I realize that I live in the Seattle area, but did we really need to have the rainiest winter on record? Isn’t it over yet? As you can imagine, Event 2 took place in the rain. With my tires that are terrible in the wet, I had another challenging drive just to keep facing in the proper direction. It was a fun time as usual though!

Picture on the left is what a beautiful, clear day on the weather radar would look like. Picture on the right is what the radar looked like on the day of Event 2 right before my first run. The red star is the track location. Not good!

At least the track was long and fast this time around. Looked pretty interesting with lots of features.

The day actually started out dry as you can see in the picture that I took during the course walk (above). Unfortunately, I was assigned to work my station first before my runs. I could see the rain coming. The first group running got in one dry run before the drizzle started. They were going all out as they new that was going to be their only dry run. By the end of their 4th run, it was a steady downpour.

By the time I was ready to run it was standing water everywhere on the track and still more rain coming down.

The car looks decent though! I aired down my tires to 25psi in the rear and 28psi in the front though I seriously doubted that would have much effect on the day’s performance. I also left the shocks set on full soft in order to try to minimally upset the car through the corners.

I tried to add a little more color commentary to my videos this time around to let you know what I was thinking before, during and after the runs. With all that being said, let’s see how things went!

Run 1 – 71.057 (tons of penalties):

I got completely lost and missed a few track feature sections! On one curve I was completely on the wrong side of the cones. On another section I just blew past the slalom instead of going through it. I think I was just too distracted by the constant sliding and oversteer correction. Felt like I was back in my go-kart in the wet grass again!

 

Run 2 – 71.185 (clean):

This time I managed to follow all the cone directions and make a clean run so that’s good! However, you can see how I would spin my tires at 40mph in 2nd gear when I applied full throttle even in a straight line. How am I supposed to go quickly when that’s happening???

 

Run 3 – 69.917 (clean):

Best run of the day! I was able to keep the oversteer in check as much as I could by very careful throttle application. This is probably about as good of a run that I could hope for with the car on this particular day.

 

Run 4 – 72.249 (couple cones):

Well I tried to add commentary during this run but I think that just distracted me from driving well! I was all over the place and nearly did a 360 on the very last corner.

So, in general, how did I think things went today? As well as expected in the wet! Most of the fastest cars of the day were all wheel drive or had very awesome wet tires. Most of the “pros” were in the 65 second range while a few were battling for the top spot trying to get to 62 seconds.

There’s another event next weekend and right now the weather forecast is saying 55 deg F with a chance of rain…