Winter Track event in Florida

[Brian Minkin]

A group of 5 RTR drivers met up at Sebring for the PBOC Winterfest. This is a 4 day event that involves DE, instructed and Solo and 2 Race Groups.  They also had a Super Solo group the 1st 2 days (passing in corners and passing signals optional).

Each group got about 1 1/2 hours of seat time each day. Sunday I stayed till the end actually got 2 hours of seat time.  Weather was cool and had some light rain.  We also had a fog delay one morning.

Sebring is a very nice facility.  The track itself is 17 turns and uses a combination of some of the airports old runways and newer asphalt infield. The back straight is very long and fast. Cement sections are a little bumpy but not as bad as I expected. No elevation change.  Many of the turns are sequenced so that if you mess up the 1st in the series you blow the whole series.  I will post video of a 30 minute session once I get it down loaded and converted.  I turned 2:37:0 laps. That is about 40 seconds faster then I was on day 1.  Steve Mankowski was in the same run group and was turning about the same times. I think he might have been in the 2:36:30 range a few times. It was tough to get your own space as the run group had about 70 cars so you had to do a lot of waiting for passes but each session was a blast.

Steve Meenan in his radical was incredible.  2:20's or less as he battled to be the fastest in the super solo run group.  Barry Schwartz in his Diasio worked to hard to hang with Steve and blew up.  Barry's friend Bob, another Diasio owner was in our camp of 5 and ran in the solo group.  We where in the paddock next to Chris Diaso (the Diaso Car Company) and another Diaso owner from Jersey (Red Diaso) who has run with us but I do not remember his name.

Sebring is a long haul but with 4 days on the track it was worth it.  It is worthy of its reputation as a world class track.

I will post some pics.