How About a Little School
by Rick Kostelaz

For those of you who attended Rounds 1 and 2 at the Bragg-Smith High Performance Driving School track in Pahrump you are in luck. Fortunately, Bill Prince was on hand for the Sunday runs and he took a lot of pictures while standing just past a very important corner on Sunday’s course.

First of all let’s identify the corner that we are discussing: It was the sharp right hander which lead onto the main straight away. It was the corner just after the fast “S”. If you will recall, on Sunday I placed a wall of pylons about 100 feet down the straight-away which forced you over to the right hand side of the track.

This wall of pylons completely changed the character of that right hander leading onto the main straight-away for the Sunday event. As you will recall, on Saturday.... no pylon wall.... accordingly your best line was to carry as much speed through that corner as you could. On Sunday, because of the “pylon wall” it was necessary to give up speed coming into that corner so that you could take the proper line coming out, thus achieving maximum acceleration down the straight-away.


Here are some of the pictures that Bill took:

Todd Lashley takes a good line	Rick Kostelaz takes a good line
Mark Bartelt takes a good line.	Car 197 takes the wrong line.

The secret to this particular corner was to brake early going into it while driving the car as close to the left side of the track as you could. Then turning to the right and getting as close as you could to the apex cones on the right hand side of the course. Take a close look at Todd Lashley in the picture above and notice how tight he is on the cones. Compare that to the #197 Corvette..... it appears as if the #197 car tried to carry much too much speed into this corner.

Now, because the #197 car is so wide he is going to have trouble getting his car over to the right side of the track in order to clear that “wall of pylons” which lies just a hundred feet farther down the track.

Herein lies the secret to quick times. Because Todd has set up properly he will be able to accelerate much earlier coming out of this corner than the #197 Corvette. Todd will be going much faster by the time he reaches the next braking point (which was going into the slalom). Since this particular straight-away was the longest one on the course there was a lot of time to loose if you didn’t enter and exit this corner properly.

This SOLO II driving can be quite technical and to be fast you must be able to read the course. SCCA LVR will be holding a SOLO II Driving School later this year. The chosen dates are June 15 and 16 at the Bragg-Smith track in Pahrump. I believe that Rob Sudhop will be having both class room sessions as well as track sessions. They will be designed to show you some of those “technical” things that you may not have thought about.

Now, run over to Bill Prince’s web site at www.wprince@wprince.com and take a look at the photographs that he took on Sunday (Round 2). After a couple of minutes you will probably be able to see who was fast and who was not.

Rick