05.03.2011 A Tasmanian Track day.So a friend invited me to a track day in Tasmania that RS Liberty club was having. When else is this opportunity going to arise to race in Tasmania right? Might as well go! (Seriously that was my thought process haha). Later I found out it was the same weekend as the AROCA driver training day at Winton. So upset I missed out on that, but I'll attend the August one for sure!
So all on my lonesome, I boarded the boat on Thursday night and arrived on Friday morning to meet up with the rest of the Liberty club guys.
Google maps had a different idea and took me on a crazy detour into some twisty roads. It felt like I was going the wrong way, but the roads were so nice and deserted I was enjoying the drive and kept going. I'd been driving for about an hour when I suspected that I was at the top of a mountain. The "dust" in the air was actually SNOW!! Holy crap!! (I've never seen snow before.)
I regret not taking more photos, but at the time I was pretty scared as I had no idea where I was, stopping to take photos wasn't high on the priority list!
The road started to descend and soon turned to gravel. I stopped an elderly couple in their jacked up 4x4 and they said there was no way I'd make it in the mx5. I had to go back the way I came.
I returned back to the last main town I had passed where the infomation centre woman said that google maps often took people that way as it was the shortest route but it can only be done by 4x4 because it's a gravel road!
About 2.5 hours later I caught up with the liberty guys who had pulled over as one of them had caught on fire!
Baskerville Track. Early Saturday morning, we made our way down to Baskerville track which is about 20 mins from Hobart.
Some one thought it'd be a funny joke to make the 1km leading up to the track out of bumpy gravel road. After a 5km per hour crawl. I made it to the track.
Unfortunately, for me, the surface of this track is BAD! It's patchy as all hell and feels like a closed street circuit rather than a race track. The liberty guys that sat with me noted that my car was really suffering from the uneven track more than they were. They could barely fell the bumps in their cars! Boo.
The day was run really well by the MG car club who also provided a bacon and eggs breakfast bbq and hamburgers and donuts for lunch. During the drivers briefing the MG guy told us to be careful of turn 3 and the end of the straight which had some of the really bad bumps in the track. He also told us one of the cars the weekend before had flipped onto it's roof after coming off the side of the ripple strip as it's 'quite a big drop.' Hrmmm.
The layout of the track on the other hand is AWESOME fun! Theres some nice corners, elevation and two straights. The mx5 made it up to 160km at the end of the straight. The Subaru's were hitting 190km +.
After doing some practice laps of the track I came back into the pits and my car dropped idle and stalled. With some help from the Subaru guys, we figure out it's the AFM clip which keeps falling out as it doesn't quite click in properly. Race tape fix FTW.
The last half of the day involved sprints from a standing grid start. The mx5 was grouped with 3 other Liberty RS's. Nothing more depressing then trying to out launch 3 AWD turbo cars. They were gone in an instant haha.
My lap times for the day were actually quite bad, managing a best time of 1:12 which was the slowest on the day. The fastest person in an STI did a 1:05.
But I'm not terribly fussed with the lap times as I had a blast, added another track to the list, drove through snow and met some cool people. Most importantly, the mx5 survived 900kms of abuse and delivered me back home, like a boss. :heart:
