teams had arrived and were setting up shop. I was trying to figure out how to exit the track, made a wrong turn and then jack-knifed my trailer while I was backing up (I just wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing). The angle iron on the trailer put a nice dent and hole in the side of my car. Of course it got the rear quarter panel and the bumper. Ugggg!!!! I guess my insurance company is going to have to actually give me back a little of the money I’ve been paying them for the last 15 years.

OK, now for the good stuff. The trackday was great! John and I pitted on cold-pit-lane and used the track’s power, so I never even unloaded my generator. The weather was about perfect (maybe 5 degrees cooler would have been nice) and the track was good from the first session on. We ran 30 minutes on, 30 minutes off all day, so we got tons of track time. They include a really nice lunch with your trackday fee and since this was my first time riding with Mid-Ohio School, I got a free T-Shirt as well. There were 32 riders in our A/I class so we had plenty of open track.

My best ever lap at Mid-Ohio is a 1:43.87, so I was hoping to do a bit better than that. This was only my second day at Mid-O this year (the 1st being a really cold day with NESBA) and it was John’s fourth, so he proceeded to show me the fast way around. I believe I was about 2-3 seconds a lap slower than him in the first session and I was able to drop my lap time by 3 seconds for the second session, but so did he. We played this game for the first three sessions and John ran a 1:42.8. That would end up being his best lap of the day. My best laps came in the last 2 sessions, where I ran 3 1:44.00’s.

John really seemed to be leaving me for dead on a few corner exits; The Key Hole, Turn #9 and the Carousel. I never really felt like I got the Carousel figured out, but I’m not sure what I was doing wrong in the Key Hole or Turn #9. John was carrying some mad lean angle, chewing up his toe-sliders, so maybe that was it.

My suspension felt much better at Mid-O than it had at BeaveRun, but my rear tire looked much worse. The grip levels seemed really good all day, although I did get a few rear end slides here and there. I’m picking up a new shock from Eric today and I’ll be rebuilding my forks. I’m pretty sure my issues are due to beat up oil in my shock and forks.

Mid-Ohio 7/15

Mid-Ohio 7/15

Mid-Ohio 7/15

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