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Over 1000 miles down, about 400 to go. I'm at my brother's house in Atlanta, recovering in the AC while I wait for the sun to go down for the drive home to Raleigh. Driving the Duff car for a 6-7 hour stretch on a hot sunny day is a special kind of hell, but driving it at night is bearable since I aimed the headlights so I could see stuff in front of me and zip-tied a piece of dryer duct to the door to direct some air towards me.
The Car Show votes have been tallied. We were hoping for victories in "Most With the Least" or "Spirit of Targa", but much to our amazement, and the amazement of the organizers, the Duff car won Best in Show at the car show. Given the awesome rides that were there, it was, to say the least, a shocking victory. The clincher appeared to be that our car has a built-in beer bottle opener on the rear fender, while the new Acura NSX, regrettably, does not. Take some notes here Acura, a truly world class car should open your beer for you. If it doesn't do that, then you're better off with a clapped-out '94 Honda Civic. Some mention was made of bribing voters and going to prisons to get convicted felons to register with the SCCA and cast votes for Duff Beer, but we're a LeMons team, so what were they expecting? That type of politics is just normal for us.
The Corvette Museum Autocross was fun, about half the size of the awesome Zmax course, but a seriously fast course where we could carry a lot of momentum. We finished ahead of several cars, including an S2000, Mustang GT, and a BRZ, so there must have been some real novices out there, because the Duff car is easily the slowest car in this field by a good margin, with the exception of a similarly clapped-out Cavalier with a badly leaking head gasket, but they are in a different class. Even so, they beat us at the autocross, while we edged them out at the track.
Robert finally beat me in the track cross, which I blame on him getting more practice runs than me, because he couldn't just be a better driver. We finished about mid-pack, but we left a lot of time out there. It was basically the east course with a start gate at T1 and a finish gate at the last turn. It was about a mile long and roughly 50-60 seconds. The only bad thing was that the track insisted that we leave 30 seconds between cars, so you had a massive wait between runs. They could have let cars go every 5-10 seconds and been fine, as all corner worker stations were staffed, and we would have gotten a lot more seat time, but the track insisted on 30 seconds. I was still taking a second off/lap on successive laps, so we were still learning it when we had to do our timed laps. I had 5 runs and they went 60-59-58-57-56, while Robert got a couple of extra practice runs and got in to the 54's.
The Car show victory, combined with our pretty good performance in the Road Rally, clinched our class against a 2015 Golf GTI that was driven well and very much faster than us everywhere that driving skill and speed mattered. I felt a little bad for them, getting beaten by a rolling junkpile, but I'll take the win.
Overall I liked this event and will do it again if they do another one. It was the first event of it's kind for the SCCA, and that showed in the scheduling, which was pretty much made up on the fly, but I'm guessing that subsequent events will get better. My biggest gripe was running later than scheduled at Charlotte and then starting earlier than scheduled at AMP the next morning. After a very long day at Charlotte and a long drive to Atlanta, I really wanted more than 4-5 hours of sleep before my long day at AMP and drive to Bowling Green. The biggest surprise was how much fun the Road Rally was. I didn't think that we could have than much fun at the legal speed limit. Next time we may take a car with air conditioning and comfortable seats. Having a caged track car for the track sessions did let us drive at 10/10 at Charlotte, AMP, and NCM, which was a huge plus, but 1400 miles of street driving in the Duff car is really brutal.
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"Every ship is a minesweeper, once."
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