Star Road

As I recently posted, I finally drove Laguna Seca at speed in my own car. With four classes each doing five sessions over the course of a full day, there is a lot of down time at the track. So of course I brought my camera–and monopod this time!–and spent my free time capping snaps.

No sooner had I reversed my car in the paddock than Chris had delivered a jack and tools. Before I had even eaten my morning banana I was pulling everything out of my car and swapping my track wheels and tires.

Ah yes, my track tires. This is how I started the day. These are Kumho V730’s in 245/40/17, flipped on the wheel to utilize that remaining bit of tread. They were sitting in my garage since my last Thunderhill track day in 2022, and they were already old then. Next time I will definitely be on fresh rubber!

It’s always a treat walking through the paddock on any track day. The first thing that caught my eye was this pair of Saab wagons.

Intentionally or not, similar cars seem to always end up next to each other in the paddock. Birds of a feather and all that.

Which early-2000’s sport coupe are you taking out for a session?

I love the well-earned battery of patina on this Integra.

Of all the canned and bottled beverages out there, this is my favorite: Orange Vanilla flavored Polar water. It’s just so damn good. I would love to see an Orange Vanilla Polar livery on a race car.

Track bros! This Series.Gray BRZ in Cool Gray Khaki was the special edition BRZ in 2019, the year after I bought my car. In 2018 when I bought mine, I wanted World Rally Blue anyway, but the special edition color was a muted blue as part of Subaru’s lineup of 50th anniversary cars, which made the decision easier. In 2019 when they made the Series.Gray as well as the low-winged tS, the choice would have been much harder. I didn’t get a chance to speak with the owner, but this particular car is likely competing in the Subaru BRZ Super Series due to the GT Radial windshield banner and Champiro SX2 tires.

Being Northern California, of course there was the newest hot track weapon: a 992.1 GT3 RS. I wanted to pore over every detail, but I didn’t really want to attract the attention of the owner at this hour, so I just grabbed this quick snap and snuck away.

What the hell is this? If you guessed “the standard color palette for the 992.1 GT3 RS”, spot on. There are three no-cost paints offered with the $241,300 base price, and then three shades of grey for $4,220.

No worries though, because you can get a seat at the PTS table! You can pay $20,960 to pick a color on the approved list, or $43,390 to potentially get a brand new color. It’s an interesting dynamic: the demand for special colors and individuality for these days is so strong, why even offer standard colors? However, it does feel more than a bit cynical: you’re paying so much for the car, so they know that you have and will spend $21k to get a special color. And you’ll probably make it up when you sell the car, such is the mania over unique PTS colors.

Anyway, the good thing about being at the track is that PTS nonsense is merely a footnote for what people are really here to do: go fast. This 1995 Caprice was in my class, but the driver showed up a bit late and then proceeded to work on his car for a while, only coming out for the afternoon classes. I don’t really get why you’d spend a couple hundred bucks on a track day and only do half of it, but I guess that’s one fewer car on track in my session, so maybe I should be happy about it.

And the winner of ugliest front end in the paddock is..? BMW’s get their fair share of design critique, but what is going on with full-size trucks these days? I just can’t understand what the hell Chevy is trying to do with the front of that thing, and the gussied-up GMC version is even worse.

This was an interesting and surprising treat to see for a number of reasons: the very first Tuthill Porsche 911K, being driven by its owner, instead of Richard Tuthill or Chris Harris.

I never expected to see this car in general, as I had no idea it was local to Northern California.

It was also a surprise to see this car on this particular day, as it was a regular 92dB day. The first time this car went out in the morning, you could hear it from everywhere. I saw it run one lap and not return, assuming it had gone so far over the limit on the sound check run that it was immediately kicked out.

But nope, I saw the car out there a few more times later that day. At the very end of the clip above, which was taken at Turn 4, you can hear the driver leave turn 5 and just not get on it. There’s no way to get a lap time doing this, but you still get about a mile and a half and 10 turns to play with.

In the same way it’s great to see any sports car fulfilling its destiny by being flogged on a race track, it’s also great to see trucks and SUV’s living up to their duty as workhorses. Most people buy a new G-Wagen to pick up their kids from school and park in those fancy malls, but this owner shows it can tow your track car too.

Since I was also driving on this day, I couldn’t wander too far from the paddock; that’s why there are a limited amount of action shots in this post and they were all taken Turns 3 & 4, the closest spectator spots to the paddock.

I was quite pleased to see that the 911K was being driven quickly and, from what I could see, rather well. Many drivers, even those lapping at track days, think the racing line is optional and going fast is scary–and the proportion of such owners seems to increase along with the value and age of the car. To see this 50 year old, million-dollar car leaned over on the curbs, engine screaming, was a real treat indeed.

Of course what I was really stoked about all day was that I remembered to bring my monopod! It makes a big difference in holding up my heavy 70-200mm lens. Sharper shots mean that I can crop them more, resulting in being able to zoom in on shots like this: Chris lifting an inner wheel in his M3.

The monopod also enabled me to go the other way, slowing down the shutter and getting a nice smooth pan. The previous shot was wide open at 1/250 shutter; this one is down at 1/80. I’m not a huge fan of Titan Silver E46 M3’s, but this is my buddy Chris’ car, and my main photo goal when I hang with him at the track is to get good captures of him driving his car.

I’ve invented all kinds of objectives while taking photos over the years, like getting two cars as close as possible, or to get as many cars in the frame as possible. It’s pretty rare to see cars driving close together at track days just by their non-competitive nature; I can’t tell if these guys were battling or if the Mustang was in the way of the S2000.

Here’s an eclectic group of cars. This looks more like a DWA Rally than a track day.

Now that’s a lot of cars in one shot! But what is happening? Note the ZR1 in the lead with the hazards on; that’s an instructor leading a novice group, and they’re doing a lead-follow to get everyone used to driving on the racing line.

Ah, the “Red” class, the top group with the fastest cars and fastest drivers. Sadly, Andrie in the 4C wasn’t backing it into T4 like he was on the last Laguna day, but he still drives as hard as anyone out there.

Here’s the photo of the 911K I used for the Youtube thumbnail. This thing looks nice and squishy on its soft suspension and big tires; I would love to take this thing for a rip on NorCal back roads.

Andrie is Chris’ good friend and track “teammate”, which I suppose makes him my teammate by extension. Another thing that sets him apart on a track day is that he uses all of the available track; he turns in from the edge of the track, clips the apex, and carries speed all the way to the edge of the track on exit. Here you can see him boinking the curb at Turn 4.

While most track day enthusiasts are grazing the red-and-white curbing, Andrie shows why they added sausage curbs as he almost dips a toe in the dirt here.

Chris is getting down there too. It’s been great to see his progress through the years; he’s very lucky to spend a lot of time on track and have a great coach.

Track rubber installed on the Caprice, finally. See that NB Miata in the background? Apparently they crashed very early in the day (first session?) and then parked all the way at the edge of the paddock as they worked on the car with a bit of embarrassment hanging over them.

Oh hey, it’s a new Model 3 Performance. No concerns about noise limits when you’re tracking an EV!

A completely different type of high-performance sedan, the Civic Type R. And is that a Lexus IS in the background?

People who want to go to the track will go to the track; everyone else makes excuses. People say they don’t have a sports car or the proper rubber or this and that. So I like to show pretty “normal” cars that most people wouldn’t even consider for a track day.

This is a novice class so I’ll cut the Challenger some slack for being miles off the racing line: the point here is they took their automatic V6 Challenger on All-Season tires to the track instead of making excuses.

Downplaying the significance of the track also demonstrates another fact: just because you go to the track doesn’t mean you’re any good at driving. Again, this is a novice class, so I don’t mean to pick on this Saab driver specifically; but there’s an attitude of “yeah I’m fast, I go to the track” by the same people who could park a school bus between their line and the apex.

Okay, here’s an actual example of what I’m talking about. As a car, this 997 is clearly much faster than my BRZ; as the video starts I get blown away on the straight by a great sounding flat six symphony. However, I immediately caught them under braking into Turn 14 and carried more speed onto the main straight. They still pulled away down the straight into Turn 1, but actually held me up going into Turn 3. I remained close through the whole lap, and they only pulled away on the straight after the chicane where they had passed me in the first place. Their lap time is about the same as mine despite driving a much faster car, in large part because they are not utilizing the track properly.

On the subject of “needing” proper rubber, I was definitely not about to complain about old V730’s if some people are out there on All-Seasons. The stock GR86 tires are Pilot Sport 4, so this person specifically chose All Season 4’s–and then took it to the track on them.

Gas at the track used to always be $9.99, but on this weekend it was in the low $6 range, which is only about a dollar higher than a public gas stations in the area. Knowing this, I had to ask these Tesla owners if the Superchargers at the track were more expensive than the average public Supercharger in the Bay Area. None of them could quote an exact rate, but they all agreed it was “about the same” as from a public charger. Good to see track fuel going down in price; one of the only commodities to ever to do such a thing in my lifetime.

Underneath the trashy (and very heavy) bedliner paint job was this really nice EF Civic (well, it’s actually an ED7 but I digress). Pretty interesting to see a D16Z6 built up to such a high degree, as historically everyone who gets to this point swaps in something DOHC from the B-series.

The interior had a bunch of interesting parts, and even the floors were replaced with carbon fiber.

At the end of the day, Chris asked me to get some shots of the three of our cars in the paddock. But first I had to put my wheels back on and put everything back into my car, which took forever because I just had a ton of stuff to pack. So I had Chris move the cars into position while I did that, then rushed to take some snaps.

Ah, the “side” position of the circular polarizer that I rarely use. I usually don’t turn it this way because it looks unnatural, but with the angle of the cars and light, it was the right choice here.

Then I threw my car in the mix. Man, I really regret not washing my car before the track day, especially when I look at Trevor’s photos of my car.

Japanese, German, and Italian: very different cars for very different drivers.

Here’s a better example of what I mean by “top” and “side” of a circular polarizer. Normally I shoot like this, with the top of the car (so usually the front and rear windshields) affected by the polarizer.

However, sometimes the situation calls for this: the polarizer turned so the side is affected. I rarely shoot this way because it gives a bit of a fake look to the image, which is even more of a concern these days with the proliferation of AI.

Chris had been struggling with his brakes all day; he ordered new calipers a few months ago but they hadn’t arrived in time for this track weekend. Not wanting to buy new pads for the current brakes because new calipers that require a different pad were on the way, he decided to chance it with these pads, and almost flew too close to the sun. I regret not getting photos of him changing the pads with some random mismatched pads on hand, or the aftermath, which was that the front pads he pulled off had less than 1mm of pad left. How the backing plate didn’t destroy the rotor is nothing short of a miracle.

Normally when these guys do a track weekend, they just stay overnight at a hotel in the track area instead of driving back to the Bay Area. However, not being able to get the right pads in town to swap even if he wanted to, and with another track day scheduled for the very next day, Chris made the baller decision to go home on Saturday night and get his other track car to drive on Sunday. Since he would be passing right by my mom’s house where I was staying, he asked me if I would like him to give me a ride to the track. With the rain percentage in the forecast decreasing, I had to go for it. Even though I had brought my monopod and captured some good snaps on this Saturday, I didn’t really get to stretch my legs either physically or metaphorically. Without any pressure of driving on Sunday, I could focus entirely on photography. Bring it on!