Thanksgiving Weekend at Button Willow, November 24-25, 2001

I had a great weekend.

I went with the Green Flag Racing Association. They hold this event every thanksgiving at Buttonwillow. If you are a Newbie, you will not enjoy going with this group. There is hardly any instruction. The best organization to go with if you are a newbie or intermediate is still Open-Track. They are the best. Hands down.

This group had a lot of exotic cars in it. I counted 3 Lotuses, one Esprit, one Elise, and one Sport Elise. A Ferrari 360, 2 Shelby Cobras, M5, M3, 2 Porsche 928s, and one supercharged 911. There were also a lot of late sixties Mustangs, an SVT Cobra, 3-4 NASCAR style cars. And finally a Viper. And one 200SX SE-R, being me. It was amazing lining up next to these cars on the pre-grid and not hearing my engine rev because of all the noise emitted from open exhausts. My car was out of place sitting next to these machines.

Green Flag runs only three groups and I was in the fastest one. But there was no open passing and this proved to be a problem among the high hp cars. The track was going CW including the Star Mazda turn, a configuration I never ran before. The only passing zones were on the front straight, I-5 before cotton corners, and down Magic Mountain on the drag strip before the
Star Mazda turn. It seems that the guys with the high hp cars refused to let me through on the straight even though I was on their asses in the twisty sections of the track. It happened so many times I lost count. Eventually I started heading to the pits and complaining to force the issue. So those who did that started getting the black flags. Long live the squeaky wheel :-)

One incident that I remember well was an encounter with a Viper GTS. I was on the back straights after going through Magic Mountain and I noticed this red Viper in my rear view mirror a distance away. I knew I had to put more distance between us otherwise he will catch me through the esses. By the time I hit sunset, he was clearing the esses, so I knew he could not catch me on the straights but not be able to make the pass. On the straights he guns it and decides to make the pass anyway. I hold my line on the inside and let him try. By the end of the straights he notices that he has little room left to brake and he was still at my rear quarter panel. He hits the brakes, locks up and ends up spinning off the track. He later on comes into the pits to apologize for trying such a stunt.

BTW, From around the truck stop (after bus stop) and all the way down Magic Mountain, the track has brand new asphalt. It felt great.

On Saturday I did four out of five sessions. I missed the first one, since I was prepping the car. After my first session the rain came very hard. We took an early lunch break hoping it will stop, but it did not. So I went out in the rain on my racing tires and I had a blast. It was great trying to make the car handle in the rain. You have to change your line to avoid the puddles, otherwise you will go off the track. It was a whole new experience that I loved. In the third session things began to dry a bit and I was
getting more aggressive. As I was coming out of magic mountain, I hit a wet spot and the car skidded to left and hit the mud. The suspension bottomed with a loud bang. I kept the car straight and slowly brought it back on the track. I headed to the hot pits and asked the splitter to take look and see. He looked and found all to be ok. After the session I inspected the car and there was mud all over. It seems the N-Tech bar took the brunt of the hit since it was holding most of the mud. Luckily, the oil pan was not banged up.

Sunday was a cool partly sunny and partly cloudy day. It was a great hotlapping day. I ran five sessions, some of them 10-11 hot laps. My best session was the fourth one where I scored my fastest time of 2:18.82 with the Hotlapper. If as assumed the Star Mazda turn adds 10 seconds to track time over the regular sweeper, then my time with the sweeper should be 2:08.82. I told you that sub 2:10 times were possible in an SE-R. Here are the rest of my times:

Lap
1--2:22.85
2--2:18.82 (fastest)
3--2:24.60
4--2:19.94
5--2:22.03
6--2:20.16
7--5:00 (went to the pit to complain)
8--2:19.70
9--2:19.91
10--2:19.91 (I was amazed that lap 9 and 10 got the same time)
11--2:21.08

At the beginning of the weekend everyone was looking down on the SE-R. But at the end of the weekend, the SE-R was earning a lot of respect. There were three corner workers that were clapping and giving me thumbs up. One of them took his hat off and bowed to me on one of the cool down laps. The other one at the hot pit entry was yelling "great driving." The organizer of the event came up to me and was impressed with the car and wanted to know what I did to it. A Shelby Cobra owner came to talk to me and told me that he was very impressed and that is why he gave the spot back after he passed me in the straights. His words were "you deserve to be ahead of me after dogging me in the twisties." Finally while I was switching to street tires, one of the older corner workers comes over and says "you were driving the wheels off this thing out there. You have to be cheating, there is no way you can be so fast and so smooth." We just laughed out loud and then he left.

The car is still in one piece. I did notice that my car consumed 1 quart of oil. Do I need to be concerned? Or is that normal due to the high revving that I subjected the car to? I had to add Mobil 1 synthetic 15W-50 that I borrowed from one of the racers. I noticed most of them use that weight. Can we use that weight in our SE-Rs?