Velocity Racing's 'Honey Badger' Blog

The season finale of the 2016 AFM race season was taking place at Buttonwillow Raceway. I came into this weekend knowing I had made a lot of progress over the year, and that the front runners (in a year with some crazy fast novices) were just outside of my reach – maybe not 1 st or 2 nd , but a podium finish was within my grasp in something other than my Legacy class. I wanted to have that finish badly, since it would be my last shot at it before moving up to Expert where I’ll be unlikely to see much of anything for quite some time… I headed down Thursday afternoon so I could arrive and get settled in before traffic and so I’d be relaxed going into the weekend. I wanted to do part of the test day on Friday just to work on lines and technique, which is exactly what I did. There wasn’t a transmitter out, so I had no idea on my laptimes, but that was okay since I wanted to stay focused on proper technique. I chose not to put my own transmitter for that reason. The day went well with...

Typically this time of year we’re not really having to worry too much about the weather, but it’s getting close enough to winter that I tend to start keeping an eye on it, especially if there’s something important coming – you know, like a race weekend! So, early in the week, I started keeping an eye on the weather – since I had just been down at Buttonwillow (where it had been hella hot), I was wondering if I’d need to stock up on my Skratch Labs for the race weekend. Much to my dismay, instead of hot, the forecast for the weekend instead was showing a high chance of rain and very cool. WTH?!? I kept on following the forecast daily, sometimes hourly – it seemed to be trending to lighter chances of rain, but it wasn’t pulled off, either. Close enough that it was still going to be worth heading up – I already had the pet sitter arranged, and was committed to helping out at a track day on the following Monday, so I packed up with a little extra prep in case we did get wet. I arrived...