Track weekend at Palmer Motorsports Park

[Candide13]

Just returned from a 2-day event with Chin at Palmer, my last event this season. Palmer is a new twisty track carved into a mountain, with lots of elevation changes and concrete walls nearby everywhere..

This was my first time with Chin and I was pretty impressed by the organization. They just run three groups (novice, intermediate solo, advanced) with 30 minute sessions back to back. They also do two joint 30 minute sessions: one warm up session in the morning under standing yellow, and an open session in the evening. So a total of 3 hours of track time per day are possible.

This event was lightly attended with only some 35 cars or so. I was in the intermediate solo group, which is really pretty fast. For comparison with NASA, I think it was faster than their HPDE 2. Compared to BMW CCA it was definitely faster than their intermediate group. There were no supercars or full race cars, but a lot of carefully prepared dedicated track cars. My daily driver M3 was the exception..

It rained on off for the whole weekend which made for some challenging conditions. My Nitto-05 tires were on their last legs (this would have been the 10th track day on them) and with wear bars showing they did not like the rain at all.

Finally the track dried and I also got some helpful hints from a very experienced Corvette driver, which gave me my best time of 1:57 around that track. I felt traction control off was needed for that kind of time, but you need to balance your risk with all the concrete walls nearby...

On the second day I collected marbles on the tires which I did not get off the worn-out thread. It was one baked-together wobbly mess. This led to huge steering vibrations and altogether loss of traction, or so it seemed to me. It did not help my confidence that another driver had just stopped because of a vibration in the steering wheel and found that one of his wheel studs had given up!

Anyhow, amazing what a loss of confidence in your car can do, as my lap time dropped to 2:07 in perfect track conditions! So I called it a day a session early and packed up for the drive home to NYC.

Palmer remains my bete noir track, I've been there four times and had great laps there but also great gobs of frustration. To do well there you need to be on it 100% but also be really technically sound, otherwise you make a mess that is difficult to get out of. I find other tracks more forgiving, where you can sort of stick the car into a corner at speed and somehow make it work (Shenandoah was like that for me). Here, not so much..

Anyhow, shout out to everyone, those whose seasons are ending and those who just get started for the nice weather

[iBoosted]

Never ran with Chin, but I've spectated a few of their events at Road Atlanta. Their red group always brings out some fast drivers and rare/unique cars.

[Candide13]

Originally Posted by iBoosted

Never ran with Chin, but I've spectated a few of their events at Road Atlanta. Their red group always brings out some fast drivers and rare/unique cars.

Certainly does! Most common were carefully prepped Corvettes, but also a GT3 and a few race cars.

[Datka]

Chin is great. My fav. club right now.
Their intermediate solo is really the same as most other clubs advanced.
Their advanced is really for superfast cars(supercars and fully blown race cars driven by top notch drivers)