Just got back from a weekend at Mid-Ohio with MVP. Awesome track (my first time there), awesome group, but man was there a lot of drama.
I left for the track from Chicago (it's about 5.5 hours away) after work on Friday. Goal was to get there around 11 that night, and the airbnb was right next to the track so plenty of time to make it to Mark's hard cutoff driver meeting at 715 the next day.
About an hour into the drive, my buddy (who was towing his 911 turbo s) calls and says his friend, who was also driving the tow rig had a medical emergency and they had to go to the hospital. They ended up bailing on the weekend (though the friend turned out fine in the end)
An hour after that, I can feel and hear the trailer rattling. A lot. I pull over, several times, trying to figure out what's going on. Try bungy-ing down various bits that I think could be rattling, no dice. Check the tire pressure of the tires. All good -- around 60psi. Then about 90 miles from the track, at around 1130 at night, I hear a pop from the back, and start seeing sparks from under the trailer. I pull off to the shoulder to find this lovely view
I proceed to call uhaul for assistance, which all things considered they do provide in a timely fashion, it takes about an hour and a half. This is basically the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, so that kind of response time is actually not terrible. By the time all is said and done, I get to sleep at 2AM, needing to be up in 4 hours. But we make it.
Half-way through the day, guys rolls past the trailer and yells out "hey your trailer tire is flat". Yeah. Second tire went flat. Guy comes out, says the belts inside exploded and poked through the rubber. At least this one they did while I was on track.
Speaking of track -- Mid Ohio is a lot of fun. I ran it a few times on the sim at home just to get my bearings, but of course the real thing is so much more. By the end of the first day I was moving relatively quickly and had a pretty good idea of the line.
However, after the first session of the second day, I went to bleed my brakes and spotted something not so fun.
Huge downer, especially since I felt really good after a full night's sleep and having internalized the previous day. Not a whole lot you can do at that point, so I loaded up the trailer, and started saying my goodbyes around me. Then one of the guys I was chatting with asks why I was packing up, and when I showed him the tire goes "you can run my spare set if you want"
I knew track rats were awesome, but this was next level. I ended up running two more sessions on his Proxes RR and setting a PR on them (despite them being his "crappy" tires).
At the end of the day, I walked away with a PR of 1:40.6, which given my first timer status, and the fact that the Kumhos are slow, I'm pretty happy with. There was a surprisingly deep field of E90s there which was cool, including a couple of fully prepped ones. One of them running on slicks, with the owner saying he'd been going to this track for 18 years was running 1:36s, so I feel like that's a solid start.
Aaand that's a wrap for the E90's season, and maybe a little longer. After a full season (~15 days) of having to go to the uhaul the night before, drive it home, load up the car, and then afterwards drive home, drop the car off, drive the trailer to the uhaul and finally drive back home, I've decided to park the E90 and got a dual duty car.
The new kid is here, it already stole the Forgelines from the E90 (which is why it was on Kumhos that I had forgotten the number of days on and got in trouble in the first place), and has gone to the track once. I hope to get a few more days in this season with the GTS to get my bearings. In the meantime, the E90 is for sale (but I won't be sad if it doesn't sell).