I was down at NJ Motorsports Park with the SCDA earlier this week. We ran Thunderbolt on Monday, and Lightning on Tuesday. All I can say is wow!

Thunderbolt was fun. It is pretty fast, some elevation change, and takes a little while to get used to the speeds you can carry through the corners. The corners are much wider than they first appear, and you can really fly through a bunch of them. My only gripe is that many of the corners are text book style corners, so there isn’t that much to “figure out” if you will.

Lightning is in an entirely different league. Overall it is much faster in most places than Thunderbolt, and has an excellent rhythm and feel to it, much like Lime Rock. And other than 1 text book left hand corner, every other corner is unique and takes a little thought to figure out.

I’ll try and get some videos up soon.

In a recent decision, Massachusetts highest court, the Supreme Judicial Court, gave the green light to Police tracking suspects with GPS if they have a warrant to do so.

The facts stem from a drug bust for over 120 ounces of crack cocaine. As with any possession-based offense (and especially something like crack cocaine), the easiest way to beat the charges is to have the evidence thrown out. That is generally done because police violated some policy or constitutional right of the suspect. Here, the Defendant is simply arguing that the use of a GPS to track his movements violates his Fifth Amendment right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures.

Well, the Court didn’t buy his argument. Most people immediately criticize decisions like this and lament the rise of the “police state.” I have to disagree, as I don’t think this decision adds any fuel to that fire. The key to the decision is that GPS tracking is permitted as long as the police have a warrant. Searches with warrants is older than the US, and certainly within the acceptable tools available to law enforcement. It really is no different than tapping a suspect’s phone lines after obtaining a valid warrant.

So what does this mean in practice? The Police can track a suspect with GPS provided they get a warrant. So don’t worry, you can still attack the use of a tracking GPS. The argument now will simply be that the warrant should not have been issued, rather than that the use of the GPS unit itself is a constitutional violation.

We’ve talked about reference points on the ground, as a rhythm, as your engine note, and now we can talk about using your hands and the steering wheel as a reference point as well. As with other “soft” reference points, the benefit is that you have some additional frame of reference after your last “hard” reference point. But you need to recognize your consistency (or inconsistencies) and any changes in your baseline or you may be sloppy at best and get yourself into trouble at worst.

The idea of using your hands and/or the steering wheel is very close in practice to using a rhythm as a reference point. Indeed, this technique actually requires using a rhythm to be effective.

When to Use the Technique
First lets talk about when you can use your hands as a reference point, and that will make explaining what to do much easier. Basically, on longer sweepers and hairpins you are turning for a long time. And usually throughout the course of the corner you will need to make a few steering inputs. And I’m not talking about your normal, minor steering inputs, but broad changes in the attitude of the car. A double apex is the best example. Your hand inputs are 1) turn in for the first apex and hold until 2) you reach the apex and begin unwinding for the track/turn in point at which point you 3) turn in again for the second apex. Between the two apexes, you are pretty much in no man’s land. You are often in the middle of the track, and on some tracks you may not ever get all the way to the edge before turning back towards the second apex.

The Andretti Hairpin at Laguna Seca and Big Bend at Lime Rock are both excellent examples of this. Both are double apex corners in which you don’t track all the way out until after the second apex. And now that Lime Rock has been paved, both lack any visible markings on the track itself that you can use. So what do you do? How do you know where that track out/turn in point between the two apexes lies? You don’t really (unless you have a hard reference point) - you just know after your into the second apex whether you got it right or not.
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When most people buy an auto racing helmet, their criteria is usually something along the lines of how well it fits their head, cost, and possibly the design if that is your thing. But one aspect which few consider is arguably one of the most important: how well a pair of glasses fits with the helmet on.

By design any auto racing helmet will cover your ears and temple, and a full face will, naturally, cover the face as well. Since glasses have an arm and an ear piece which keeps the glasses actually on your face, these two pieces will be directly where the helmet is going to be. How the helmet sorts out this interaction can make or brake your day. And don’t just think this applies to prescription glasses - sunglasses fall into the same boat.

To be fair, as long as glasses stay in place after they are put on, any further complaints are in a way petty. But over the course of several hours, these petty issues can become rather unpleasant distractions. And distractions are pretty much always bad.

I have a G-Force helmet, and my glasses or sunglasses fit, but just barely. There is a break in the foam right along the temple and ear, and into this divide my glasses always fall. Unfortunately, the angle of this divide is not the angle I would normally have my glasses at, and they consequently get pushed up into my eyebrows. That gets old kind of fast. If I pull them out more, they feel much better, but are more susceptible to bumps. And though tracks pride themselves on being silky smooth, there are bumps are racetracks, sometimes to the extreme. In the last season before Lime Rock was recently paved, the bumps coming out of Big Bend were very rough and there were a bunch of them. Quite a lot of real estate in the second part of the turn was bumps. With my sunglasses pulled out slightly, the bumps would cause them to bounce so violently that I literally could not see until I had hit track out and the surface got smooth again. Not being able to see at all is decidedly worse than a distraction.

It may seem silly to try on your glasses when you are trying out helmets, but you’ll be glad you noticed any catastrophic issues at this stage rather than the first time you put your glasses on at the track.