Miatas Before the Gap powered by Rspeed

[— kung fu jesus —]

Offering a ride along in the afternoon, I think this was a guest from R*Speed (Joe's son). Just some stuff pulled from my dash cam. It was slippery in T6 from an LFx (V8 Roadster?) dumping it's coolant. Just playing with shift points and adjusting to track conditions, it was a blast!

[SigmaX]

...It was slippery in T6 from an LFx (V8 Roadster?) dumping it's coolant...

It was one of the RX8s. Owned by a shop that wanted to prove the stock radiator could handle hard usage. Result? Overheated, coolant on the track, blown engine.

The other thing I’ve enjoyed is how pleasant they are in day to day driving. Honestly, this car sees far more street miles than the track. It’s tiresome to drive everyday on ‘trackday bro’ tires that howl constantly while cruising on the freeway.

I just now realized that I totally didn't say hi.
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Here's a video of one of my sessions, I think the same one as yours. I suspect that there was something around T11 as well as it was extra-slippery, even accounting for rain.


My comments:
The facility: AMP is a motorsports country club (with a base membership cost of $10000), not a motorsports competition facility. You can definitely tell the difference, from the lack of on-site food facility to the fact the main building contains a couple conference rooms and carpeting, but no large track map. The split paddock is a little odd, but the paddock itself is small enough it's not a huge problem. The single set of restrooms for us plebs is a little strange too. The on-site shop holds mostly driver safety gear, some misc. vehicle safety gear, nothing in the way of spare parts or typical trackday stuff - couldn't even sell me shop towels. The owner is a really cool guy, was nice enough to chat with me about seats (and their fitment into Miatas), and with a ton of racing experience. Racing Analytics is the on-site mechanics/tuning shop, with one focus on Spec Miatas. I hung out and chatted with them for about 20 minutes, and they did a no-extra-charge swap of pads and rotors on my Miata in about an hour without batting an eye. I'll be trailering the Miata back down to have them do some race prep work in the future.

The track: I can't decide if AMP was designed by a sadist, or an elitist. It is a highly technical track favoring lower-powered vehicles. There is a huge amount of elevation change, and every other corner is a blind, off-camber, tightening radius turn designed to test your throttle control and vehicle weight handling. However, there is plenty of well-designed runoff and safety barriers that make an off-road excursion less scary than it might otherwise be. Quite fun.

The event: Almost all of my trackdays have been with national amateur competition motorsports orgs, so my bias of comparison slants towards that. First off, I have to say I was really disappointed by the last-minute changes to rules and schedules. Many people (including myself) were coming from several states away, and changing requirements last-minute is REALLY unprofessional. Any changes not forced on the hosting org. should be locked out AT LEAST a week before go-day. The ancillaries were very nice - coffee, donuts, stickers, pizza for lunch, giveaways, etc. Not something I would expect at a "typical" trackday event at all; and with a REALLY low cost of entry I suspect the sponsors were heavily involved in the final bill. The lack of paddock-wide announcements was a real hassle; keeping track of the run groups' orders was all based on the watch. This hurt especially when crashes and spills on track caused delays and re-ordering of run groups. There seemed to be a relatively low number of entrants, which was nice for keep the track clear and allowing movement between run groups. The sessions were set at 15 minutes, which I really feel is too low. Not counting the warmup and cooldown laps, I was seeing 6 hot laps, depending on traffic. I would have preferred fewer, 20 or 25-minute sessions. Driver's meeting seemed fairly typical, except going over instruction better left for the classroom (like flag meanings). Classroom instruction for the beginner's group was... odd, I'll say. Spending the first classroom session having the safety gear shop owner talking about safety gear, and not a driving instructor talking about driving safety issues, had me shrugging my shoulders. My in-car instructor, I have no negative comments with; but individual instructor quality always varies person-to-person. Once I told him my experience level he was happy to bump me up a group and really only had an issue with my habit of using lift-off oversteer to correct my lines midcorner (which I totally understand, it's not something a typical novice, or even intermediate on this track, should be doing).