I would have to say racing here was on the list of things that I thought would be cool but I also thought I would never get to do. Thankfully, I was only wrong about one of those things. We loaded up the trailer and started our 14 hour drive at around 7pm on Thursday night before the race weekend began. In retrospect, we should have just taken Thursday off work and driven down during the day to get a good night’s rest at a hotel before showing up at the track Friday but we don’t always make the best decisions for ourselves. Rolling up to the track and parking beside a field of sheep made me second guess if I had actually made it or finally passed out at the wheel.
Once we got there we had to immediately unload the car and drive it down to the makeshift Parc fermé since our truck and trailer had to be parked in an auxiliary lot until the current group using the track was done. While Lauren took the car down I set up our cots in the trailer to try and get some sleep. A few hours later, once it was time, we pulled the car up and flew through tech with no issues. Our theming was solid, including my brothers advertisement banner, and our fancy bribe of an envelope of cash in our newly custom built intake appeased the BS inspection judges enough to leave us in B class with no penalty laps. Side note: classing the cars in A, B, or C is pretty subjective but, generally, the judges give C class to crazy builds or cars that don’t belong on a track, A class to cars that will most likely lap everyone else on track because they are a common platform found on the track, and B class to anything in between.
Around 6pm when the other group’s track day was wrapping up, they finally released all the Lemons tow rigs to go to the main paddock area to claim a spot. Initially we were told this would be very organized but in typical Lemons fashion, the organized part broke down immediately and the Benny Hill songs started playing as everyone raced to an empty area to start setting up their space for the weekend. Once we had the pop-up and sleeping tent set up by the trailer we took off to get some well needed groceries and dinner.
Saturday started with some precipitation threatening and a lot of eager beavers out on the track. Dodging traffic and minimizing our mistakes, we slowly climbed up the leader board. I did end up making one mistake, trying to be too aggressive on braking for the chicane turn 9A trying to pass someone and shot through the grass instead of making the turn. This was my first ever black flag in Lemons and I immediately went to the pits before taking another lap to self report to the judges. They were very kind to me, basically reminding me to focus less on driving all out and more on having fun while I was out there. After that I managed to avoid any issues throughout the weekend. We started noticing the coolant in the car was looking pretty rough, turning orange and losing a little volume, but the car kept taking our abuse so we kept attacking the track.
In typical Lauren fashion, she was our steady eddie plucking away lap after lap with no issues. It’s crazy how much quicker you can be as a team just by staying out on the track running lap after lap with no incidents. We were still struggling to figure out the fastest way to get our red VP fuel jugs to dump into the car without making a mess and having some radio issues after getting the push to talk button wrapped into the steering column but outside of that we successfully completed the weekend. Though it was no fancy result, finishing 17th in class (out of 50) and 39th overall (out of 114), we were able to put in some major track experience with 271 laps in total and learn a lot about what we could improve on. Hope to see you at the next one!
