Road America – July 17-19, 2009


It was the Kohler International with Brian Redman last week at Road America and Su and I went along, as I had an invite to drive a GT40 Replica. Sadly, the clutch failed on that almost straight away, thus reducing me to a spectator, not something yours truly is very good at! Shame, as I’d really been looking forward to driving at Road America, one of America’s truly great circuits.

However, there was an excellent entry of over 450 cars, including GT40s (the featured marque), Lolas (including several beautifully turned out T70s, both Coupes and Spyders, and Formula A (F5000 in Europe) and F1 cars. George Tuma was trying out his new (to him) Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Comp. Daytona, which he reported as: “Very fast, lots of power but the brakes..!” (or lack of them, I think he meant).

Su and I had rented a new Chevrolet Camaro and, to our astonishment, it seemed to attract more attention than any of the exotic racecars present! Of course, being a rental car, it only had a V6 engine but performance wasn’t bad at all and it did sound good. It also had paddle shifters to operate the manual (clutchless), 6-speed gearbox, which also became an automatic with a one notch move of the gear selector. Interesting!.. except for when you’ve got more than half a turn of lock on, as when exiting a corner, when you can’t get your hands far enough around the steering wheel to operate the paddles! Hey-ho, the box changes up automatically anyway, which rather left me thinking why bother?

Things I didn’t like included: the currently fashionable high doorline/small side windows; the almost non-existent 3/4 rear vision (you can’t check to see if there’s anyone in the mirror’s blind spot when you change lanes); the thick “A” pillars; and the low seating position.

With the exception of the seating position, all the above dislikes fall under the heading of “passive safety”. All very well but I’d like to see the truck bearing down upon me, so that I can take avoiding action, rather than have the thing hit me before I’ve been able to see it.

Oh, and another thing: Whilst driving at night and with a car behind with it’s lights on full beam, I hit what I thought was the inside mirror’s dipswitch, only to hear a voice say: “OnStar, what is your problem?” Panic ensued whilst Su and I tried to figure out how to stop it, and the subsequent imaginary huge bill! Sort of left us feeling like saying to all the gadgets, “Go away!” Ah well, getting older obviously.

In the dry, the Camaro handled well and wasn’t bad in the wet either.

So we left on Friday morning and came home early, so that we could pick up Humphrey, our one hundred and twenty pound dog, from the kennels. He certainly seemed to appreciate getting out early and fairly bounded into Su’s Dodge Ram, which he seems to like very much. Can’t say as I blame him either as it’s carried me on a couple of solo thousand mile plus jaunts now.