Ninety Bucks A Lap

Ugh, frustration. I'm in the middle of an 810-mile round trip to Summit Point Raceway and my brand-new (well, not BRAND NEW, we'll get to that in a moment) right rear Hoosier race tire developed a hideous bulge after something like twelve laps.

Not that Boxxy (yes, I recently renamed one of my Porsches after her) was having a great weekend anyway. It's suffering from the typical Boxster 1.3g left-hand cut-out at the bottom of Summit Main's big downhill. The exhaust leak is clearly robbing power: Boxxy can't quite hit 130mph on the long front straight. The good news: I swapped the brake discs on Friday afternoon and they're fine.

Now for the depressing math.

I bought those Hoosiers as new-old stock in 2006 and have left them out for a couple of years. It's my fault that the tire died, probably. You can't treat race tires like street tires. Luckily I only paid $600 a set back in the day. The bad news is that I still have two more sets and I'm pretty sure they're no good either. Let's say I got ten good laps out of them, although as you can see from the laptime in the video (a dismal 1:32, albeit in traffic, against the 1:24.5 record for NASA Time Trial C, where prepared Boxsters compete) none of the laps were truly "good".

$600 for the tires $160 for fuel $100 worth of wear on my Pagid Orange pads and new discs $15 worth of horrifying energy drinks like "NOS GRAPE"

Total is about nine hundred bucks. For ten laps. Ninety bucks a lap. Well, any time I'm prepared to be depressed by something like that, I remember how much it cost me to run Grand-Am; maybe $500 a lap. So this is cheap by contrast, right?