Putnam Park 2010 (10-10th Motorsports)

This year was the first year that we drove to Putnam Park to attend a PDE organized by 10-10ths Motorsports. Putnam Park is about 30 minutes west of Indianapolis in southern Indiana, so it was a six hour drive down from Wisconsin. However, we'd heard the track was a great rhythm track and emphasis cornering/handling, so Chad, Damian, and Rick all signed up. While Damian and Rick both signed up for the weekend, Chad was only driving on Saturday due to scheduling conflicts. However, he did hang around long enough to give us some nice videos and photos from the track. Thanks, Chad!

Putnam, as promised, was an awesome track. There is a reasonably long front straight, but the rest of the track are all curves, and many off-camber and decreasing radius. Basically, the track was hell on tires but extremely fun. All three drivers - Chad, Damian, and Rick - completely annihilated their brand-new tires in the weekend. To run this track you're looking at lots of negative camber and lowered suspensions, but it was fun, fun, fun.

10-10ths Motorsports runs a pretty relaxed PDE. Their Advanced sessions was uncontrolled passing - pass anywhere, no points, no warning. The Intermediate sessions had pass anywhere with a point. So there was a bit of an adjustment from the standard PDEs. However, since Damian and Rick attended the club race school at Octoberfest this summer they were much more comfortable with this type of passing. Chad was game, but a miscalculation on a pass leading into a corner did result in the RRC club's first off-track excursion as he spun off turn eight! Go, Chad! :-)

Another difference at Putnam was the seriousness of the hardware. There was more big iron at Putnam than even Road America, and the field was so stacked that Damian and Rick elected to drop down a session to Intermediate since their cars were so low-end compared to the pack. However, the atmosphere was awesome and the driving was outstanding, if a bit crazy. We hope to be back to Putnam in the next year or so, and perhaps we'll see you there!