Jan 26-27, 2002
Sebring Raceway, FL
BMW Winterfest driving school

I finally took my Si to the Sebring Raceway. It was a blast; don't know why I didn't do this sooner. Sebring track itself is great (speaking from inexperience of course), but very tough on brake. Since this was my first time out, they placed me in the Novice group. There were also Intermediate, Advance/Solo, Instructor, and Racer group. The BMW and Porsche clubs organized the event. I have never seen so many M3 (new ones too) and 911 in one place. There were other cars too like Vipers, NSXs, Audis, Corvettes plus a few others. I only spotted one other Honda, a CRX, an instructor. I think my Si was one of the lowest displacement cars out there. Each of the two days consisted of three 30 min sessions with class review in between. Each session started with a warm-up lap with no passing. After that, then passing are only allow on the designated areas but only with hand signal from the overtaken car, except for the Racer. Since they're racing, they are allowed to pass anywhere. Even with more than 100 particpants, the event was well organized and all ran without major incident.

My Si is pretty much stock, except the Falken Azenis tires and Carbotech Panther Plus pads, front and rear. I did flushed the brake with Motul 600 fluid before the event. The brake felt great for most of the day except for the slight fade at the end of the 3rd session. Apparently not all of the old fluid was flushed out of the system. By going with both front and rear race pads, I noticed that there were not that much nose dive during heavy braking and no lockup in the rear. I'm now hooked on this stuff and will try to attend any events that I can or until my wallet cry fouls.

For the video, I rigged a tripod in the backseat and secured it with seat belts and bungee cords. It worked alot better than I had originally thought. The video is from day 2 session 2 lap 4; total time 4:43min and 47Mb.

http://www.altamontepro.com/jacob/Car%20Stuff/Sebring_Jan27_2--4.mpg

Thanks to Jacob ( siisgood00 ) for hosting my vid. His site's speed limit is about 50 kb/s, so please don't hammer it. Try saving the vid to your HD instead of clicking directly on the link. For those who are familiar with usenet and have broadband, I post the vid on the newsgroup alt.binaries.mpeg.videos. Search "Sebring" in the subject line. Look for files in Rar format; I tried but failed in posting the vid as a whole. Downloading from usenet should be alot faster but the retention depends on your ISP server.

Trent

 

Here's a temporary mirror of the movie... right-click and save it to disk.
http://jellybiscuit.com/Sebring_Jan27_2--4.mpg

If the link doesn't work, I've probably removed the file.


[Modified by JeffS, 6:47 PM 2/6/2002]

 

Glad to hear that you had a good time at Sebring! I ran there for my first track event back in Decemeber with http://www.chinmotorsports.com and had a blast too I was up at Roebling Road with Chin at the same time that the BMW school was happening... wish they had been on different weekends so that I could have done both.

Hope to see you out at Sebring later this year with Chin maybe...

 

Thank you JeffS for mirroring it for me. Digitize vid is such a pig. The original avi was 800Mb! And that's just about 5min. I have almost two hours . I need a 100 gig HD.

Trent

 

Nah man, you dont want any of those BMW schools. I ran with them at Roebling last Sept, and it was fun and all, but it was the same price as Chin for 4 hours of track time spread over 2 days. Ghey.

 

I picked the BMW school over Chin because I really wanted to run at Sebring. I know that Chin will have another track day at Sebring in April, which I'm planning to attend, but back in Jan, I really wanted to run at Sebring. I have not been to Roebling so I can't really comment about that track, but Sebring just have that mystique for me. Regarding track time, I think as a novice, I had enough track time with the BMW school to familiarize myself and also have fun. In fact, there was a 4th session at the end of the second day that I decided to skip entirely. However, as I progress, I'm sure I'll want more seat time.

Trent

 

I can understand wanting to run Sebring. It's a really nice course and much more technical than Roebling. I'm hoping to be out at Sebring in either April or May with Chin... kinda depends on $$ though. Unfortunately, Wei-Shin won't let me run for free

 

Yea definately no freebes. You can tell Wei-Shin is really starting to add on all these silly *** fees that start to add up. Like the $25 increase for this year. Oh well, min per $, easily the best deal around. I already signed up for Sebring in April

 

Good deal on the school Trent! Track time is good stuff, definately. As for being the lowest displacement...who cares. When you get point-bys from the bigger displacements.....ahhhh, nice! Remember, anyone can build horsepower...but building a driver takes skills! Mad skillz y0! ;-)

 

Yes I agree. Passing cars more than twice the cost/displacement is awesome.

 

It's pretty funny, my instructor said "It's so wrong to pass those cars" (referring to the M Roadsters). But then early on, I got passed by a Ford Focus. Dooh!

Trent