Summit Point May 2002

We had a great time at Summit Point! Great weather, great people, and the car ran great.

It was a long haul from New Hampshire, with freakish weather: it was snowing all the way from my house to Worcester! But by the time we got to West Virginia, the sun was shining brightly, and it stayed shining till we got home.

On the way down stopped at the kit car show at Carlisle, PA, where we saw a lot of friends and many interesting and beautiful cars, including Gary Cheney's gorgeous new FFR Daytona Coupe.

At right is a photo of me in the Carousel at Summit Point, taken by Dave Newman. Nate bought this photo for me as a present. Thank you, Nate!

Summit Point is a terrific track! This was Nate's first time here, and my first time in over 15 years. Despite my previous experience, Nate blew me off - and the Corvettes blew us both off.

There were four C4 'Vettes there, each with over 360 hp. Summit Point has two long straights - one of them is 3000 feet long - and our excellent handling just could not make up for the several seconds they were pulling out on the straights. In my last report, I mentioned that our Cobra's handling would not be able to offset our power disadvantage on tracks with long straights, but I had no idea how brutal the actual experience would be.

At one point, I went into Turn One with one of the Corvettes right on my tail. I figured I'd let him by on the short straight between the exit of that turn and Turn 3, a fast sweeper. But when I looked in my mirror exiting Turn One (a long, fairly fast hairpin), he had lost so much ground that he was way too far behind to pass!

The Corvette caught me on the short straight, but there was no place to let him by after that until the final, fairly long straight. I looked in my mirror coming onto that straight, and the Vette was so far behind I could hardly see it! By the end of that straight, he was right on my tail again.

I waved him by as we went onto the main straight, and by the time we reached the pit exit, he was roaring by. By the time I reached the end of the straight, he was a speck in the distance.

Nate was faster than me all weekend. The tables were turned from our usual form. We both had a video of Summit Point, and both of us spent a lot of time watching it before we went, to familiarize ourselves with the track.

It worked better for Nate than for me. Right away he was quick. On the morning of the first day, we decided to run our street tires while we were learning the track. After one session each, we both agreed that the street tires were a waste of time. We were way slower than the other cars, and the car just didn't behave the way it does on race tires. We decided to change to the race tires during the lunch break.

In my last session before lunch, still on the street tires, I started pushing harder. In fact, I caught and passed Bruce Allen, who was testing Gary Cheney's spanking new FFR Spec Racer. I got so excited - this is probably the only time in my life I'll ever pass Bruce Allen - that I immediately spun in Turn 3, a really scary 90 mph corner. I was really lucky to miss the tire wall by about 5 feet.

I spun again a couple laps later in a slower corner, went through the grass and a huge puddle, and covered the car and myself in mud. What a bummer!

The car was a lot better after we put the race tires on it, but I never caught up with Nate. It was my first weekend as an instructor, and I was in and out of cars all day. By the end of the day I had driven four cars and ridden in a fifth, and I had been driving or riding (with students) for nearly two thirds of the total time the track was live that day. I was bushed!

Apparently fatigue plus the knock my confidence took from the spins really affected me. The next day Nate was consistently two seconds faster than me, and I was feeling really down. Nate extremely generously offered to let me ride with him in his last practice session. I was shocked! He was really driving aggressively! He was braking later and harder than me, using more of the track in the corners, and driving the car closer to its limits everywhere.

This was enormously helpful. With my courage stiffened by seeing what the car could do here, I was able to take more than a second off my time in the last session, getting to within 8 tenths of Nate's best. But we just didn't have the horsepower to compete with the Corvettes on the straights.

The fastest 'Vette, with a 396 motor, did a 1:22.9 to win our class. All the other 'Vettes, which had 350 cu. in. engines, were within one and a half seconds of the winner. Jeff Iafrati's 3rd generation Mazda RX-7 was next. At Lime Rock, Jeff is lightning quick, but here at Summit Point he was 5 seconds off the pace!

Nate was next, just a second and a half behind the much more powerful RX-7. He beat me by 4 tenths! Even one of my students, Jeff Ruck, beat me! Drat! That's the last time I teach you anything, you bum!

Just kidding, Jeff. Besides, Jeff has 600 hp in his Mustang, so I can't feel too bad about getting beat.

My only consolation was that I outran a 500+ hp supercharged FFR Cobra by over six seconds - but I am probably not going to get to do that any more, because the next day, the owner called up Doug Arnao and hired him to do the same tweaks to his suspension that Doug had us do to ours!

We had a beautiful ride home, and we stopped at Rausch Creek in Pennsylvania to look at the track. We walked the entire way around, snapping photos along the way. Although chicanes have compromised some of the fast turns in the original design, it still looks to be fast and challenging, with nice flowing corners and very dramatic elevation changes.

Its construction was well under way when it was stopped by the EPA a year ago. If it's ever completed, it will be awesome!