As advertised, my Speedring report:
Corey, Sharon and I attended Speedring's pre-opening christening of the
track tonight. The place looks really good. The track is nicely laid out
and it can be run in both directions. It has 7 turns, including a couple of
very tricky ones. The surface is nice and grippy and it got grippier with
every lap.
There is a nice restaurant elevated in the middle of the track with a big
screen TV. You can watch the races from there or on the nice viewing area
outside of the restaurant. You can even take the stairs down and watch from
the ground level, right in the middle of the track.
The cars are nicer than Inside Track's, but they are newer after all. They
run on gas, not propane, and they feel much more powerful. I hope they can
maintain them better than the Inside Track. If you don't have your own
equipment, they will supply the race suit, gloves, balaclava, neck brace and
Eddie Ervine's replica helmets (we all looked like Peter Thana). The crew
was well equipped and professional, specially the race director.
Now for the fun stuff:
We were 24 racers all together, including the owner (Peter Knoot) and a
couple of other ringers (pun intended). They split us into 4 groups and we
took 6 laps each. Then they split us into 3 groups based on our lap times
from the first session and we did a 5 minutes session. Corey, Sharon and I
made the first group. Then they grouped us again based on the times and we
did an 8 minute session. Corey stayed in the first group while Sharon and I
dropped down to the next group. And the final results... Corey came in
first overall with 32.8xx, I was second with 33.3xx. I don't remember
Sharon's result. So, Corey now has the track record at Speedring. How is
that for a challenge? Anybody? Kit? Nanda?
To be fair though, the cars are very uneven. I went from 5th the first time
to somewhere around 13th and back to 2nd. Corey was 3rd, then 4th, then
1st. My last car was a killer. It's very possible that there were faster
drivers in the bunch. There were some karting champs in the crowd.
However, they explained that the karts were are brand new and they were
going to modify them to be more even as they broke them in.
Since they didn't have enough time to let people know about tonight's
session, they are going to do it again tomorrow and Wednesday. Guess who's
going to be there? :)
--Navid
No ace reporter!
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