.jpg) This event was my rookie debut with
BMWCCA club racing. The first day began early with freezing temperatures
and frost on the ground. After passing the annual tech inspection
and attending the rookie meeting and drivers meeting we were off to our
first practice session. This was a good chance to warm up the car
get a feel for the track. Later that morning we had our qualifying
session that kicked off with three practice starts. While this may
have been tedious for experience racers it was great practice for the
rookies. I also believe that this approach also allowed the other
drivers to settle down and prepare for a good start in the up coming
races. While I improved my best lap time in qualifying it was not as
good a finish as in the practice session earlier, leaving me with 17th
position in the starting line up for the sprint race that afternoon.
After a long break the spring race was on for 5:00pm that day.
After a warm up lap and then a pace lap the green flag dropped.
Unfortunately, I did not have a radio setup and did not get a good start
as I could not see the flag around the turn going into the straight.
I was late on the gas and a number of cars were able to jump in position
ahead of me. Moreover, being on the inside track allowed others to
sweep the car in the first turn and in turn 3 I was forced to take the
outside track. At this point I was pretty much at the back of the
pack. I was really in the hole. After the third lap traffic
began to spread out and I could start working my way up the pack.
Over the course of the race I passed at least 10 cars to work my way back
up the 13th position and put in a fast lap that would have been
competitive with the front of the pack.
In working my way through the pack I had some great racing with John
Mariani in his IP E36 M3. Herb Wise closed the door on me more times
with his M3 LTW than I can count. Fred Landwehr was hard to catch in
his SM E36 M3. Phil Sansiossio got jump on me going into
turn 9 and it took several laps to catch him again. The event was
very competitive but everyone gave room and the race completed without any
serious incident. My thanks to all the racers in the event for such
a fun clean event.
Sunday was the 1 hour enduro. That mornning we had a practice
session where the car was black flagged. The engine was down on
power and clearly burning oil. I opened the hood to discover that
the intake was leaking oil. I had a serious case of oil blow back
into the intake. The HFM was fouled and the intake filter was soaked
with oil. The engine was chocking and the HFM could not send a
proper signal to the ECU. There would be no way to clean this up in
time of to start the enduro. This was also a possible indication
that I may have blown a piston ring. I did not want to risk further
damage to the engine so I sadly withdrew from the race. Too bad
since other withdraws would have put me in top 10 of the starting grid for
the race. Better safe than sorry and I will be ready to race another
day once we clean this up and sort out the
cause. |