Day 1

The first official day of Fireball Run consists of a high speed track event at the Louisiana State Police training center. We get up early, pack our stuff, and head towards the track. We find the huge State Police training center and pass shooting ranges, training areas, and finally find the track. On the grounds we find a nice pond with an ominous sign warning us of gators!

The actual track is much faster than I anticipated. It’s a 2 mile track that’s not designed as a race track but police training grounds, it’s high speed, no curbing and absolutely no run off! There are a series of esses that have street signs right where you would go off and mess up your car. Then there is section that comes off a fast left hander and you need to get on the brakes hard as the road narrows down to one lane! The car gets a little loose at this point and squirms from one edge of the road to the other.

We get a few practice laps and then we get put into our groups. We get split into groups of 5 and get put on track in Time Attack fashion. They take the fastest of my 3 laps. 2 laps into my run they red flag the race and stop us on track. I just came off a high speed straight and braked hard from 110mph. They keep us there for 5 minutes as they fix a timing error. Well sitting there with no airflow the brakes heat soaked and boiled the fluid. When they restarted I took my first lap super easy to give myself plenty of room so I don’t catch the back of the field. Problem is I didn’t use my brakes until the end of the fast straight away. Oh oh !! NO BRAKES!! I miss the first corner and go past some cones. I realize what happened to the brakes and get back on the track. Problem is I’m stuck behind two cars and I only have 2 hot laps to go! I go really slow on my second lap to make some room in front of me to go hard on my third lap. I charge hard on my third lap and it’s a good one. We get the results later and find out we win first place by over 5 seconds! with most of the competition trailing over 10 seconds behind me. The funny thing is I didn’t even run the BFG R1’s, just the KDW street tires. We’re saving the R1’s for the Auto-X’s and Grattan Raceway in Michigan.

With the first event out of the way we look forward to our challenges tomorrow. The track events account for a small part of the total points and it’s really going to be our puzzle solving skills and common sense that bring us the points. Tomorrow morning we all leave Baton Rouge in style, as we form a car caravan and get a police escort out of downtown. I’ll post a pic tomorrow of our assigned missing child. Her name is RJ Meyers, she’s 7 years old and was last seen in NY. It’s really sad to see how many kids go missing each year and hopefully we can make a difference. We’ll be pro-active during our missions, handing out flyer’s, talking to people, and putting up pictures of RJ. Well that’s it for tonight, sorry for the long post and we’ll see you tomorrow!