On Sunday, a friend and I drove up to College Station (90 miles north of Houston) where the Texas A&M Sport Car Club does it's approximately monthly autorcross on a giant sea of concrete that, as far as I can tell, was once used long ago for aircraft testing and now seems to be occasionally used for testing out various road-building technologies. Mmm.. civil engineering. For $10, you can take as many laps as you want, and there's always plenty of cool people around who'll ride with you and give you pointers about how to clean up your lines, where to go harder on the gas, etc.

Anyway, I was drinking plenty of water, but was still freaky hot. Add on the exhaust fumes and a violent ride while I was a passenger in this guy's Corvette Z06, and I wasn't doing too swell.

Him: "Hey, you want to drive it?"

Me: "Actually, I think I need to throw up now."

I tore off my helmet and barely managed to get out of the car before hurling all over the pavement.

Me: "I think I'm done for today."


This guy with the Vette turned out to be a Rice alum who had taken a sophomore programming class from me a few years back. Well, he passed the word around, and now I've gotten several other ex-students e-mailing me. Joy.


Anyway, it's interesting to see who shows up with what kinds of cars. This time around, there were probably four BMWs, three Corvettes, two Honda S2000's, two or three 60's muscle cars, a new Acura TSX, a Nissan Maxima (early 90's), a late 80's Supra, and a race-prepped Nissan/Datsun 240Z (no muffler, no rear bumper, something decidedly non-stock under the hood, etc.). Notably absent were any rice-boy tricked out cars. Probably the coolest car there was a custom-built racer. The guy imported one of the rare Mazda 20B 3-rotor engines from a Japanese Cosmo and built everything else around it custom. That car sounded more like a motorcycle and it was frighteningly fast. I would have invited myself along for a ride if not for the aforementioned barfing incident.