This overhead view of the Street of Willow Springs track was pieced together from satellite images retrieved from Microsoft's Terraserver site. The image dates back to the mid 90s so it doesn't show the completed horseshoe shaped section with the double apex turns on the north part of the track. The green track lines overlayed on top of the satellite image is a plot of the track data taken from a handheld GPS receiver (Garmin 12XL), and plotted with a Mac program, MacGPS pro. With Select Availability off, I thought it would be interesting to see how accurately the actual track layout could be captured using a GPS receiver. The data was taken during one 20 minute session on Sunday afternoon, when the cars were traveling around counter-clockwise on the track.

This is a 3.8Mb QuickTime movie of me spinning out at the left hand turn just following the chicane. One nice thing about having on-board video is that I can see the mistakes I made which led to the spin. It looks like I turned in just a fraction too soon, while also carrying a little bit too much speed. In the early part of the turn, I probably lifted up on the throttle every so slightly to scrub off some speed. But as the rear end lightened up and began swinging around, I tried to correct it with more throttle, but I just couldn't control it, and the rear end swung all the way around, and I just went along for the ride straight into the dirt. There was so much dirt and dust thrown around that the cars coming up from behind me probably couldn't see my car behind the dust cloud. I had to turn on my wipers to clear all the dust from the windshield. And I still couldn't see where I was and how far I was from the track. I slowly started to move and finally found my way back to the car. Also, while I was spinning, it looks like I was flailing my hands around on the steering wheel instead of keeping the wheels pointed straight ahead. Beacuse at some point during the spin, my headlights popped up and then back down. I suspect I must have activated the flash-to-pass feature. Total movie duration 42.6 sec. Frame size is 320x240, 30 fps, 22Khz, 8 bit mono audio. The recording was from a tiny CCD video camera clamped on the rear view mirror. Audio & video from the CCD camera were recorded with a a camcorder sitting in the passenger seat.