We Have Track Time
January 26th, 2009
The good people at Motorsport Ranch–just up the street from Jesse’s place–have agreed to give us track time and driving instruction gratis.
The details: 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 15th.
We’ll need to bring the MR2 and another car with a stick shift to take out on the track. Why two cars? We’ll need two vehicles to accommodate all of the drivers.
Side note: Jack Pharr, the guy who runs Motorsports Ranch, will be one of our instructors. And he just might be competing against us in Houston. Intrigue!
This also means we really have to get cracking on the car.
Brad, that’s super news. My only concerns are if that will be enough time (from 3:30 to dark) for us to shake down the car, and where in the world are we going to get another car with a manual transmission to use that day?
I really like the free part, but we could spend all day on the track for $150 with the help of my friend-of-a-friend. That wouldn’t include the instruction, however.
I am, however, confident that we will have the car ready to roll by then.
Maybe the late time is Pharr’s secret plan to bring us down! We could always spring for the $150 to get more time later.
Is the BMW a standard?
Neither of my road-going vehicles is a standard. All of the MR2’s are, but as you know, 2 of those are non-running and I don’t see that changing between now and the track day, if ever.
I’m not sure that we could/should plan on getting more time later. The main reason for trying to get things hooked up that second weekend in February was so we could shake down the car with a full 2 weeks left to fix anything. If we were to run the car again the following weekend, we’d be pretty boxed in should something break/fail.
Both of my cars are automatics too. How about the Anderson clans?
All trucks and all automatics at Casa Anderson.
I chose to write Anderson “clans” in the hope that widening the circle to the Jesses and Graysons of the world would turn up a stick shift. Can it be?
As hard as it is to believe, I don’t think any of the vehicles owned by the Andersons are manual. One of the Stude’s might be, but don’t think any are in a driveable enough condition. I like the idea of free track time. It’s tight but it seems like 2.5 hours would be enough to test out the car. I was considering renting a standard trans car to practice on (assuming I can find one to rent…). This might be an option for 2nd car, but we would have to drive it carefully and I would need assurances it would not get crashed.
Dave, I’m not sure that it’s possible anymore to find a manual car to rent. Unless you rented something kind of exotic. Even the Corvettes and Mustangs that you can rent from the mainstream rental agencies are automatics, but the price on renting one of those is higher than the $150 that we’d pay for an entire day of track time in the MR-2.
If you wanted to rent a car for this, the best bet is either a Viper with a manual that can be had for something like $420 for the weekend or a Hertz Corvette that has an automatic but which you can put into manual-shift-only mode (it is really a lot of fun in that mode, but it uses paddle-shifters) for something like $200/day. But driving a Vette around that track, while fun, wouldn’t really be great training for driving our MR-2 in competition situations.
What would be ideal would be another car like the MR-2. Something like a Miata would be fine and those are plentiful, but I don’t know anyone around here with one that we could borrow.
Brad, you might want to try to contact some of the folks listed on the Motorsport Ranch website about MSR race car rentals?
there is a place…i think it is that place you mentioned…right outside the gates to MSR ranch that has a bunch of miatas parked out front that look like they could be rented.
That place right outside the track with the Miatas parked in front of it is Performance SpeedTech. Might be worth checking with them too. Illustrious possible 5th-driver Sam has a connection in Dallas that might work out too, I think that she’s checking on it.