Why Rain Made For A Good First Track Day
As a novice you have to book a HPDE weekend well in advance to secure a spot with an instructor. COVID only complicated this as many of the car club events had restrictions from BMW or Porsche that didn’t allow for in-car instructors so they just wouldn’t have a novice group at all. This was very frustrating for someone who just bought an M2 to take to head to the track for the first time.
The first weekend at a track close to me was with Just Track It at Atlanta Motorsports Park (AMP). As the weekend got closer it was apparent that we would have storms on Saturday. As you can imagine, I was already nervous about my first ever track day and pushing a new to me car to its limits. Then you throw pouring down rain on top of it and my heart was racing way before I got in the car or on the track!
AMP is a very technical track with a lot of blind and off-camber corners along with steep elevation changes. The final turn at 16 onto the main straight is deceptively hard to get just right and was the topic of many emails, drivers meetings and novice classrooms prior to our first session. My instructor reached out prior as well and started to put my mind at ease by planting the seed in my head that rain provided a good learning opportunity.
The rain was more like a down pour as we lined up for our first session and I was anticipating sliding all over the track. That didn’t happen! The first two laps of the day are always under caution so you can warm up your car, tires and mind. I was surprised how well the car did in the wet. The focus was on learning the track more than driving fast and rain meant that no one was pushing very hard behind you.
Being smooth with your inputs is important on any track, but in the rain mistakes with turning angle, throttle input or brake force are amplified. So the heavy rainfall forced me to pay close attention to the little details that the boy racer in me would have ignored and just put my foot in the floor to go fast in dry conditions.
The rain let up after lunch and our last two sessions provided us with a drying track. It was like the rain acted as a governor and each session we got to go a little fast and push the car a bit more. This incremental increase in performance allowed you to really start to nail the tough sections of the track and set us up for some great runs on Sunday.
