Wild and Willow (2/23/2003)

Willow Springs hosted round 2 of the SOPAC national series and the Tiger Karts Vandiemen arrived with a big dose of optimism based on Carl having run the track in his go kart and many trips to the adjacent track providing a sense of home town to us. 

This aint no go kart, a rude lesson the old track taught us during the Friday practice as we struggled to become comfortable with the track and to undo all the cool things we though the track would want for setup.  Meanwhile, the lead F2000 contingent was putting up big numbers in the timing while we wandered almost clueless. The punctuation to clueless came in the last session where Carl went out with out tightening any wheel nuts or inserting the pins.  The result was a spectacular off in the 110MPH turn 1 that damaged a rear wheel and sheared the drive pins.

After a nice dinner and beer  Friday night at a favorite dive, we arrived Saturday to begin making progress.  The first obstacle to overcome was the driver becoming comfortable with the awesome downhill speed that you must carry into  turn 5.   You accelerate steeply down hill from the highest point on the track to about 80 mph before taking a sharp left that is off camber.  our next obstacle was to work on the lonooooong turn 2 to keep the nose down and not push off the front tires.  As part of an effort to minimize drag on this very high speed track, we had installed a very small front wing with no secondary.  We were also running only the smaller of the two secondary elements in the rear.  Unfortunately, turn 2 is an aero sensitive turn and we needed the front down force which we finally realized late on Saturday.   Installing the big front wing but without secondary planted the front and things began to look up.  Saturday night was a delightful Italian dinner at Tina's with a fine Chianti Ruffino which we enjoyed while Peter was towing back to Buttonwillow to replace a cracked head and Jim Bryant was driving to Fresno (7 hours) to get a new rear upright.

Sunday AM qualifying was important because we had a Carb float break during the first qualifying and we had a chance to redeem ourselves with a solid run on qualifying tires.   We switched to harder race tires for the main and lined up in fourth for the main.  

The main was a blast as there were more than 50 cars in the run group so everybody was racing somebody somewhere most of the race.  Carl hooked up with the 19 Vandiemen and duked it out with a variety of sports racers for the first half of the race.   Unfortunately, 19 punted one out of the way and then got away leaving Carl with nobody to race with.  However, he racked up solid 1:22s with clear track and cruised home to a very satisfying 5th.  Our choice of setup resulted in what he called the best handling car he had driven in years, which was reward itself. 

Next race is our new home track in Litchfield Park.