The March 16/17 race weekend at Sonoma went… well… as planned! The Life’s Good Racing!TM team executed on our strategies for both the 2012 Camaro and the 1969 Camaro with great success. The weekend saw competition in Time Trials for the 1969 Camaro and in our first Super Unlimited race in the 2012 Camaro.
In the new NASA Time Tials 1 (“TT1”) class we won both days with times in the 1:48s and with very little margin, particularly on Saturday when we had a very fast BMW crawling up our tailpipe. We won by only one-hundreth of a second. Sunday we won by close to a full second. Regardless, that’s four consecutive wins in four outings in 2013, following an undefeated string in 2012. Life’s Good Racing!TM our 1969 Camaro! Our next outing in this series with this car will be April 13 & 14 at the very fast Thunderhill Raceway just outside of Willows where we achieve speeds of 150mph at the end of the front straight.
The 2012 Camaro saw its first competition at the hands of Dave Brown in Super Unlimited, a class that fields THE fastest cars to hit the track. These cars feature very high horsepower AND fantastic handling. The fastest included a Dodge Viper ACS, Fort GT, Ford Mustang, and a Factory Five GTM. These, along with others, are well sorted foll-on racing machines that presented very fast competition for our new-to-this-series 2012 TA2 Camaro.
The weekend started with some challenges as we struggled with our setup on Saturday as Dave had to continue “hanging on” to a very loose car that was extremely difficult to pilot. Saturday’s performance was respectable with a 4th in class in spite of our “growing pains”.
Sun day was a different story all together as Dave again gridded fourth in class, fifth overall. Within a very short time Dave worked the 2012 Camaro to first in class with lap times as low as 1:44 and held on to first until just a few laps short of the entire race when he wisely decided to retire the car which had developed an exhaust leak…. teathing pains. What a fantastic performance for our first weekend! We not only hung with the big dogs, we led the field for a while in a commanding style!
I want to thank all the people who came out to visit us in the pits and spend time with us. We had some great “bench racing” with lots of current and former racers. We love this and encourage everyone to come out. Pro/Am racing presents a rare opportunity to get up close and personal with the drivers and the teams that many racing events don’t offer. Pick a date on our calendar and come out! We had many visitors at Sonoma. When will you come out?
As always, we want to shout out a huge THANKS to HAWK Performance for giving us the “whoa” to match the “go” that these two Camaros have. Watch our videos and see how much we make up in braking!!! Also, a great big thanks goes to Competition Clutch for a fantastic piece of machinery in our #96 Camaro that gives us the confidence to put the power down and not only keep up with, but pass, our competition! Also Red Lineracing fluids provides us with the confidence to continue pushing our equipment the way we do with 100% confidence in reliability!
Fast forward to today, or more accurately, tomorrow. We pull out for our second competition in the WERC series (Western Endurance Racing Championships) at Buttonwillow Raceway, outside of Bakersfield, California. The race starts at 6:30pm and is a day/night race lasting three hours, our first night race. This will be another great opportunity to both test the car and the team. We race Saturday night and will be testing Friday.
Be sure to see our updated lifesgoodracing.com website for videos from the Sonoma Race Weekend, as well as the Life’s Good Racing!TM page for regular updates during the upcoming race weekend.
And, as always, we hope to see you at the races!