When you're into modifying cars it's
good to have a chance to take your baby and let her off the leash enforced by traffic laws to see if your changes hold up. It's for
this reason I was at Auto Club Speedway a week ago with my R35 GT-R
to do a track day with NASA.
If you haven't heard of NASA before,
it's not the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that's
responsible for moon shots, freeze-dried ice cream, and sending Bruce
Willis out to protect us from asteroid impacts, it's the National
Auto Sport Association. It's a nationwide organization that promotes
motorsport activities from the novice level all the way up to the
professional. The two biggest organizations right now that are aimed
at promoting amateur motorsports are the Sports Car Club of America
(SCCA) and NASA. Both are great associations but NASA currently has
the better setup for the beginner to get started in high performance
driving in my opinion.
NASA has the HPDE or High Performance
Driver Education program where a new member starts out in the first
tier or HPDE 1 and gets paired up with an instructor to teach
him the basics. You then progress through to three more tiers until HPDE 4 where you can then consider doing basic racing
activities like Time Trial or go to Race School if you want to do
wheel-to-wheel racing. Each tier is logically arranged so that you
progressively gain the experience and skill needed to become a
veteran road course driver or a full-fledged racer. I respect the
SCCA too and have done trackdays with them as well but compared to
the logical progression NASA offers, starting out with SCCA can feel
like getting dumped in the middle of Tokyo without a guide – so
much cool stuff to do but where the hell do you start?
I've done about a dozen trackdays with
NASA so far and it's a great organization. The other drivers are
usually very friendly and welcoming to new blood. Camaraderie is
encouraged within the different run groups and unlike with private
trackdays where you usually drive with complete strangers at each
event you usually get familiar with the regular attendees in your
group which helps both on track and off. Saturday events are usually
followed by a paddock barbecue where everybody chills, has a good
time, and occasionally weird party games erupt. Overall, it's a great
way to get on track and I highly recommend it if you have any
interest in road racing.
Anyway, as I mentioned in my intro post
about my R35 I've had the engine and transmissions fully built by a major tuner, TopSpeed
Motorsports out in Atlanta. They've got a great reputation for
building reliable, high-power, track-oriented GT-Rs – a trio of
successive overall wins at One Lap of America with their shop R35s
attest to that. So after my car got built I had to get her out on
track and see how she held up. My first time out with the car two
months ago at Wild Horse Pass Motorsports Park here in Arizona was
hampered by a slight transmission issue. My friends and I weren't
able to figure out the cause at the track but TSM traced it to some
clutch slippage occurring and throwing off the car's computers.
Upping the torque capacities in the car's transmission settings was
the advised solution but I couldn't test it out on the street of
course – yeah, I don't think the local PD would like me staging the
inaugural Grand Prix of Yuma on a whim. Since I'd never been to Auto
Club Speedway before, this May NASA event was the perfect chance to
test things out and add another track to my resume.
This time I'm happy to say the car
delivered one hundred percent. The day went with no hiccups even with
extended high speed running. I was driving pretty conservatively
since it was my first time at Auto Club (and I didn't want to stuff
my baby in a tire barrier) but I was routinely hitting 140-150 miles
an hour on the banked oval and having a blast doing it.
Since this was actually an event run by
the SoCal chapter of NASA instead of the Arizona branch I normally
run with most of the people were strangers to me. I only knew one
other driver in my HPDE group from Arizona but almost everyone proved
to be good and courteous drivers out on track. There was plenty of
interesting hardware to see in the paddock too. With that said, I'll
let the pictures do the talking at this point:
Classroom time is part of HPDE - all in the name of making you a better driver
Gridding up for a session
If you think NASCAR is easy you need to actually see what it's like to drive an oval at speed
Here's an onboard video I shot with my Iphone 6 using the Harry's Lap Timer app:
I only saw one other GT-R at this event - this one's a 2015
You normally see all sorts of vehicles at a NASA event whether it's in the race groups like here or in HPDE
This cool Kia race car is just one example of the variety
How about this ultra clean M3 track car?
Or this rare Panoz?
Prototypes were there too, like this Mazda.
Not all Ferrari drivers just pose with their cars.
This Prelude stayed in the pits but was too clean to ignore
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