Scuderia on track - Road Trip edition

The Porsche contingent of the Scuderia was at VIR this last weekend with NASA southeast. Cars from all of sports-cardom were there from Spec Miatas and Spec E30s to F430 challenge cars, a couple of stock cars, and this beautiful F430 droptop that parked next to us.

Paul Newman said "If there is a heaven on earth, it is VIR." For the track enthusiast, I agree. The rolling hills are quite picturesque to look at and make the driving quite interesting and challenging. This track can be fun whether you have 100 or 500 horsepower. The climbing esses can be navigated at 100+ MPH, but dont ever apex early here:



The back straight after the oak tree turn is long and lets the high horsepower cars stretch their legs. You can always go into turn 14 faster than you think. There is also the 3-4-5 section where you will be punished if you get too greedy with the throttle. The amazing thing about the technical nature of this track is that it was laid out back in 1957 mostly by a trial and error method of grading the dirt, driving around on it, and grading some more.

According to Dr. Hooper Johnson, one of the founders of VIR: (courtesy of virhistory.com)

"The club members were looking for a place to build a track. George Arnold said he knew of a place that was not being used. He brought us some aerial photographs of the Foote farm up in Milton. I sat down at a table in the dining room at Baptist Hospital and sketched out where I thought the track should go. One of the doctors, Jesse Meridith knew a couple of road grading contractors, Horace and Harry Strickland from near his hometown of Mount Airy. They actually lived over in Virginia at Fancy Gap. Ed Welch, George Arnold and I took them up to the farm and drove through the grass to show them where the track should go. Dick Snyder was there with his Mercedes 300SL and we used the turning radius of his car to mark the radius of the horseshoe turn at the end of the front straight. The turning radius of the Strickland brothers' road grader was used to set the radius of Oak Tree turn. After they did the rough grading we would take our cars up there on weekends and run around on the dirt at up to 100 mph. We found one place where the cars would get airborne so Horace just took his grader and shaved off enough dirt to correct the problem. We became concerned about the drainage around the track so we waited for a big rainy spell and went up there and corrected the problems we saw."

Here is some video of my laps around the place: (no track records were broken here!)