All together, there were 5 cars that crashed all week, 4 of them Porsches, yours truly is unfortunately part fo the statistics.
On Tuesday this happened. At the corner named Bottomless Pit.
That wall is 100 years old, it wasn't built to withstand car impacts. Beyond the wall is pretty much a bottomless drop that goes down a few thousands feet. It was the hands of God that pushed the car back towards the road, another foot he would have fallen down the pit.
I went off on Wednesday, but at least I picked a spot where I don't fall 1000 feet. Only dropped about 4 feet.
It pretty much right at Mile Marker 18. That area is called Boulder Park, as it happens I flew 15-20 feet into the field and didn't hit a single boulder. No one believed that I didn't hit a single rock, when they came back down the mountain from the practice run, they could see my car from a long ways away and thought I purposely parked there to do a photo shoot.
Decent damage to the front, needing new bumper and radiators, the front trunk was mangled and quite a bit of underbody damage but nothing major, my car was perched onto of a rock and that rock is 6 inches from the engine. With the help of Porsche Colorado Springs, my crew repaired my car in 4hrs later that afternoon.
I made practice and qualifying Thursday. The new bumper was also re-wrapped and graphics-ed in time for Fan Fest Friday night. But it also wasn't without drama, my rear glass shattered during the downhill drive after a run, and my crew did a quick fix with tape to secure the glass. Don't care about the not color matching red and green tape. As luck would have it, the TV film crew was doing filming on my car, so they captured everything.
Just before the glass shattered, while waiting for the field to come up before going down. What a view up there.
Thursday during qualifying another ClubSport took a spill in the lower section, safer as there are no cliffs, but with trees and rocks. It was quite a bit more damaged than mine, his front trunk is even more mangled and also broke a shock tower. My crew jumped in to help with the repairs, and 16 hours later it is running again. I took the only set of radiators and front bumper from the PMNA support truck, but Porsche Colorado Springs jumped in to help again and gave up a car for us to cannibalize parts for the repairs.
Come Sunday for the race, another one of our ClubSport crashed 2 corners from the finish during the race. His brakes failed just before Cog Cut, there is a cog rail line 70 feet beyond the edge of the corner, he launched and flew all the way to the rail line. One can't quite see what's beyond the edge, so when he flew off, he thought that was it for him and he is gonna fall 1000 feet to his death. Luckily that didn't happened. And the car also made it back to the shop at Porsche Colorado Springs by 8pm. As it happens, his front end took the brunt of the impact, also the rocks destroyed the oil pan. And a shock tower broke too. The joke was that we 3 crashed the ClubSport harder and harder.
The crashed car does make a great pizza buffet table though:
I simply cannot say enough good things on Porsche Colorado Springs, they went above and beyond for sure.
And it's only fitting that their car, the yellow GT3R driven by David Donohue, won it's class and broke the time record.
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