| Had a great time out with the usual Texas guys. Was cool to have Woody & Roy drive all the way down there for the event from CO... and they cleaned up (as it were) on the car show awards. They got 1st & 2nd place in Z32, Roy got the tt.NET choice and Woody got the Spirit of NISMO award. I didn't take but a handful of pictures. Ric has several thousand and Shi (sp?) said he had over 5k by end of the weekend. I'm sure these will be available some time soon. I'm not going to bother posting mine... but I will share some video of the track day. Track day is why I show up anywhere anymore. I wasn't sure about Driveway Austin at first when it was announced as the track location this year because all I knew about it was it was a 30 second testing track basically. Looked at google maps and saw it had grown... a lot. Then started watching in/on car video and saw elevation changes. Track is a training track and not a racetrack so it's somewhat narrow and the walls are close and runoff is minimal. That coupled with rain/wet track made for a couple nervous moments in the morning hours. In the afternoon enough traffic had splashed their way around that it was dry enough for slicks. It didn't last long though, the clouds piled in and dumped on us busting the 4th session of the day. The first 2 were lead/follow to get used to the track, then lunch and tire change and then sessions 3-5 at speed. Here's video of my session 3 hot lap: Session 3 Lap 9 Not terribly high speed, but a workout to get around smoothly (which is it's mission)! I spent some time chatting with the owner about the track surface, because unlike most others in Texas this one is very smooth and predictable. Not a lot of 'character' which is fine by me in this situation. They spent a considerable amount of time on road bed preparation to maintain the surface over the years and it really shows. Watch the video again for repaves/other surface nonsense, you won't see much. Very nice track! The car show on Sunday was cool as well. The lower section of the track is tree lined as you can see in the video, so the cars were lined up along the track back there in the welcomed shade. The vendor area and the single in/out lane was a little crazy but overall for the first time bringing NF to Driveway things worked out OK I thought. Congrats to Milo and the small army of volunteers who made the potentially miserable weather weekend fun as expected! We'll see you again next year!
Later
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