[Philostang]

Hey Texotic,

Yeah, the Mazda's are not big-folk friendly, but it can be done. In fact, Pete is one big dude! At 6'8" and some 230 lbs or so, it's a bit funny to see him climb in to the cockpit...then he kicks your butt for laughing. The real trouble you might have are your feet. We had a couple of other very tall guys there with big feet (size 12) who just couldn't get enough clearance in the new foot well (something to do with the way the redesigned the front suspension).

Apparently they switch their cars (not the Formulas) very frequently. I thought I heard them say something on the order of every 6 months, but I kept thinking that can't be true. Anyway, my car had a lot of miles on it from their perspective (6K), so you know they are turning over cars fairly frequently these days.

Argonaut,
I did enjoy the Corvette, and you summed it up pretty well. The car is just really easy to drive, very forgiving. My only complaint was the surprising amount of noise you get from the targa top. I wouldn't want to pay that kind of money only to hear constant loud squeaking and rattling. From a performance perspective, I don't care, but from a "hey baby, want to take a ride?" it would be embarrassing.

Timothyrw,
The biggest thing I learned was how to properly trail brake the car to maximize grip. My worst bad-habits all revolved around braking technique. Either I was jabbing the brake at the moment of heel-toe shifting, just generally braking too hard too late, and/or letting off the brake too abruptly. All wrong, all upsetting the car's balance. Pete had a great expression the first time he caught me doing it. "Do you know what it takes to go deep and hard into a corner? A big set of balls. That's it." His point was that there's no skill in what I was doing. I wasn't controlling the car by communicating with it, I was just hoping to go fast. Also, I wasn't doing a good job of tying together brake and throttle with steering. I was ok with unwinding the steering wheel with increased throttle on corner exit, but I had no clue what I was doing with the wheel mid-corner or during trail braking. Now I'm bringing it together. I've still got a long way to go, but I can now identify when I'm doing something wrong and not getting the most out of the car. I can communicate much better with the car to know what she needs.

Looking through my notes there are a ton of other habits I began braking, but those were some of the bigger ones.

Best,
-j