A very good friend of mine, Bruce LeDoux (and founder of the "Spyder Club" website) invited me to join one of his "Sixth Gear track Days" at Thompson Speedway in Northeast Connecticut. How can you turn down a free Track Day?????
So I tossed my GPS into Pearl and headed on down there this morning - a PERFECT late summer day, BTW - to see what was going on. Getting there was almost as much fun as going to Lime Rock a week ago, just a shorter ride for me (37 minutes versus 2:45 to Lime Rock).
This track had a road course when I was a kid, but it was already way past it's prime and had been relegated to Go-Karts by the mid-1960's. I was in the "Modified" kart class back then - dual, "power products" 30 hp motors both chained to a live rear axle (no gearbox) on a kart that could hit a little over 90 mph on the top end, while my older brother was in "Super Modified", running a 250cc Triumph motorcycle engine and a 5-speed gearbox. Bear in mind that there were no roll cages or bodies on these karts. Eventually, karting seriously lost favor in New England due to more then a few deaths on the tracks.
Anyway, Thompson has rebuilt their road course into a very nice, 1.4 mile road course with absolutely new pavement. It was a joy to ride around there, even if I opted not to do much driving. OK, so I did a couple of laps around the paddock garage area in Bruce's Ferrari Scaglia-something--or-other, like this:
Fun, but not exactly out on the track. For THAT, I opted for his Lotus. Not the most powerful car on the track (but close, in power-to-weight ratio) but by far one of the better handling cars:
This car is an absolute joy to drive, especially if you know what you're doing, which I definitely don't, but here is a bit of how it sounds:
and another, over on the back side of the track. It has this delightful snarl, especially with the driver's foot well into it:
He was more than keeping up with that Porsche GT3, losing ground on the front straight, but then clawing right back up his tailpipes on the back curves.
There were a lot of big bucks cars in the paddock, all there for the track time:
BTW: this Ferrari 308 has that delightful V-8 amidships, running 4 Big-ass Webers on it. I wonder how hard it is to keep them all synched!!
Anyway, great day, terrific weather, some decent track time in the Lotus and a lap around the building in a Ferrari. Not too shabby a day!!
