I finally had the opportunity to attend SCCA’s Time Trials National Tour (TTNT) event at Palmer Motorsports Park, July 4th weekend. Because it was my first time trial experience, I leaned heavily on my fellow MoHud members. A quick review of the classing rules prior to registering, I interpreted them to find my car qualified in the Unlimited 2 class, mostly due to using tires (Nitto NT01s) that were grippier than the encouraged 200 tread wear street tires that series sponsor Tire Rack sells.
The event itself had some unseasonably cool weather that weekend, and when combined with the damp conditions it helped preserve gas, tires and brake pads. I had fortunately signed up for a carport spot at Palmer, along with a majority of my MoHud friends, which lended itself to a very good atmosphere. Our driving experience was all over the board, and since SCCA groups entrants by driving experience, I found myself on track for my sessions with other drivers who had classified themselves as “advanced” drivers. So you had to wait for all driver groups to complete their sessions before looking at your results in class.
For the advanced drivers, we found ourselves with only 1 dry session out of the 6 sessions we were scored on over the 2 days. This seemed to work into my advantage with AWD and some solid experience with the track. Unfortunately for me, another Evo driver who I had the pleasure to chat with while flagging at NER’s June Paddock Crawl Race at LRP was a quick learner of the track, and was soon using his AWD and superior power output of his Evo to establish a lead I wasn’t able to dent. The good news for me was that this spurred me to put an even bigger lead over the other competitors in Unlimited 2.
When all was said and done, I held onto 2nd place and was awarded a trophy. Gotta admit that this was the cap on a really fun event and has me dreaming of doing it again next time the TTNT comes to the area.
