Saturday started off wet but the rain started slowing around 9-10am, just in time for qualifying. The car was ready to test on Friday but straight up gross, wet, and cold conditions, we made the team decision we’d wait until Saturday where there was a window of potential dry weather.
Jordan got to work on the car and after completing a full inspection, we were in decent shape! There were a couple of suspension bits to monitor, some to proactively replace but aside from that, it was just work to get the car personalized to Ann’s preferences and get the car out on the track so we could know more confidently, what we had on our hands.
Look at the butt on that! Yeah – it must work out. Any specific result was not a consideration at all for the weekend. With her car being new to the team and her and limited information of the running state, we set low expectations for the weekend: get the car on track, have it circulate consistently and have Ann start to build confidence in the car. So she spent the off-season looking for options and just in time for the NOLA race, we took delivery of her new steed on the Wednesday before the race weekend. At the end of the 2023 season, with the repairs needed on the car from a failed tire during the runoffs, Ann made the decision to move on from the Cayman and jump into a GT3 Cup Car. If you’d like a more detailed walkthrough of the track, check out this video that came in super handy from ASM and Tom O’Gorman.Ĭredit: ASM + TOMO Coaching Ann’s new baby shark! 991.2 Porsche GT3 Cup CarĪs some of you may have read in past posts, Ann has been developing at a rapid pace the past couple of years and driven the wheels off a Porsche Cayman GT4 Clubsport, mostly in SCCA GT2 and T1 classes. The esses complex is relatively straight forward but carrying speed into Turn 9 (the first ess) is critical and sets up the rhythm through the rest of the complex.įinally, the left side tires only get a mini-break before needing to turn hard at Turn 13 and then suffer through a long duration compound section of Turns 13-14, which leads onto the main straightaway. Turns 5, 6 and 7 are higher speed corners where you are trying really hard to not over-slow for turns 5 and 6 but as you try to carry the speed into those corners, the left rear tire is taking a beating from the slight high-speed yaw action when trying to rotate the car and then accelerating through the corner. From Turn 4, you are only making right hand turns until Turn 10! Turn 4 is a slower speed corner which requires a good amount of mechanical grip.
NOLA has 16 corners with 10-11 of them (depending on how you count the corners) are right hand corners and there are two sections of the track where you have consecutive right hand-corners, which makes those left-side tires important. Why do we even leave the PNW to go racing? Thoughts on NOLAįlat, minor (but critical) banking in some corners, no point-n-shoot corners and not a lot of time above 120mph meant that balancing the car in the cornering bits was going to be a premium. But once the test day came, the cold air from up north and a weather system from down south decided to join the party and aside from Sunday, we had low 40F temps, rain, and wind. Relatively flat, built on a swamp and host of SRO GT Americas race events the past few years, NOLA ended up being a decently technical track and the Louisiana weather initially welcomed us with 70F, sunny and with a breeze weather. The second stop in the 2024 SCCA Hoosier Super Tour schedule for the team was NOLA Motorsports Park – a new track for all the drivers and most of the team.