Chris Brinson circling the oval

January is a great time of year here in Phoenix, so although I didn't plan on racing my own car, it was a fine weekend for racing and I wanted to be part of it. I went to both days of this event pretty much to take pictures of a few guys I know. The first, Chris Brinson, was running on Saturday with the bulk of the people who show up for these events. He's the webmaster of HondaPrelude.com and had sent out an email inviting all the Phoenix area Prelude owners to show up at the track for a fun day of racing. Well, it wound up just being Chris, myself, and Brady, although Brady was just there with Technodyne Racing, not actually racing.

So, the Prelude meet was one guy racing, one working, and myself, actually a Civic owner, taking pictures. A little skimpy on participation, but still a great day anyway. Chris had a covered canopy, sodas, and even a grill to BBQ some hot dogs on so it was a pretty good day. I managed to take at least 5 fuzzy pictures of Chris' Prelude, but another 6 or so of them turned out well. Every time I go to the track I'm reminded of how much harder is really is to take good pictures than I thought it was.

Saturday, January 8th
Chris Brinson of HondaPrelude.com	Chris again, from the side	One more, directly from the side
Chris mixing it up with the crowd	A couple fast Porsches on the oval	Chris on the oval under the Goodyear bridge

On Sunday, I met up with Tage to put my video camera setup in his Integra and get some more pictures. There was another guy, Mark, with a black Integra GS-R running on street tires. Where Tage's GS-R was on Kumho race tires and has a suspension setup that he's spent about a year fine tuning, Mark is new to road racing and was out here at PIR from California since none of the clubs were running any events there in California this time of year.

Well, the first session seemed to go just fine. Mark was running in the school group and Tage was in the high performance street group, so Mark loaned me his helmet so I could go out on some laps with Tage. We had fun sliding around a bit on cold tires for the first few laps as it was about 40 degrees out. While that isn't too cold, that's about 150 degrees away from where the tires make peak traction. As the session went on Tage was able to dial up the speed and really get going around the track. His last laps of the first session were about as fast as his best laps when he was here at PIR back in November. At the end of our 20 minutes we pulled in to the pits and I gave Mark his helmet back.

Although I don't remember if it was in Mark's first session or his second, he wound up wiping out in Turn 1 and smacking the wall. He'd taken the driver's school the previous day so he was familiar with the track, but as he was trying to work his speed up Sunday he wound up stepping over that thin line of control. The short of what happened is that his car's back end came out under late-braking while turning in to turn 1. While this normally wouldn't be so bad, the surface changes when you go from the banked oval to the flat infield and this pretty much sealed his fate. He slammed the inside wall of Turn 1 pretty hard and apparently then slid sideways down the track a little way. The impact was hard enough to blow both airbags and pretty much crush the front end.

So that pretty much ended Mark's day with a bang. He was upset about the loss, but really took it in stride. Outside of a few sore muscles, he basically walked away from it without a scratch. Since he was in the school group, the damages would be covered by insurance. I wound up driving Mark and his girlfriend back to their hotel where they made arrangements for a rental car to get home. Tage and I found out about a week later from Mark that the car was declared a total but that it would be covered by insurance since he was in the driver's school group when it happened. Basically it gets handled the same as any other single-car accident where the driver is 100% at fault. So, while this puts a pretty big speedbump in Mark's start at road racing, he still was excited to get a new car and get back on the track. Is that dedication to racing, or what?

Anyway, back at the track Tage did awesome with the exception of whenever his car ran low on oil. It seems that the oil rings on his pistons are fried from some 90,000 miles of hard driving and the car now burns a lot of oil. Like, over a quart in each 20 minute session. Still, while running flat out, Tage was able to turn in lap times some 4 seconds a lap quicker than he had run back in November. As far as racing goes, that's a pretty big improvement when the track is only about a minute and 20 seconds total.

Also at the track we met a nice C5 Hardtop owner, Peter, who had just brought his new car out to see what it could do. He had brought a compact camera with him and asked Tage if he could try and take a few pictures of him out on course. Well, I overheard this and offered to try and get a few good shots with my Nikon. Since compact cameras like the one he had are mostly just made for close up still action, I thought this would be a good chance for me to see if I could once again get some good pictures for a fellow racer. By chance or good fortune, all three of the shots I attempted turned our great and after sending them to email by Peter a few days later he was pretty impressed and happy to see how well they turned out. Tage had asked how well the ones he took with the compact camera turned out but I never heard back on that, so I have a feeling the ones I took looked a little better...

So all in all, it was a great day at the track all around. Most all amateur racers are just about the nicest folks you'd run across. Need a tool that you forgot? Ask around and you'll almost certainly find someone who will loan it to you. Need advice on setup? Everybody will give you their two cents on how to go faster. At two separate events now I've needed to borrow helmets in order to do ride-alongs and had no trouble either time finding someone willing to loan me a helmet for a session. While you really should always come to the track with two of every part that you might need, it's nice that there's usually someone around willing to help if you managed to forget something you need. Now if only I could get someone to loan me a really fast car so I wouldn't have to keep watching from the sidelines or running my 115 horsepower Civic.

Sunday, January 9th
Mark, the Integra GS-R driver from California	One more of Mark cornering hard	The last picture of Mark racing his GS-R
Mark's GS-R, post crash after being towed off course	Not pretty, but he did walk away without a scratch	A Civic hatchback out on course
Peter on course in his C5	Side profile of Peter's C5 hardtop	Another great picture of Peter's C5
Tage actually passed the Viper here and kept trading places with the Camaro	A great picture of Tage in the clear	One last front 3/4 shot of Tage's GS-R
A closeup of the Viper which was taking it easy on course	Victor Felice's incredibly fast 3-wheeling Toyota MR2 in the race group	One of those very fast racing Porsches

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