Monday, August 01, 2005

SG Evo Club Trackday Sepang 29 July 05

Man what a weekend!

Looking forward to the trip, I only managed to get to bed at 12.30 am on Thursday night. So I woke up at 3 am and proceeded to meet the convoy past the border. Only problem is that when I arrived at the Secret Location I was the only person there!

Quick call revealed that the actual meeting time was 4 am. Damn.

After some waiting around the convoy finally managed to form up and proceeded to drive up to Sepang... on the way we encountered very heavy rain which reduced visibility immensely. Progress was slow as some of us were on semi-slicks and were hydroplaning. Fortunately when finally we arrived at SIC the track was dry.

After the orientation laps I began to concentrate on trying to improve my driving.

The first two laps were disastrous. On the first lap I was at WOT coming to T4. Two cars were ahead, one of them saw me coming and allowed me to pass. The other car ran very wide, past the 50m braking point. I thought he let me pass so I made for the apex. All of a sudden he made a sharp turn towards the apex as well. Fortunately he saw me in the mirror at the last moment and kept to his original line. Whew!

Next lap wasn't any better. Coming out of the bus stop I was WOT heading into T9, the hairpin. At this point speeds are above 160 km/h. Car ahead saw me coming but was wavering and couldn't decide to keep left or right. I was reacting to his steering inputs and he was reacting to mine. Eventually I had to go off throttle a little and overtake him on the outside. Close shave #2.

I completed another lap to cool the car down and pitted in. I know both drivers so I approached them to clear up the misunderstandings and listened to their perspective of the events.

While in the pits we received word that Dan and Eric had gone farming at T8*. Fortunately the car was OK. At around the same time reports came in that another car went past the gravel and crashed into the barriers at T12. The damage was limited to the hood, bumper and intercooler, but driver was unscathed.

Later in the morning an STI also went farming but the damage this time was limited to the lower lip.

On the bright side the rest of the day was relatively incident-free, and I did manage to get in 2 consecutive hot laps.

Ending the day were the friendly drag races; Shireen went head-to-head with Jenny (a mother of two!) and it was really entertaining.

Next we headed to the workshops in the Sunway area then rested for a while at the Dorsett Hotel in downtown KL. After dinner we set off for Singapore and I didn't get home till about 2.30 am. I had been driving for a good part of 15 hours and covered more than 1100 km.

*Dan later said that the the cause of his off-roading was that he wasn't used to the car's new level of power.

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