At the end of the event, as I said here, Marilinda did give us a few minutes to do one of our “patented” Micro-Intervews. Given the news of Friday from the Supreme Court as well as in anticipation of today’s decisions, those result served as the basis of the quick questions:
Also, one of the coolest things that I have ever had the chance to do at a political event was to take a few laps around the mile oval in one of the track’s Pace Cars:
Watching the Mustangs go ’round was one thing, watching the Sprint cars on TV is another, but doing it at speed in person is yet another thing altogether. TMEW had come with me and was a bit nervous about getting in the car. Well, things went rather faster than I thought it would – the driver immediately floored it and screeched the tires on pit row and headed out to the track with the engine growling higher and higher. Even with just regular street tires, he dug into the corners starting around 80 mph, dropped to around 60 and then accelerated to 70 coming out of the turn. We reached almost 100 mph (again, while new, the car was totally stock except for the paint scheme) flying down the straights until hard breaking into the corner again. Watching the real Sprint race later on Saturday night, I saw what happened to cars that lost traction in the same spots where our tires (again, just street tires and not racing ones) where screeching. It was also clear that the track, while appearing to be rather smooth, it not when at speed. I should have brought a camera mount with me but I think that this shows the unevenness a bit more; go ahead, do that for 300 miles at speeds higher than that AND with 40 odd other cars doing the same thing just inches from each other.
The G forces were quite a bit higher than what I had expected – and you can see that in the video when I tried to keep the camera level with the hood -twasn’t as easy as first thought. However, the telling moment was when I opened TMEW’s door to let her out – the nervousness had turned into a beaming grin from ear to ear. Given how shy she normally is and risk averse, I could tell it was a great ride in going in circles.
Now, if they only did just Right turns…..
