Right. So he was going 200 MPH 3 seconds into the video and the hand of god pushed down on the wing and pulled him towards the heavens, right through the thick density altitude. It would have been a lot easier (and safer and faster) to mod a Tesla to 3000 HP instead of that Camry.
I suppose there are two categories of HDPE. There are non profit events run as schools. And there’s for profit track rental time companies. The statistics on accidents are 10x lower at the school, simply from having a second person in the car making sure you don’t amplify a mistake lap after lap until you crash. I notice more people who self select into the track rental time events are there just to unload horsepower, like dudes showing up in F430 convertibles that really can’t drive but exhibit the most aggressive behavior on the course.
You are ridiculous…
First off the damn wing had nothing to do with it. The front end lifted and once air gets underneath a car like that at speed it’s over. The problem is he should have had wheelie bars like every other top fuel dragster.
Do they have Solo 1 events in the US? Time based runs where you’re the only one on the track at any given time.
Where are these statistics you speak of? I have heard bad things about NASA lead HPDE’s, or track day events, but that is the only one. Club events don’t require instructors in the advanced class, or you can quickly be signed off in intermediate if that’s what you want and the instructor feels comfortable with it.
I’ve never seen it. Let’s say they gave each person 10 minutes to get 5 laps in. You’d only have a throughput of 40 cars for a given day. That would cost a little over $1000 per person per day to rent the track and safety equipment/crew/ambulance/insurance/corner workers. Most people are happy to just share the track and get hours of track time in, for a much lower fee.
If there’s 150 people at a normal event, maybe 10 of them are even in a position to put down a personal record on a given day. It has to do with the car, confidence, distractions, knowledge of that particular course, etc. If you live outside of California I suppose track conditions (weather) are the main thing that prevents you from setting a PR.
Believe it or not, people don’t like admitting they wrecked on a track. Since gasoline cars don’t seem to be able to connect to the Internet, there’s no global statistics log from an open data API which we can poll for accident data geofenced around popular road courses. You can however look at the insurance rates for open track HPDE versus instructor led HPDE. The actuaries think there is a difference.
I’ve observed a difference in the accident rate, but I’m not a credible witness to my own life as people on this board will point out.
I’m pretty sure there are timed events, though this is just what I’ve read online: http://www.scca.com/clubracing/content.cfm?cid=44465
And about the statistics, I figured if you used statistics as the basis for an argument, you’d know of some actual statistics rather than something you made up on the spot. To test your theory that insurance prices are different, I just grabbed quote from lockton between AudiClub, 3 Balls and VRPerformance HPDE’s at grattan. The only difference between them was a 10% off coupon for the Audi club, by virtue of affiliation. So the actuaries think there is a 10% difference according to your logic. Assuming that has nothing to do with marketing to car clubs with members driving expensive cars in a relatively conservative manner…
I can’t see the point without a timed event. I kind of thought that’s what you guys were doing out there. I figured each ‘day’ would conclude with proper timed laps.
From my experience, most guys in the top classes are running decent telemetry equipment and recording their times. Maybe sometimes it’s a question like “what is the correct line through turn 6”, and they’ll try different lines and compare data amongst their own runs or other similar cars/drivers. But it’s not a competition, there is no one else recording times (like an autocross), and usually your lap time will get “affected” by some car in your way or you have to slow down to let someone pass.
There are cars that are really quick in one section, but slow in the others (miata is probably the best example). This can cause traffic jams and unhappy people. Most people there are very cool, pretty competitive, but still there to have a good time and be courteous. There can be a small douchebag minority there to prove something. Usually the instructors intervene in that case.
I think the ultimate point is to drive your car harder and faster than you ever could on public roads. People thinking they are getting recruited to F1 won’t like the HPDE format. They also have a classroom section, the quality being highly dependent on the person leading it (like any class). If westwest was leading the class I would laugh and leave immediately 
How can you be competitive and compete when there is nothing to measure and people hold their own stop watch?
I think it would be fun to do…once
It makes no sense to invest $10k money in a track setup that I’ll also DD…only to go to an event where I can’t win or brag about my times.
I get that it’s a hobby, but some guys speak about it like they are race car drivers and part of some elite group…that is comical.
yes it is
Thinking too small again, drob. The insurance a group requires to rent a venue. Not whatever piddly policy you need to insure the paint on an A4.
You took my use of ‘statistics’ too literally. Statistically, it is more dangerous to be a meth cook if you smoke cigarettes because they make the lab go boom. You don’t need a corpus of data to prove that. Even a fool can consider sensible risk management techniques for something harmful and apply them, without statistical proof of their efficacy. I’m sad that this is lost on you.
The most fun I’ve had is when you can find a relative equal. You can go full out and see how close you can stay. When you come up on traffic, that’s fine, wait it out and then start going at each other again.
Every car is different so how could you otherwise compare? I think this is why spec racing exists. That’s where you go if you truly want to play race car driver. Something like spec miata or e30 where the costs are relatively tractable. Chump cars/lemons is the other avenue. I guess solo time trials could also work. I think Boro laid out the various factions early on in this thread.
The other side is you’re pushing your car far harder than you can in public. I get that you can go flat out going forward, but lateral forces is where the real fun is. Anyone who even approaches limit driving on public roads is crazy, maybe in a miata, but in these cars that’s a death wish given the performance envelope. A road course is really wide and generally smooth pavement with plenty of run off. You know the exact geometry of each turn after you’ve been there a few times, the only thing to really monitor is tires and brakes.
But like any hobby, it’s hard to pass judgment until you try it, and at least give it a fair shake. Most people don’t because they just don’t want to subject their cars to it. I get that. The one counterpoint is these cars are fast as hell and easy to drive at the limit, so in my mind, it almost feels like wasted potential to not track a car at least once.
Honestly, I’d rather have a more underpowered cheaper AWD DD that gets good gas mileage. Driving my B8 in traffic is kind of worthless, maybe a grin for the one or two on-ramps, otherwise it’s just sitting behind some Prius. Then get a second weekend/track car that isn’t necessarily comfortable, but is really fun, with a stick. So my choice of dual use is kind of flawed, but you live and you learn I guess. At this point I would be fool to trade in my car. So I’ll continue with my setup until the B8 gets long in the tooth.
It’s more that you’re well versed in the argument of “smoke and mirrors”. But anyways, now you’re just trolling me.
The people who “brag about their times” or even talk about their times have not been even middle of the pack in terms of how fast they are, in my experience. They start myopically focusing on corner entry MPH and end up being slower overall, unable to take new instruction as they apply perfection to a suboptimal line. I only really started looking at times in my 8th year of doing this.
I think it’s bizarre that you guys let the density altitude ruin a good Saturday. It matters that you had fun, you learned something, and you didn’t wreck your car. The time is always “slower than someone else who is better”.
Indeed, it is fun to go to a mostly German car event run by Audi or BMW because the average speed and line is similar.
There’s a lot of ways to look at what it means to track an M3/S4 category of car. You can look at it as 5x more expensive than a Miata, or 1/2 the price of tracking a Porsche 911. I like that the German cars have wide and deep tuner markets, lots of wheel and brake fitments, etc. so you’re not going alone and trying to figure out how to make it track reliable. When you get to the super high end like Ferrari or McLaren, your only option is factory stuff and it’s stratospherically expensive.
if I wasn’t so tired, I’d post the 10x or so that you’ve bragged about your lap times at various courses. And that’s just in the past 2 months.
I don’t lead with it and I don’t even check until the weekend is over. But I try to be transparent about where I am in my skill development and car development, when I post about it. Most of my lap time gains YoY are from suspension, tires and brakes. It makes me feel comfortable pushing the car further, though I’m nowhere near the limit.
hypocrite lol