Today was a very interesting day... Another very WET day in the morning. But this time it worked in our favor! We got some decent sleep last night and had to wake up even earlier for the event at Carolina Motorsports Park that starts at 8am instead of the usual 9. After our great success over the last few days at Sebring and Daytona we were getting ready for another smooth run at CMP. CMP is one of the tracks that Andrew knows very, very well with many test days with Grand Am, sprint and enduro races, he's got it down packed.
To make a long story short...... The 1st session was very wet, we got out in the 4th run group and luckily the rain stopped a while before and the track was drying out! The GTR took top honors again, and Ian in the GT2 battled the slippery conditions in the beast of a Porsche. We thought Andrew slipped in between the GTR and Ian by a few tenths, thank goodness it wasn't so, because we would have taken more points away from Ian if we finished in front of him. Ian beat us by .02 of a second, two hundredths of a freaking second between 3rd and 4th!!!!! 5:45.596 and 5:45.576 respectivly!! It can't get any closer than that. We took 4th Overall and 1st in class in the soggy conditions. We are starting to think that the M5 loves to run in wet conditions, oah yes all that weight is good for something afterall.
The second session was completely dry and it made for some very fast and close competition. Carbonell did great but the tight corners and constant radius turns at CMP made for a challenging situation for the M5. We ended up running very close, with Audi taking first only 4 tenths of a second separating the two, the BMW Performance School M3 taking 2nd, and we came in a close 3rd, 2 seconds behind.
At the performance driving school we did exactly was needed. I drove a clean run with out hitting any cones (each cone is a 10 second penalty!). We got 2nd in class and 11th over all in the tight course. There was this one left hand turn that crests a hill on the back side of the track that Ian was talking about going almost full throttle through it... well oah no, not in the M5; I entered the corner fast and almost took out an entire family of cones!!!!! At the apex the hill crested and I was in the throttle at this point sideways with the back end of the car maybe a foot or so away from a row of 10 cones! I slid sidways on power in 3rd gear at about 70 mph for a hundred feet or so. It was awesome, but I was freaking out about hitting any cones, and thankfully I didn't.
At the end of this day we are 1st in class by 5 points (which is one position worth of points) and we are 6th overall out of a 60 car field. A luxury car hasn't taken a top ten finish since the early 90's where an E34 M5 finished with top honors. It will be tight running from this point out, only two events left and the dry skid pad is not the M5's strong point.
Oah, BTW no pictures today b/c I left my camera with Rachel in Orlando, duh! Will have my dad's camera tomorrow as he is meeting us in Pennsylvania at Beaverun!
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