The Northeast region of NASA held a 3 day event at New Jersey Motorsport Park’s Lightning track June 19-21. Lightning is the smaller and probably faster sister to the Thunderbolt track where all of the professional (GrandAM, World Challenge, NASCAR, etc) hold their races. Last year’s final November started with all rain and ended with a broken car – and this year’s event wasn’t much different.

The month of June has been almost all rain in the northeast. When we left for the track on Thursday afternoon, it was raining the entire time making for a long and unpleasant drive. Friday was open track, and we got a couple of sessions in to learn the track before the rain came.

Saturday was all rain, and we didn’t take the car out at all. Rather than loose class points, my teammate Mike Cohen came up with the idea of renting spec miata cars and classing them as SU. While rain equipped “real” SU cars would certainly beat us in the race, we’d at least score points. So that’s what we did – and I placed 3rd in the rain with a rented “SU miata”.

Sunday was also rain, although it started to dry out in time for qualifying and looked like the race would be dry. I qualified 3rd with my teammate Mike on the pole and Tom Soriano in 2nd with a laptime of 1:08:617. I went out of slick tires (so did everyone else) and it started lightly raining during the pace lap. I held 3rd place into the race but broke a driveshaft a little over halfway thru the race and finished 4th. Full results are here.

A video of the Sunday race is up on the videos page. The drive shaft breaking makes a great sound!

And, for the record, despite getting wrecked twice in the first 5 laps of the karting race on Saturday, I still kicked everyone’s ass (yes YOU Coy!), including some German kid who weighed 100 lbs!

Next event is the NASA NE Grand Slam weekend at Pocono in July.