FIRST TRACK DAY…WHAT TO BRING? – 2/16/09

If you are about to embark upon your first outing to a track event, first congratulations for taking the leap!  You are in for tremendous fun, lots of education and will likely leave the track at the end of an event with what must be a similar feeling to that of a heroin junkie who’s looking for his next fix…you’ll be hooked!

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, there is the minor detail of what to pack up and bring with you to the track.  When I was preparing for my first DE (last year) I did a bunch of research on this subject.  I looked through various Porsche-specific web forums and asked hordes of questions.  I also scanned through several non-porsche web forums (BMW, Miata, etc) and got a fairly good cross-section of ‘stuff’.

While some of this is/was specific to my Porsche, most of it is generically good for any make.  I have attached a little excel spreadsheet checklist I created with all of the stuff I took to that first DE.  I have used this list since then and still bring most of these things, although I’ve tweeked what I actually bring based on things I’ve seen along the way.  There are a number of schools of thought about what to bring.  There is the “if you forget to bring it, you’ll definitely need it” school, which prescribes bringing EVERYTHING.  And then there’s the “if you make friends at the track, you’ll always have what you need” school, which prescribes bringing all the critical stuff, but not sweating the list as you can always borrow from someone at the track.  I have combined these into the “new-school” and therefore I bring enough stuff to fit safely in my car (I am not a trailer guy…yet!) and be able to fix most minor stuff that could go wrong, but I do make friends because you never know when you might need to borrow that ‘brake bleeder that you don’t even own’ or something else!  Having a nice array of ‘stuff’ also means that you can help out when somebody else is in need.

One thing I’ll probably add this year is a small tent…more like a patio tent.  You see the tarp on the list is to keep your ‘stuff’ dry should the sky open up.  But that does not work real well for the stuff, and does nothing for YOU.  Unless you’re lucky enough to land a garage spot in a paddock, you’ll likely want to hang out in the dry too.  So I’ll probably spend the $50 to pickup a cheap tent and a few patio-block to hold it down.  Another thing on the wish-list is a cordless, electric impact wrench…but I don’t need that until I have a good way to bring track-tires/wheels to events.

This will all be modified when hopefully in the next 12 months I get a trailer….but that’s a whole different write-up!

Keep both hands on the wheel!

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