The forecast for this sunday was all over the place, with "Strong Storms" predicted at some point during the day by the ever-dilligent Weather.com meteorologuessers. It seems to me that the little weather-icon for a "Strong Storm" should be really angry looking, but it still has the cartoonish look of all weather.com icons...still, i was packed for rain gear. I decided that i was sick of changing tires in the wet, storing things in the wet, and drying things out after being wet...so i said screw preperation, I'm going to run my street tires, which as you'll see elsewhere on this site are Volk TE-37s (kickass wheels) with Pirelli P7000 Summer tires (pretty cheap, decent...but the azenis weren't really around when i got them unfortunately). Since I had decided to throw caution to the wind and not even bring my race rubber (which is expensive and wears a bit more quickly than your average street tire) i decided to let my friend and extremely helpful car-working-buddy Tim beat the snot out of my R with me.
The course was typical of the Steubenville type I enjoy so much, a very tight, twisty, first-gear only course where the limited-slip and nosebleed redline of the R are particularly suited. The lot is slippery, with a sandy layer that evens the field a bit between race tires and street tires. The R was turning in respectable times, for both myself and co-driver Tim, who was enjoying his second autoX ever. Check out the Racing Videos section for the only mutlimedia of the day. The weather held off, and it ended up being a warm (although humid) day...towards the end of the day, after all my runs were done, the Strong Storms started to come, looking far more menacing than their cartoony icons....for a few moments, the winds were so strong that cones were blowing over...runs had to be cut short, and the trip home was a mix of insanely heavy rain (which we seemed to chase the whole way out of Ohio) and dodging blown-over work signs in the middle of the road, which is a piece of cake after dodging cones on the slippery Steubenville lot.
Results are HERE.