SPEED at Wild Bubba’s & CoTA Racing Baptism

This weekend Racing Ready went to the environs of Circuit of The Americas (CoTA) to celebrate 1 month away from the inaugural Formula 1 race weekend in the United States. We came back with more surprises than anticipated!

I participated as an AMSOIL vendor with my friend Wyman Gilliam at Wild Bubba’s Wild Game Grill – Octoberfest 2012.  He hosted his fourth successful Meet, Greet & Eat get-together of grassroots F1 Austin region race fans.

This Octoberfest was so successful, in fact, that Bob Varsha Of SPEED came by to visit!  It was great to be able to visit & converse with him.

Also in attendance were Jason Anderson, manager of F1Nightly.con, along with the popular F1Nightly.com Girls.  Many people were posing with them for photo ops all night long…

After some overnight Facebook jockeying, early Sunday morning dawned with dedicated Formula 1 race showing up at the Haywood property (just NE of CoTA, near Turn 11).  This was coordinated & published by Friends of Formula 1 Austin Texas.  Here’s that post:

I just spoke to Mr. Haywood. He is allowing us to view tomorrow’s event from his hillside for $10 a person. Opens at 8:30 am.  Cash only.  Entrance near Elroy Road and Jacobson Road.  Who’s going?

We were there to witness the racing baptism of CoTA with none other than Mario Andretti driving the first racing speed laps ‘in anger‘, in a 2010 Renault R30 race car!  Here’s a video snippet.  I was amazed at how wonderful that shrill exhaust screaming sounded & how far it carried - turn it up!

All of us 10 plus witnesses were in pure aural ecstasy.  This was my first time hearing that SO unique sound.  I now know that hearing the racing broadcasts on TV is not at all a substitute for the real thing, live & in person.  We were all relishing the thought of how this is going to sound with all 24 race cars at speed in 4 weeks – WOW!

Racing Ready is humbled by this live, joyful F1 racing initiation & very glad to share it with you!!!

Dan

P.S. – In the interests of due diligence & correct reporting, we later found out that Mario Andretti wasn’t driving, but it was current Lotus Team test driver Jerome D’Ambrosio driving those first 5 CoTA baptism laps that got us all excited.  There was an indication that the engine was not performing properly, so they stopped the R30 laps.  We still thought it was a beyond this world experience!!!

P.S.S – Yup, I posed, too!  Who could resist…

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