Now a little more settled into my new life on the East coast, I want to get more involved in local activities I enjoy. High on that list is joining the local chapter of the Porsche Club of America and participating in events. The club e-mail newsletter advertised a call for volunteers for an upcoming club racing weekend. I jumped at the chance.
The event was held at Summit Point Motorsports Park in West Virginia. For me, it was about a 90 minute drive. Once out of the traffic and highways of Northern Virginia, I was treated to perfect end of summer weather, beautiful farms and open land, and open winding country roads. It was a great way to decompress after a long week in the office.
If you arrive early, you get a great chance to walk around the park and see all of the race cars up close. I’m a sucker for anything with the Martini racing livery. That was there, but quite a few participants and some unique and amazing liveries. And, since this was a Porsche event, there were just a ton of amazing vehicles.
For the day of the event, I was assigned to support the Timing and Scoring team. This was a dream assignment. One of the team members walked me through the software that keeps track of all of the sessions and timing of each car. Each racer owns a transponder and puts it in their car. From that, sensor can identify when the car hits certain points on the track. For this track, there was one at the start/finish line to keep track of lap times. There were also two more at the entry and exit of the pit lane to assure that for the endurance races, proper pits stops were conducted. The timers, were responsible for starting and stopping sessions in the software, assuring all transponders were being received, and addressing/noting any anomolies (e.g. penalties or disqualifications). This really spoke to the data loving side of me, the room where this was held had an amazing view of the track, AND there was air conditioning. What’s not to love!
The weekend is three days. I worked the Saturday. There were three classes of races. Silver was for vintage cars. Then, green, blue, and red races allowed for progressively more performant sets of cars. The morning started with practice sessions for each class, then up to 3 races for each class.
Talk to anyone at the track and they’ll tell you, the bbq served at the end of the day is amazing. It did not disappoint. The brisket was flavorful, but the turkey was equally as good; which is probably something no-one has ever said about bbq turkey. All in all, it was a wonderful weekend!