enter to win

greetings from the lovely ramada inn in wherever the hell i am for the audi chicago autobahn country club track event.

it was hell getting here to joliet from work at ~16:00 on friday. the registration, tech inspection, and driver's meeting was at a holiday inn convention center so we had a small conference room for the >100 people to fit into.

i got my registration information and for some reason we switched to color-based rungroups which is kind of confusing because you forget what the other colors are (white and blue are instructors, green is advanced, and yellow, orange, and red are intermediate and beginners) so when another group is out you can't easily figure out how many groups are left until you go again (as opposed to me being in rungroup 3 and knowing rungroup 5 is out).

anyway, i was put into the advanced green group without an instructor. i'm comfortable without an instructor but since i've never run on this south track at autobahn, i'd have to learn the track during my first session which is kind of confusing.

after the meeting i drove to my hotel and checked in. another smoking room because i made my reservation too late, but at least this one doesn't smell as bad as the last one.

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this morning i somehow managed to wake up on time, got ready and packed everything up (for some reason i didn't feel comfortable leaving stuff in this hotel room) and headed to the track.

emptied the car and had a brief drivers meeting. since i was put in the advanced group i wouldn't be doing the excercises (lane toss, slalom, threshold braking) but would be helping set them up and run them. again, no complaints, i was getting tired of doing those things every track event and was glad to help out. after lots of running around and driving to different parts of the track, we finally setup the cones for the braking excercise and ran all 3 beginner/intermediate groups through it.

after the excercises we picked everything up and had lunch. autobahn has a nice food place now. the hot dog was excellent.

after lunch, white group started on the track while i helped davey bleed the brakes on his r32. we finished just in time for our green group run so i ran back to my car and headed out on the track a bit late. on my second lap or so i realized i didn't even check the tire pressures but the car felt pretty neutral anyway. by the end of the session i still hadn't quite gotten a firm grasp on a good line around the track and some corners were still surprising me. i rode along with scott during his session in the blue group to see if he could give me a better line but he ended up asking me for suggestions. guess nobody really had a great line through the whole thing.

on my second session i finally figured things out and was putting down some quick laps. the car felt good although there are a few corners on the track that they are resurfacing so they are very slick. my tires squeal like pigs as i slide through them.

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so as i'm sitting here in my hotel room typing this i hear lots of banging on my door. i get up and go look through the peephole and there's a guy and a girl trying to get into my room. obviously their key doesn't work because they're trying to get into the wrong room, but they can't seem to grasp this concept and keep banging on the door and putting their keycard in the door over and over. they've been doing this for probably 2 solid minutes.

i don't really feel like confronting them and i figure they'll just go away when they realize that they're trying the wrong door. but then i wonder, if they go back to the front desk and say they can't get in their room and give them my room number, will the desk clerk actually check anything or will she just give them a working key to my room? so i watch them through the peephole and now they're just standing there by the door talking to eachother. i open the door and the guy says "what the fuck?!" and the girl steps back and i just look at them like "uh go away." the guy says "she rented us a room that's taken" and shows me his key card with 222 written on it and i say "yeah i guess so" and shut the door.

wow, so as i was typing this, my room phone rings and someone says, "this is the front desk, who is this?" "uh, josh" "what's your last name?" "stein" "ok, i don't have you in the computer, did you check in?" "i did yesterday" "ok, that room is supposed to be vacant" "well i didn't check out and my key still works" "were you supposed to be here one day and something changed and now you're there for two?" "uh, no, i was supposed to be here all weekend" "uh, ok"

so i'm guessing those two people just got screwed out of a room. wow, i'm really glad that i took everything out of my room when i left today, otherwise they probably would have taken my stuff. or maybe they saw that the room was empty and thought i had left. this place sucks.

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anyway, back to my story. after two sessions the day was over so we all headed to a restaurant really far away for our banquet. it was a many-course meal but nothing looked good so i didn't eat anything. i did have two hacker pschorrs, though. now i'm kind of sleepy but at the same time still freaked out about those people trying to bust into my room.