By Anker Berg-Sonne, Northeast Region PCA
The ZG1 Championship Begins
The first championship point race for the Zone 1 Wildcats was run Friday, December 5th, at Road America.
Road America is a fun, fast course with a couple of very tricky corners. Corner 3 requires a lot of braking and patience to hit the apex and track out. Failure puts you in the grass or a plodding exit speed leading on to the Moraine Sweep.
Corner 5 has a downhill approach and punishes late braking by putting you in the runout, as does corner six, where you end up in the grass and inevitably spin out.
The Carousel goes on and on, and you have to choose just the right moment to get on the throttle and track out. At the Kink, you need to have just the right speed and rotation to avoid going off track.
Starting Grid
We had a good-sized field with 25 cars on the grid (11 911 GT3s, and 17 Cayman GT4s).
The tricky course made the passing of the same type of cars quite difficult, but incidents quickly mixed up the field and saw no trains develop. As expected, the GT3s lapped the GT4s.
Good Racing
Of the GT3s, Cameron Martineau and James Huth dominated the PCA Pro Class, with Cameron finishing first with James 3 seconds behind and then a 14-second gap to Chris Braun in third place. Then a 43-second gap to Jeremy Mazzariello, who finished first in PCA Club Class, followed by Julian Velez behind by 19 seconds.
Of the GT4s, Aaron Ambrosino ran a terrific race finishing overall 8th place, being lapped by Cameron just once.
Three drivers, James Huth, Chris Braun, and Aaron Ambrosino, deserve commendation and received two bonus points for running a zero-incident race.
4 racers disconnected and did not finish.
Video Recaps
Two YouTube videos show the main battles and incidents from the race.
A 10-minute summary.
And the full race.
A quick personal note! I was finally able to put my advice into practice. I kept my adrenalin in control and ran a careful race with just four incidents, three of which were running off the track, but no spins. My fourth incident was a bump into another car during a pass attempt in corner 6. My apologies to Ron Cahill. Finishing in 10th place overall and having the 20th fastest lap time shows that incident avoidance and defensive driving trumps fast lap times.