Fast, fast, fast continued

Frank and Clio on the F1 pit straight. Frank ran qualifying laps all day. He's just come from down there.

RSR, the company supplying our track cars, was running this track day as well, and its owner, Ron Simons, took us on a walk around the track, giving tips about lines and entry speeds, etc., warning drivers of the ease at which you could get into trouble
at this track. As I stood at the top of the hill at Les Combes, the chicane where Mika Hakkinen passed Michael Schumacher so memorably, the view back down the hill toward Eau Rouge was OMG steep. Pictures do not do it justice whatsoever. The track is built into the side of two mountains, going up and down the steep sides and running through the valley only on the way back to the pits. Of some minor concern during this walk around was seeing an iron manhole cover right on the outside white line, right in the middle of the very fast downhill Pouhon, two very fast turns taken as one arc, the natural tracking out of the car taking the driver out to the line right where this manhole is. I would not want to see if it were grippy in the rain.
Eau Rouge. Photo by Frank Vilardi.

Not to sound like the next Hamilton, but the track was not all that difficult. It was FAST, very FAST.
Even the chicanes, with the exception of the replacement for the old “bus stop”, were FAST. Tracks like VIR and Mid-Ohio are more technical; right about the time I had sailed through Eau Rouge for the umpteenth time, I realized that years of high-speed roadrace karting made curb-hopping and flat-out speed somewhat second nature. While I had not driven a car of any sort at speed on a race track since a day at Bridgehampton in the 80s, I came to grips with both the racing line and the car pretty quickly.
I had forgotten the sheer pleasure of going up and down through the gearbox at speed. By my second session, right after a superb track-supplied lunch, I was already looking for places to go faster. This is not to say there weren’t dramas: while testing the Alfa and track limits in my first session, I missed the new “Bus Stop” chicane a few times and had one wild tank-slapper out of it. Going faster in my second session, I half-spun trying fifth in the decidedly fourth gear Pouhon. I would have loved to have seen the face of the Porsche 944 driver already out by the wall (having completed his own off) when he saw me coming towards him, backwards, tires smoking. But thanks to the huge asphalt runoff through these two turns, I let off the brakes a bit, kicked in the clutch, got it stopped with engine running, and took off again. I had previously hated the sight of yards of asphalt runoff, but now have a wonderful new appreciation for their ability to stop a spinning car, without the requisite “crunch” sound.

Most of my laps around the track were in the Alfa, after Frank and Jim both decided that the unfortunate fuel feed problem, caused by one of the fuel pumps packing up, made the car less than pleasurable to drive. The fuel feed problem caused the car to have absolutely no low-end revs; part-throttle would cause the car to embarassingly chug. Essentially now a 3-speed car (no power, chug and full throttle),
I tried to drive it all day at full throttle. The Clio, on the other hand, was GREAT. It stuck, it steered, it stopped, and was pretty darned quick in a straight line. We did around 375k in the Alfa and 450k in the Clio, and I must have done over 4 hours myself!

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