It was another day with near perfect weather and my buddy contacted me about shooting at his range. Matty and I headed over and shot mostly rifles, he has a friend that lets him borrow his SKS and I shot about 200 rounds through the 10/22.
Later in the afternoon my buddy got out his Windham AR-10 and let me shoot 25 rounds through it. Its a very fun gun to shoot with enough kick that I would loose site of the target at fifty yards after almost every shot. I still managed a nice grouping with a gun I was unfamiliar with.
To top the day off my buddy got out his MRAD .338 Lapua Magnum. Shooting it at 50 yards is and not getting a bulls-eye would almost be hard to do. At around $5.00 a shot we all took just one, below is a short video of Matty taking his turn.
I've lived in the Indianapolis area on and off for over 20 years, I've been to numerous local events such as the US Nationals, IROC, Rolex, Brickyard 400, Bush Grand National, SCCA, Silver Crown, Craftsman Super Truck, Super Chevy etc. but never the Indy 500. I never wanted to deal with the crowd to see a race that is better viewed on television.
This year was different, the 100th running, it wasn't the first time I had been offered tickets but this time we went.
The tickets were commemorative made from some clear plastic with the ticket printed on it. The day before the race I was able to get a fourth so Matty's girlfriend could go along with us.
Its just under 13 miles from my house to the track yet we left at 5:45am for a 12:30pm start time, with over 350k people attending traffic and parking would be fun. Having the home field advantage we parked about 2 miles north of the track and hung out in the car for a few hours before walking to the track. Once at the track it was blistering hot, with just a slight breeze from the west. As luck would have it we were sitting just outside of turn 4 which made the stands back up to the west blocking the breeze.
Prior to the race to pass the time the normal group wave and beach balls went around.
Just prior to the race they did a parade lap with former winning Indy Cars. The 100+ year old Marmon Wasp winner of the first Indy 500 was out there running around the track with them.
Promptly at 12:30pm a ZL1 Camaro pace car raced by and the field passed for the start of the race.
The race itself was fairly exciting with multiple passes and the whole fuel thing going on. The icing on the cake was Juan crashing out early on. I'm not sure I would have had the same opinion if we weren't directly across from a large live TV screen.
Afterwards we headed back to the car with our coolers and backpacks, we still had half a cooler of drinks left. The drive home was quite simple, that was the home field advantage I mentioned before. Once we reached the car it only took us 40 minutes to get home, it was very painless. We ended up waiting at one traffic light for two cycles, the rest was like a normal drive in Indy.
Overall I enjoyed the day and was glad I went, I don't know that I will go again, it would probably take turn one suite or pagoda seating to entice me back. Its a great place to enjoy the moment and the crowd its a horrible place to see an oval race.
Tania and I had the opportunity to attend "Fast Friday" at the Brickyard. We were in a nice suite on garage row, with good food and a lot of my friends.
Pippa Mann stopped by to give autographs and personal tours of her garage.
One of the teams was using these cool fat tired bikes as pit bikes. Notice the 4" wide tires, the disc brakes and bottle opener on the seat tube.
Gas Monkey Garage is the main sponsor on a car this year, their merchandise stand wasnt open yet.
The GM booth had a couple neat items, first was this static display of a Indycar V6. Its amazing the power this little motor puts out reliably..
The last picture is of the new ZL1 Camaro,
The front end reminded me of something, I couldn't quite put my finger on it.
I spent last weekend tracing all the grounds on the Corvette and checking them for resistance. After that and some other small troubleshooting I couldn't find anything wrong with the Corvette. I drove it to Mike Norris Motorsports Friday and he confirmed that the ECU was the problem. I found an online service that repairs ECU's for $125.00 and if it is beyond repair they charge $75.00 for the diagnosis. The advantage to this is confirmation it is the ECU and if it is I wont need to have it reprogrammed with the default parameters and then with the dyno tune.
In researching this I found out I cannot buy a new ECU for the car pre-programmed. It can only be done by the dealer and must be installed in the car to learn the clutch pedal and I believe crank trigger. So today I cleaned up the car and removed the ECU to send out tomorrow.
Last week I also removed the running boards from the Sierra, I hated how they looked and hated even more all the crap that would end up on top of them. Two weeks ago it rained and the following day there were dead dried worms stuck all over the top of them. The truck is a bit harder to get in and out of now but it looks much better to me. I put them up on Craigslist yesterday and they sold in about an hour for $300.00 which is about what they are each.
I wasn't trying to stage a photo but after working on the Corvette and cleaning out the garage I realized I had them all lined up so I took a quick picture.
