The Director's Cut Weekend Extravaganza (Part I)
As
evilviscountess recounted earlier, this was the ALMS weekend in Monterey. It is my favorite race weekend of the year, and I get to spend an entire weekend geeking on cars and racing.
The weekend actually began on Wednesday afternoon with a media lunch at Montrio's. The chef there, Tony, is a friend of ours, and said we had to come on down, even though he wasn't sure exactly what was going to happen. So down we went and hung out with our friends from the restaurant. Laguna Seca sends over one of their pace cars, and a PR woman gets out. We still don't know how she drove it in 4 inch heels. Eventually Jorg Borgmeister wandered in. He is a Porsche factory driver and drives the Flying Lizard no 45 Porsche 911 in the ALMS. At this point, Tony disappears to be the driver host, although we do overhear him asking Jorg if he has brought any Nomex (the fire resistant fabric racing suits is made out of) for the cooking. This turns out to have significance later in the day when
evilviscountess gets an email from Tony saying that Jorg burned all the hair off of his arms in the kitchen. This weight savings would be critical later in the weekend. We leave shortly afterwards since the event was proving to be dull, dull, dull. Lunch at Bistro Moulin for us.
Thursday with evening practice. I hadn't planned on going out to the track, but Carol put on Radio Le Mans and when I found out that we had over an hour of time left in the session, it was grab a jacket and the camera and drive out to Laguna Seca. We dropped down at turn 5 (the Bus Stop) because I wanted to get some pictures of glowing brakes. As the sun set, and the wind picked up, we added more layers, but eventually I got some nice shots of the brakes glowing.
evilviscountess promises to post the pictures from her site soon, so all can revel in the excitement of red hot brake discs. Afterwards, back into town and dinner at Moulin.