June 2000 Speedtrial

A wet parking lot, a tornado and a few fanatics...
By Pascal Gademer

Sunday, June 10th... 7 am... The weather was still unsettled as it had been the entire week end with some heavy rainshowers moving thru south east Florida.

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On the way to the Metrozoo parking lot where Equipe Rapide was holding its second speedtrial of the season, the clouds gots darker and closer and it started raining. The rain stoped when I got there and registered hoping things were going to dry but a nasty line of thunderstorm moved thru. As I stood under the tent with other fanatics, I see a small tornado forming about 1 mile or so away, near 152 nd street. It only touched down brifly but it was a real tornado... not just a funnel cloud... Thankfully it didn't last and dissipated within a few seconds.

At the peak of the downpour, Rick Hill showed up with his 2+2 but decides not to run as his car had developped a misfire in the wet and headed back home.

Back to racing... sort of... We wait and we wait and we wait for the rain to stop and the sun to finally come out to dry things out. Around 10am, a few cars ventured on the course splashing the water around as some puddles were up to a full inch deep. I waited as late as possible, we all know that British cars like water as much as cats do, and I went for a 10 minute practice session with 5 other cars.

Amazingly, despite the amount of water still standing on most of the course, the E-type turned out to be very easy to drive. The Pirelli P6000 225x60 ZR15 I had mounted a week before turned out to be excellent even in the wet, much better that the 215x70 MXV4s I had before. The E-type is extremly responsive and gives its driver a lot of feedback making it easy to push to the limit. I pushed a little too hard a couple of time but was able to catch it time and never spun it.

That's the beauty of autocrossing and Speedtrials, you can push and explore the limits of your car, with no risk at all.

After the 10 minute practice sessions ended, the first set of timed run begun, by group of 3 cars. I was placed in a group with two Miata, which where pretty quick, but one of them spun on the first lap, causing me to catch up and then be blocked behind for the entire 3 timed laps session. Because of this I was allowed to run again, this time with two C5 Corvettes.

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a racing Stingray goes for a spin... litterally.

Nicer company; despite the obvious power and technology gap the E-type was competitive and I took third in my class, novice. First was a Miata and second one the C5, about 3/10 of a second faster.

Click here for a short video clip of the E-type going thru a portion of the course.
(340 Kb, needs Media player or similat to play )

Next Speedtrial will be Sunday July 9th, also at the metrozoo. Check the calendar page for updates and changes of schedule.