Day One --- Afternoon
Rat Race
After lunch it was back over to the skidpad for the Rat Race. This was done in M3s. All the nannies were disabled. Cones are setup on the skidpad in an oval shape. Two cars line up on opposite sides of the long side of the oval. There's a green start cone on each side the you pull up next to. The goal of the event is to do laps around the oval (counter-clockwise) and complete the laps before your opponent does. The entire purpose of this activity (in my mind at least) is proper throttle control. The skidpad is ridiculously slick so putting down tons of power does not help you finish your laps first. Do that and the backend walks right out on you and if you spin around you're disqualified. The instructor calls out who is in the lead over the radio, so there's a competitive nature to this event. I like this one. It's relatively low stress, and, drifting around the skidpad is loads of fun. I didn't win.
We used these M3s for most of day one:
These three were all individual colors.
Long autocross
After the rat race we did another, longer section of autocross. This was using different portions of the track that weren't being used for the M2s. We used M4s for this. This activity introduced trail braking and a tricky high speed chicane at the end of the straight. This was tough. We ran for a long time. I was getting worn out by the end. I had the A/C set to 60F and on the highest setting and I was still hot. My left leg was tired from bracing my body back into the seat. That probably sounds miserable, but it was still an absolute blast. The was the longest, fastest, section of track we did during the first day. At the end, the front tires were nice and toasty.
They also stunk like burning brakes and you could feel the heat coming off of them after you got out of the car.
Timed autocross
After a short break it was back into the M2s for timed runs on the earlier autocross section. These runs were done in Sport+ mode. Each driver took turns doing one lap. Each lap was timed. At the end of the lap you needed to stop in a stopbox. The stopbox was basically four cones, set up at the corners of a square. The timing gate was at the entrance to the box. So, you needed to get your entrance speed just right to stop the clock, but not so fast that you overshot the box. Overshooting the box added 2 seconds to your time. I don't like stop boxes. We got to run five laps, my best recorded last was 26.833 seconds. After everyone was done with their five laps we kept running extra laps, but not for official times. I did eventually get my time down into the 25s, but you'll just have to believe me though because I have no evidence.
Here's a picture of the orange M2, because I don't really have any others to show for this section.
The M2 was wrapped in orange. I snagged this pic to show how the reflector in the front bumper was covered over. It still looked bad ass and had a wrapped carbon fiber roof.
Timed long autocross
It was getting late in the day by this point (3:30ish PM). The last thing was two more laps on the longer autocross section using M3s. These were timed using a stopwatch. All three run groups (blue, green, red), ran back to back to back to see who turned out the quickest time. This was good fun. I finished in the middle of the pack with a 1:26.07 for my two laps. First place turned out a blistering 1:21.92.
Dinner
Dinner was provided by the Performance Center and hosted in the same area as lunch. This was primarily traditional German food, the names of which I can't remember. I do remember there was some apple pie/cake that was quite tasty. I'm pretty sure there was beer available as well, but I didn't have any. After dinner, around 6pm, we were driven back over to the hotel (in the hotel shuttle, not anything fancy). I was thoroughly exhausted, physically and mentally. I got back to my room and went to bed maybe 45 minutes later, well before 8pm local time.