So as Saturday came to a close and Mike & I were driving down I-65 on our way to Memphis assessing how the day went and needless to say we both were extremely happy with the performance of our BMW M235i. Admittedly the day’s events are not a real test of the capabilities of the car against the competition, which will start Sunday when we run at Memphis Motorsport Park with two time trials and drag races. But this car is stable and predictable (wet skid pad) and agile with excellent turn in (autocross).
The 2014 Tire Rack One Lap of America got underway early Saturday morning with the events first competition, the wet skid pad at Tire Racks’ Headquarters in South Bend, Indiana, however given the temperatures we were probably close to running a skid pad on ice!. The winner of the competition is calculated on the number of G’s pulled by the car completing two clockwise and two counterclockwise laps of the skid pad.
Our BMW Performance Center Driving School/Crowne Plaza BMW M235i competing in the stock class pulled a respectable 0.775 G, with a time of placing us in 8th overall and 1st in SSGT Small Bore and Stock Touring in classes after the first event.
Once our run was completed we packed all our belongings back into our BMW and headed south down to Grissom Air Force Base for an autocross hosted by the local SCCA chapter. We all take three runs, with the idea you should reduce your time on each subsequent run, sometimes it goes to plan, other times in an effort to lower your time you hit a cone or miss a gate entirely. Fortunately Mike had his game on and reduced our time through each run and didn’t incur any penalties. 1 cone = 2 seconds and missing a gate results in a DNF. Our final run was 53.93 seconds which placed us 11th for the event.
Now it was time for a run down to Bowling Green, KY for a passage check at the Corvette Museum, but with time constraints we didn’t really have time the time to walk through the museum. The staff did provide a quick presentation on the new road course that’s been built on the other side of the interstate to the museum, and is scheduled to open Labor Day 2014.
From Bowling Green we continued our drive south to Memphis, arriving at our Holiday Inn hotel around 10:00pm CST.
You can follow our progress through the event on social media twitter #OLOAM235 and #CPBMW
