Cool weather this weekend, should be fast, the track is 10 feet above sea level....... Saturday looks like a rainout, Friday and Sunday look perfect for fast times.Cool! Should bring fast times. This is a great track.
Our experience at the Houston divisional was that the new pavement was not smooth. In fact one night they had a crew of 10 or so guys out there working to try a diminish a huge "ramp" out of the left lane at about 900 feet (they worked on it until 10:30pm). I wish I could show a pic of my wife's Racepak laser ride height sensor comparing Ennis to Houston (our last two divisionals) .... the two tracks are not comparable. Ground concrete is just dang smooth and tends to stay that way!
It may be that the nitro cars have so much downforce that they don't care, but I'm interested to see if any grinding work was done to the track after the divisional and to see how the pro cars take to the new surface. It clearly takes a fair amount of skill to put pavement down smooth enough for a 200 or 300 mph car to see it as smooth, and most of the time it seems they have to come back and grind it to get the thing really good.
Our class is not invited this year, so I will just be a pro mod & pro stock spectator.
Temp is around 70 right now & am waiting for round 2 Q.
Cliff, a lot of people don't understand one of the most common ways tires blister. Down track the wing makes the tire D shaped (with the flat part of the D being on the track), the tracks are very sticky nowadays so when the tire gets ripped off the track after being pressed down so hard for "so long" (because of the wing angle making the flat part of the D longer) is exposes places within the tire where the tire body is not as well attached (glued) to the exterior of the tire, so they separate. The wing also helps to increase the severity of the angle that the tire gets ripped up at, putting more pressure on the tire interior to exterior attachment.Jeff, thanks for the info. I thought Houston surface would be better, but I guess not. Hope they could laser grind it to smooth it out. It's really interesting to me that your tires blister if you have the wing set to give more down force. I thought that happened in T/F and T/AD, but not T/D. But, you are running low 6's, and that is quick. Just asking, but would you do better without a rigid chassis? I've seen some T/D with a flex frame that you can see the rear of the chassis go "up" as the car launches. I think Chuck Phelps has a 6.20 car & it has that chassis. Love the T/D cars!