Friday @ Petit LeMans

[FormerFF]

We'd had some showers Thursday morning, but today was blue skies with cool morning temperatures and a pleasant afternoon, with warm sun and a 10 -15 mph breeze. I arrived at the very end of the Mazda MX-5 Cup race. Bummer for me, it looked like a good one. I take my younger daughter to the bus stop in the morning, and I can't usually get to the track before 9. This is her last year of elementary school, and the middle school bus comes much later, so I'm relieved of that duty, and should be able to get to the first race of the day. Next up was the IMSA Lites, which Tristan Nunez dominated, and was interrupted by a couple of yellows. The ALMS practice was uneventful, with one short red flag. I did get to see the DeltaWing in action, as it came out for a few laps at a time. It turns better than I thought it would, but appears to be a bit slow on braking and turn entry, and gets strong acceleration on turn exit. It fit nicely in with the P2 cars, and I'll be interested to see how it works in traffic situations.

The Porsche GT3 Cup race was next, the only non-Mazda event of the day. It started out with a big crash on the start. One car in the midpack dropped to the inside of the track, and a second car apparently tried to do the same, they touched and spun, and collected a number of cars. If that first driver had held position, I don't think the incident would have happened, because it appeared to me that the second car assumed the space he vacated was empty, and never saw the first car. Once things got cleaned up, Sean Johnston pretty much had the field in hand and was never challenged, both under green and after a restart.

I dropped by the Vendor Village area during the lunch break. I'll have to say I've never seen it more active. Chyevy, SRT, Nissan, BMW, and Mazda were all represented, along with many smaller vendors, and at least two tire companies. Mazda was giving away lanyards, and I saw a few thousand of them. Also "zoom-zoom", when read upside down, is "wooz-wooz".

After lunch was ALMS qualifying, which also went uneventfully. Final race of the day was the Star Mazda series. It was a nice clean race, Gabby Chaves led flag to flag, but was never more than one second ahead of Sage Karam until turn 7 of the last lap, where Karam spun trying to get close enough to get a draft down the straight.

The crowd looked similar to last year's. Since the now defunct Lanier Speedway chose not to rent their parking lot to Road Atlanta, RA has put more effort into getting cars parked in the infield, and has a more spaces available. At $50, I declined, since I'm not going to park in the infield on Saturday, so we'll see how things work out tomorrow.

[dataman1]

I've been to Petite now 5 years in a row. I think the race day crowd was as big if not bigger than ever. The front straight and pits were full of fans during the pre-race and pictures of the spectators during the race seemed large as well. Maybe we don't need Audi & Peugot??

[FormerFF]

The crowd looked a little bigger than last year's, so apparently we don't need the factory cars. We will, however , need something faster than the Daytona prototype class.