[HexAngel]

Well, it's official, we've reserved the track and paid (most of) the rental fee for the day of Tuesday, July 7th. We need to get people signed up and start collecting money so we can reimburse Arnon for putting up most of the money up front and pay the rest of the track rental fee. It's $2500 total and we're setting an arbitrary cutoff of 25 people, so we'll need $100 each.

This is a casual for-fun sports car drive around the new Pacific Grand Prix full-course circuit as seen in my videos posted earlier. That's right, we're driving our Elises and NSXes and Boxsters around a giant, freshly paved go-kart track. 2nd gear all the way around, and it's a total blast.

This is not a race or competition of any kind, and since it's a fairly tight track (built for motorcycles and go-karts) we will not allow any passing. We'll only run a few cars (3-5) at a time in groups of similar speed and space them out so there won't be any traffic jams. We expect over an hour of track time for each driver throughout the course of the day. We'll all take turns on flag and radio duty to keep things under control ... this is a grownups only thing, no hotdoggers or drifters please.

PM me ASAP to sign up and get payment details. Post questions and suggestions here.

 

[HexAngel]

Let's make this as easy as possible... Click on (link deleted -- we are full) to use Paypal, and include your preferred email address and full name (as it appears on your driver's license) in the optional note. I'll send back confirmation and instructions, and add you to the mailing list for further info/discussion (unless you tell me not to). I hope this works... I've never actually used Paypal to collect money before. Cash works as well of course, but we'll need it ahead of time so we can cover the rest of the track rental.

Feel free to share this around, as we only have about 15 people signed up as of yesterday. There will of course be some no-shows on the 7th so we'll keep a short waiting list as well.

 

[HexAngel]

It has come to my attention that Yahoo Mail is dumping all email from me into the "Spam" folder. So if you sent in payment with an @yahoo.com email address but didn't get a confirmation message, look in the Spam folder for anything with "PGP" or "HexAngel" in the sender or subject, and mark it as "Not Spam" which should correct the problem. I've complained to Yahoo administration but apparently they're helpless to correct the problem. I'm not on any anti-spam blacklists or anything, and no other email provider is doing this to me, just Yahoo. Grrr.

 

[HexAngel]

Here's the info sheet I'm sending out to everybody who signs up.

 

[HexAngel]

We went out for more testing today, and Arnon shot a couple of videos of the track from up on the hill: one quick panoramic survey of the track and one of us running four cars at once. We were a little nervous about how that would work out at first, but Paul (the track owner) reassured us that we could easily run a lot more than that. As it turned out there was plenty of room; we never came anywhere near each other in our 10 minute session, even with wildly different driving speeds and no particular attention to maintaining gaps. We were taking it easy but still having a ridiculous amount of fun. This is how we're going to run on Tuesday: 4 at a time, with one group of 5 to see how well that works.

Greg (the Porsche driver) suggested that people go to PGP this weekend to put in some track time on the rental karts ... it's a good way to get a feel for the track and learn which way all the turns go. The tightness of turn #4 in particular (at the end of the back straight) catches a lot of people by surprise the first time. I'll be there on Saturday myself for some karting.

I cobbled together a track map with turn numbers which might be worth a bit of study, so we have a common language to describe the track. If anybody has sufficient Photoshop-fu to make a better map, the originals I adapted mine from are here.

 

[HexAngel]

We have 25 people signed up (and a few more on standby). Thanks, everybody! See you at the track!

 

[HexAngel]

It was amazing. There are far too many people to thank for making it all work out so well, so I'll just thank everybody at once. Thank you! Everybody was incredibly cool and helpful, everybody had fun and nobody got hurt. I'll post some in-car videos as soon as I can get them edited. I didn't get any still photos but there were some very nice cameras there....

 

[abraham]

Some videos

Thanks to Chris and Arnon for organizing this wonderful event.

Please use the HQ version for full screen. No tripod, so it gets shaky from time to time.

Group 2? I do not keep track of these numbers.
http://www.youtube.com/v/cLxUecyms3M

This one I know, it is the Lotus group
http://www.youtube.com/v/2fFW-qKjJVg

 

[speedneed]

chase cam video from my car, about half of a run.
that was great day
thanks to everyone involved in organizing fun day. lots of seat time:clap:
peter


YouTube - chase cam from peter's lotus

 

[marvinalone]

That video is utterly fantastic! I'll have to remember that camera location. It actually looks like we're going somewhere!

I uploaded all the pictures that were on my camera to http://marvinalone.com/pgp-2009-07-07.zip. It's almost 800MB so it may take a while to download.

I'm working on getting the gallery back up after I crashed it by throwing too many pictures at it. Until then, there is only the zip file.

Update: Gallery works now. Check it out here.

 

[HexAngel]

Gallery works now. Check it out here.

Wow, you are some kind of picture-taking superhero, like Peter Parker. Nice work!

 

[marvinalone]

Wow, you are some kind of picture-taking superhero, like Peter Parker. Nice work!

I don't take any of the credit. Someone else (I forgot his name, sorry.) took all of these. I just gave him the camera. Thank you, anonymous photographer!

 

[HexAngel]

I don't take any of the credit. Someone else (I forgot his name, sorry.) took all of these. I just gave him the camera. Thank you, anonymous photographer!

Was it ... SPIDERMAN???

 

[HexAngel]

Here's the entire gallery in 1:20, about the time it takes to do one lap:
YouTube - Pacific Grand Prix Sports Car Day Slideshow
I'd set it to some techno music if I knew how to beat-sync it.

 

[HexAngel]

chase cam video from my car, about half of a run.

Same session as seen from my car:

YouTube - All-Lotus session at Pacific Grand Prix