My day at Hallett HST

[Ian_BMC]

It was a dark and stormy.... Morning actually, when we left Wichita Kansas on our trek to Hallett Motor Sports Park in oklahoma.

It was an awesome day. Ever since Lisa had announced the plans to do road racing at our BMCN event last year I had been going nuts! I modified my suspension, brakes, and even did some power mods to back it all up! I was crushed when the event was cancelled because I figured that was my last chance to road race for a while. But then I got some friends who told me about Hallett's High Speed Touring events where you take a driver's education class and can have personal instruction with any of their professionals on site, Driving YOUR car.
So I went for it
I learned so much about all the technical sides of racing and just driving in general! It even rained while we were there so I got some excellent wet-track experience!

For our first session I had the instructor with me and while he was a man of few words, he did say that I was probably one of the smoothest drivers on the group that day He ALSO mentioned that my car was very well balanced "for a mustang" meaning that BMCP had done me good and he was generally impressed with the car's performance

Second session was in the wet and I was on my own. I took it super slow and even then managed to get really sideways coming out of the last corner :eeknew:

For the third session, the track had dried up completely and the sun was out so everything was warm and grippy so I got aggressive! Brake fade was completely non-existant throughout the day and even after pushing it a few times, I am sure I have MUCH more braking power than I was allowing myself to use. Grip was fantastic! My sumitomos, as cheap as they were, held me down nice and sticky while the Ford Racing suspension did its job. Also big thanks to the Maximum Motorsports caster/camber plates. I had a local shop give me a nice aggressive negative camber before I went and it was totally worth it!!

Towards the end of the third session my power steering fluid was hot hot hot so it felt like i was driving a blob of jello by the start of the fourth session. I took it easy and practiced my line. However I couldn't resist the temptation when my friend Andy came up behind me in his RSX TypeS. I decided if he wanted to pass me he'd have to work for it Thanks to the SCT tuner, I really out gunned him on the first straightway then he VTEC'd coming out of the first corner and passed me on the second straight hahaha. They're not kidding when they say "VTEC KICKED IN YO" :eeknew:

After the fourth session I called it quits. There was one more session left but I still had to drive 5 hours home! It was alot of fun and I would like to do it again later this year

Here are the pics I got from their on-site photographer!















We had fun with the tape