Saturday I qualified on the GTS2 pole (8 cars in class) and won pretty easily with a 17 second margin over second place. That, after losing several positions on the start when the car in front of me was a little slow to the throttle at the green flag (video coming soon). Sunday I ended up second but that fact is not as interesting as how it came to be.

I had tweaked my wing before qualifying Sunday to take out a bit of downforce to see if that improved my turn-in in the faster corners. It turned out I went a bit too far and now the car was a little too loose so I couldn't really lean on it for a fast lap. Ironically, it was also tending to push in the slower turns as it had on Saturday so pretty much everything was going the wrong way. I ended up qualifying second in class behind Jim Child (black 968), the 2007 GTS2 National Champ.

Starting in a mixed class with my wing re-adjusted and two more clicks of rebound in the front shocks, I was ready for action. Jim started 4th overall while I was 5th, a row behind and on the inside. I got a great start and pulled even with Jim on the run down to turn one. Neither of us was willing to give way in the braking zone so we went through turn one door-to-door, then through turns 2, then 3 the same way--neither of us giving the other a chance to move ahead.

Finally, going into the left-hander turn 4, I was able to come around the outside and force my way to the front. Jim and Mike Ward (in a red 968) and I ran nose-to-tail-to-nose-to-tail behind the 2nd place GTS3 qualifier, a next-class-up BMW M3 that was going just a teench slower than us but too fast to actually get around. The four of us stayed like that for several laps until the M3 made the wrong choice while trying to pass a back-marker and Jim, Mike and I freight-trained him, sending him from 3rd to 6th in the space of about 50 yards.

Clear of the Beemer we picked up the pace a bit and I was able to put a modest gap between Jim and myself while he, in turn, gapped Mike (who was eventually passed again by the BMW). Just as I was starting to feel comfortable with my lead I got caught in lapped traffic and Jim closed right back up on my bumper to the point I had to make a couple of really deep runs into turn 1, the fastest turn at the end of the main straight, to keep him behind.

Eventually, after several hard laps, I was able to open up another 5-or-so second gap and things were going pretty much according to plan.

Until I hit the oil.

You may not want to see this either, but here is it nonetheless.

The footage here is from the start of the race on Easter, a couple weeks ago. YES, I KNOW the title page says 2008. It's 2009, I just can't proofread. And, YES, I KNOW I somehow managed to edit out a small part of it midway through the race. Chalk both up to learning how to edit videos (or at least trying to learn how).

I skipped qualifying on Easter to hunt eggs with my kids, so I had to start near the back of my class. Except for the blue BMW (which is in the next-faster class), all the cars you'll see here are my competitors. At the end of this clip I pass my friend Brad (white and orange car) for the lead.

Before passing him, I had a little "moment" at about 5:40 into the video which was a lot bigger deal in person than it looks like here (I thought I was going to spin it).

Enjoy!

Well, last weekend was the first race of the season and I can tell you now that my winter's work did not go unrewarded. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First, I need to set the stage.

You may have noticed, in the photo here, the teeny-tiny little wing on the back of my car. OK, not so teeny-tiny. That's new. Thanks to my friend Charlie Burke and his boys for helping me build it in his amazing wood shop.

Yeah. Wood.

The frame is oak. The skin is aluminum, but it's riveted into the oak. Old school, baby.

I've talked to a lot of guys who "know" about what you can and can't do with race cars like mine and--without exception--they all agree that these cars don't have enough power to be able to use a wing effectively. Every one.

The problem is, I've also read a few too many books on race car aerodynamics and they all say wings make you faster without equivocation. So, after months of deliberation, I trusted the books.

The books were right.

The good news is, I don't think it matters very much. OMG.

Thanks, Jerry Carter, for finding it.

There haven't been many US Formula 1 teams. Dan Gurney did it, as did Roger Penske, but both those efforts (I believe) were US-owned, England-based. This one is going to be right here in the US. Is that a first? Might be.

Peter was on Dave Despain's Wind Tunnel talk show last night and had a lot to say about it but kept a few things under his hat in deference to tomorrow's announcement on Speed (February 24 at noon, EST).

They will be headquartered in Charlotte which makes more sense than you might think. While the World Championship used to be primarily Europe-centric, today races are pretty much everywhere...Austrailia, Malaysia, China, Bahrain, Spain, Monaco, Turkey, England, Germany, Hungary, Belgium, Italy, Singapore, Japan, Brazil and Abu Dhabi. Not being located in Europe is a lot less of a handicap than it used to be.

Being in Charlotte, thanks to NASCAR, USF1 will be literally in the heart of the US racing industry, with access to state of the art wind tunnels, composites fabrication, etc. Interestingly, Windsor said that the bulk of the technology in F1 for many years now has been American but that the teams did not say that very loudly.

I think this is terrific and wish them the best of luck. Until then, though, I'm still a Lewis Hamilton fan.

Significantly.

And this, running on XP inside a VM session on a Macintosh. I may not be able to stand the speed of the native Mac client (though I'm willing to try).

It's like when you first get a new computer and everything that used to be slow is now fast again. I'm still in the look-how-fast-it-does-that euphoria.

If you've been using one of the early ND8 versions and are complaining about speed, take a look at 8.5. For me, at least, it is waaaaay better.

Nice job, Lotus, and...thanks!

If you attended any of my sessions this week, thanks for coming. I hope you found the time well-spent.

Below are links to downloads of the sessions' slides and, in most cases, the demo databases that went with them. Please note, even as .zip files, these are all more than 1MB and some over 4MB.