We had another Open Road Race over the weekend (www.openroadracing.com) called the Gambler’s Run. This one is in Elko, Nevada. We did this one last year too. The course is two legs of about 50 miles each for a total of around 100 miles.

It was a fairly uneventful weekend because there were no bugs, no rain, no crashes, and no fires. Thank god. The only thing weird was a four mile section of the course that was restricted to one lane due to road construction. We were still able to maintain 110 mph through this section though.

Like the last race in June, we entered the 120 mph class. There were three other cars in our class. At the end of the first leg, we were 1.3 seconds fast across the line. We screwed up a bit on the second leg and came across about 3 seconds slow which gave us a combined time of about 1.5 seconds slow. Not good enough to place this year since the other three cars were all under one second. Oh well, we learned a few more tricks for next year though.

Team Porsche is back on top though, who dethroned the Corvette team. There was a great Porsche turnout for this race. The only bad news for the weekend is that the air ambulance helicopter crashed the night before the race, killing all three crew members and a mother and infant on board. This was very sad news indeed.

The car was flawless except for my exhaust tearing apart about two hours from home. The stability of the car was unbelievable. I have a new favorite high speed tire which is the Pirelli P Zero Assimetrico. It feels better than any tire I’ve tried about 120 mph. We also got a new top speed of 167 on the speedo which was 163 on the GPS. The car was still pulling strong but I was limited by the road. The only other bad news was one speeding ticket which I got about 30 seconds after getting on the road on the return journey to home. It was on the 80 interstate in Nevada and the cop wrote it up for a 75 in a 65. He clocked me at 85. It seems silly to get a speeding ticket for 85 after driving so fast all weekend, but that’s the way it goes. The rest of the ride home was on our obscure back route and we were able to maintain 100-120mph for many hours without incident.

We need to get some more Porsches out there for these events. I can tell you that they are very fun and the people are extremely nice.

 

Way to go... damn, I would have thought 1.5 sec to be good enough... how DO you time a highspeed run such that you are within a second of exact time? What are the tricks of trade?

 

You can use mile markers and a stop watch very accurately. However, some of the mile markers are as much as 100 feet off so now we use GPS mileage and stopwatches. I have a wicked spreadsheet that I made with every turn and timing at every location. My navigator announces every turn and makes time checks every mile.

Some people just use the average speed on their GPS but if you want to get under one second, stopwatches are the way to go. It's pretty fun no matter what. Some people just go out to run fast. The people and cars are very cool.

 

This just in. They scored us incorrectly at the race. They recalculated and we actually took second place! We were +2.208 seconds from our target.

Go Porsche!