It was a mixed success. Weather was not good. Grid procedures were not good. Both my car and I took some damage. SpecE30 bonding was fabulous.
I missed qual because I broke a wheel stud 30min prior. Andrew@Drive-Gear had a torch and because I’d brought a Coleman grill, I had propane so the red locktite got burned out and I was able to replace the wheel stud pretty quickly.
Altho if it had not been for Andrew’s hand sledge, I’d still be in the paddock trying to bang off my rear brake rotor with my “sissy hammer”, as termed by Andrew.
Sat race 1 was a grid goatscrew. I was in a line of prob 25cars trying to get into the false grid. Somehow grid personnel had adopted a technique that required a 2min conversation with each driver. Even after I got the heck out of the line and tried to get around the grid personnel to join my SpecE30 compadres, the grid workers stopped me. That was irksome. I was strongly reminded of the classic “I’m 7th” video. So me and 3-4 other SpecE30s started some 30 cars back from the rest of the SpecE30s.
I had no idea how to race VIR on the rain so I just tippy toed around for the short race. It was quite unsatisfying.
Sat Race 2 looked much more promising. The weather cleared up and with resolution I drove right past the grid personnel studiously ignoring their desire to have a 2min conference with me. Since I missed qual I gridded last or nearly so.
It was to be a short race.
Somewhere about the exit of turn 2 I caught a glimpse of trouble in front of me. I saw Sandro astride the track moving to the right. It was just a glimpse because there were numerous cars between us.
Not being sure what kind of mess I’d find once I got to where Sandro actually was, I decided to be cautious and go ahead and get into the grass to the left.
About 1sec later, to my very great surprise, I found Sandro now sliding off the track to the left, and therefore right in front of me. I did what I could to avoid him, but I was already in the grass so my traction was limited. I fought it to the end and because it didn’t look to me much of a hit, didn’t bother taking my hands off the wheel at the last second. Which is when my wrist got crunched.
I was really surprised to get hurt by such a no-account impact. I was highly annoyed with myself for failing to let go of the damned steering wheel.
Sandro, drove over to me and with concern etched on his face hollered “are you all right”. Furious with myself for getting hurt, I hollered back “No”.
So there I sat with a car with unknown damage and a tweaked wrist. After spending a couple minutes cussing about my bent wing, I decided to drive off somewhere such that there’d be no yellow for me. I got maybe 50m but the car was apparently worse off then I’d thought so I drove over to a wall and parked. Later we would figure out that the problem was that my air dam was caught under the car.
Then I was stuck in a dilemna. We are supposed to stay in our car under these circumstances but my left hand was inop. It occurred to me that if someone banged into me and I needed to get out of my car in a hurry, I was going to be in trouble.
I was right next to the wall, so it wasn’t going to be far to walk. I spent the next several minutes struggling with my steering wheel quick release but with one hand I couldn’t get it undone. So finally I just squirmed out of the cockpit as best I could, stepped over the railing of the wall, camped out in the trees, and watched the rest of the race. I spent a lot of time grinding my teeth over how inconvenient a bent wrist was going to be. I had a car to fix and the next race weekend was in 2 weeks at CMP.
If you’re going to hurt your car tho, do it at VIR. The Reverend Al, made multiple trips home to get me the parts I’ll need to repair the damage. Hood, R fender, passenger door, radiator support structure, strut housing and bumper. Early prognosis is that my frame is ok so not that big of a deal really. It’s the darn wrist that’s going to be a handicap.
My thanks to Andrew and the Graces for feeding folks and in so doing creating a SpecE30 bonding central. Also thanks to the guys that helped me load my gear this morning.
I’m probably out for CMP in 2 weeks. Even if I get some help from Al and Rich to replace my bent sheetmetal, no matter what the xray says tomorrow it’s unlikely my wrist will be strong enough in 2 weeks to race.