Tuesday - 6 May

We did make it to the hotel by about 12:30 AM this morning but it felt like 1:30 due to  the time zone change again.  We were up at 6 and at the track by 7:15.  AMP is a private ‘club’ oriented motorsports park.  Members can rent garages and keep their cars there.  There’s also a go-kart track that a lot of people use.

The road course has 13 very tight turns in 2 miles with only one straight of about a half mile.  It’s very hilly and several of the hills have a ‘blind’ turn at the top that’s somewhat difficult execute if you’re airborne.   Also a tightening ‘negative camber carousel’ precedes the straight (that means it get worse several different ways all at once!).  It has a very large run-off area and was used several times today.

David took the bike out to survey the track and had to walk it up at least one of the hills.  While he was gone, I got our ‘camp’ set up and walked around the pits.  On the way to the track that morning, we had passed a barbeque place in the ‘hills’ of Georgia and it smelled awfully good for that time of day.  It turns out, they we the local outfit that had lunch available at the track.

In the morning event, David managed to execute another of his ‘tire squealing – will the headlights point sideways?’ turns again.  This time more people were able to enjoy it because it was right in front of the main spectator area.  It was ‘breath-taking’ for us, and people actually cheered when David masterfully recovered from his briefly unstable situation.  Later on, David used a different word than ‘breathtaking’…….  He ended up finishing in 44^th position.  One of our new-found friends in another M-3 beat David by just 0.023 seconds so there was a combination of threats, promises and hopes discussed at lunch.

During the noon hour, Brock Yates arranged to have the track open for ‘touring’ so I got to drive 3 laps around the course.  David went with and gave a turn-by-turn tour.  It’s a fairly technical course and they have  it marked with ‘turn-in’, ‘apex’, and ‘turn-out’ points.  It doesn’t take you long to learn that ‘their way’ works best.  It was fun.

In the afternoon, David went 3 seconds faster and finished 39^th but unfortunately our friend finished 38^th.  The ‘attrition’ of the “One Lap” is taking effect.  At the start of the event last Saturday, there was one car that withdrew.  We were losing about one a day.  This morning, there were 4 cars that did not show and another 3 did not start in the afternoon.  If you can’t beat them….  You might be able to out-live them.

We’re on the 140 mile leg to BMW in South Carolina and trying to brace ourselves for 630 mile run to New Jersey late tonight…