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With the long drive from Buttonwillow to Willows now under our belt, we settled in for a day of competition. Last year Thunderhill turned out to be one of our weakest tracks. Despite all our best intentions we hadn't made it up to get some DCB(tm) practice in. Somehow 8 hour drives don't seem to be conducive to weekend events. So, going in to Thunderhill our plan was to improve over last year, hopefully enough to not lose too much ground. Session one the plan was to let Joel drive while I scoped out the track from the passenger seat. The same approach seemed to work really well last year and had worked great at Derek Daly the day before. So, out on the track we went. Through turn one, around turn two, blind right on three... Joel was handling it pretty well. Up to five, I'm telling Joel to go really slow and it's a hard blind left. Unfortunately Joel heard me say, "Go straight and punch it," because that's what we did.
Joel's Journey
The backside of turn 5 is an interesting ride downhill, quite bumpy too, oops, there goes the oil cooler duct. Back into the pits we go. Once in the pits we found that not only was the ductwork destroyed but also our lower coolant line was about to burst.
Joel at work while I watch
A quick trip into Willows secured a replacement. After a little bit of repair work and a lot of zip ties the duct was almost as good as new, the new hose was on, and the third session was up. We decided for me to go out and try to turn some fast laps before the day got too hot. The first few laps were spent trying to refamiliarize myself with the circuit. Thunderhill is an interesting track; lots of elevation changes combined with blind corners make it very technical and tough to learn. In many ways it's like a longer, more beautiful, version of Streets of Willow Springs. Unfortunately I also have about 20 less hours worth of experience at Thunderhill. In the end I managed to turn lap times of low 2:16's with one foray into the high 2:15s. That works out to about a second faster that last year, with the difference being that this year we were on street tires. Not too bad for my second session ever at Thunderhill. However, as we thought, it still wasn't fast enough with Young turning low 2:15s and Roger Foo stepping up with 2:13s. Ouch... Near the end of session 3 I took a little off road excursion that resulted in even more damage to the ductwork, I really know how to keep Joel busy. We decided for the final run of the day that we would seal off the ducting and see if we really need it with our new, larger oil cooler. We do, oil temps of 280 scare me. Back to work for Joel, reinstalling the original duct, again. That night we got a night off. The team headed into Willows and we had a great meal at Franco's with about 50 of our fellow competitors. It probably isn't a good idea to consume large quantities of alcohol in the middle of a seven-day competition, but it had to be done... -Matt
Living Large