Friday, May 6, Autobahn Country Club Juliet, Juliet, IL

We arrived at 1:20 the night before and we each had several hours’ naps in the car on the way up from Alabama, so a 7 am wake up call was really okay.  The hotel was the worse of the trip and the breakfast buffet was as skimpy as I’ve ever seen.  But whatever, all we did is sleep and shower and check out and off to the track.  Well that was a challenge.  The information posted on the track’s website said don’t trust your GPS, use our directions.  The One Lap Route Book, which Brock provided us at registration and has been fantastic so far provided different directions than the track’s.  But both were not usable because, even though it was only 5 miles several bridges were washed out some time back and the detours were not well marked at all.  It looked like a Time Distance Road Rally because you could see one lappers everywhere going both directions.  Finally, we brought out the GPS and punched in a cross road near the track and shezzam, it found us and kept re-calculating each time we made a detour turn and pretty soon we had a following of one lappers and the track we found.  Speaking of the GPS, though for the last 2 days, the thing went into a funk near dusk both times.  It seems to have lost satellite reception for about ½ hour and then return to normal.  So were not sure how much longer it will last.  Anyway, the detour turned out to be good.  We hear 2 clucks from the front sway bar links.  We knew from snapping a link a Summit Point several weeks before the One Lap, that the clucking sound was something to notice and address.  Once there we jacked up the front end , removed both wheels and checked all 4 nuts.  And sure enough, we could get about a ½ turn on the driver’s end link attachment nut at the strut.

Autobahn is yet another beautiful facility.  For the most part, the terrain was flat and the surface was consistent, so the track was very easy to read.  In other words you could drive what you see.  Just keep your vision up and look as far forward as you could and it was pretty easy to drive harder and have confidence you were not going to get into trouble.  The other thing about this track is there was a lot of run off room.  One thing though, the pit-ins were not marked well at all.  We saw a Porsche blow pit in and make a U-turn at pit out.  That’s a 10 second penalty.  And that moved him to 37^th place for the event whereas he would have taken 4^th. 

Even so, you have one reconnaissance lap to run it at speed and then start your 3-lap race, it’s still difficult to run 10/10ths even if it your home track.  Greg ran the north course in the morning and felt he ran 9/10ths.  Dave ran the south course in the afternoon and felt he could only run about 7/10ths. 

They had opened up the South course after the afternoon sessions were completed for fun-runs.  Essentially it was open track.  But we were concerned that this bunch really does not know how to pass, so we abstained.  We made it this far and did not want to risk an incident.  So we once again loaded the car, but this time we only had a 110 mile transit to South Bend, so there was discussion and a consensus was reached to meet at The Pub in South Bend.  Everyone had the address loaded in their GPS’s and off we went, only to sit in Chicago rush hour traffic.  The transit time took about 2.5 hours, but we had plenty of time.