Originally posted by Greg Gauper:
Marty, are you off your logbook yet?

Yup!

Lessons learned:
* Watch out for pro racers - they're not too careful.
* You guys drive a lot faster than it looks from the cheap seats.
* I think I NEED to get me some Hoosiers. I know I couldn't drive the lines I saw the Hoosiers run with my Kuhmos.
* This is a whole lot of fun.

Saturday I qualified 19th and finished 19th of 23 cars. I was chasing an AS Mustang the whole race (we were running at the back). He’d open up a big lead on me in the straight, and I’d catch him as soon as we hit turn one. He held me up at 2, 3, 5, 6, 10, and 12 but I couldn’t figure out how to get past him (safely). Finished 4th of 4 cars in my class.

Sunday I improved my lap times by 1.5 seconds, and qualified 16th of 20 cars. In the race when they dropped the green flag the guy in front of me hit his brakes and nearly everyone went by me. I came out of turn one in front of about three cars, but behind that same Mustang, and we started the same thing all over again. But this time I also had the cars behind me to battle with – an ITE Taurus, an AS Mustang, and an ITA Cavalier. I kept them behind me most of the race. Around the next-to-last lap a CRX took my line (and my momentum) at 11 while he was lapping me and the two cars behind me followed him around. The 280Z pulled off with a brake fire, so I finished 3rd in class and got a trophy. I was only about 7 seconds behind the 2nd place ITS car (another RX-7), and I thought I’d made a lot of improvement, so I’m pretty happy.

What's up with those ITA cars? A Saturn and the CRX were running about a second off the ITS track record and lapped 3/4 of the American Sedans and 3/4 of ITS. Had a lot more juice than I did in the straights.

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Marty Doane
ITS RX7 #13
CenDiv WMR