2023 Watkins Glen (Part 1)
17 Aug 2025“The Crash”
In the early 2000s, I owned a blue Acura Integra. It was a load of trouble, but when it drove well, it was great: the handling was tight, it had a beautiful shifter and the 8000 rpm redline was intoxicating. I had to sell it when I moved to the City (someone drove all the way from Manitoba to pick my car up), and then life and career got in the way. But a little sports car had been calling my name in the intervening years. 
Much later in life, when I was financially stable, despite having a one-year-old baby, I bought a Toyota 86. I tested Miatas and other cars, but I wanted to do track days and decided I didn’t want to deal with putting a rollbar in a Miata. Moreover, I preferred having a 2+2 (a four-seater coupe) so I could drive the kids around if I had to.
I did my first track day at Watkins Glen in 2021 and was hooked. The Glen is a historic track. It held one of the earliest US Formula 1 Grand Prix in 1961, a couple of years after the first ever US Grand Prix at Sebring in Florida. It continued to hold F1 races until the deaths of François Cevert in 1973 and Helmut Koinigg in 1974, after which there was a slow decline until its final cancellation in 1981. Since then, it has been upgraded and both NASCAR and IMSA run there.
I was looking for cheaper seat time, since the Glen is around $300 a day, and came across a little local track called Pineview Run where you could get track days for around $75-100 a day. I did about 6 track days in 2022 at Pineview Run. In 2023, I continued going to Pineview and did about 5 days there, and I was looking forward to my only visit to the Glen later that year. I did have a minor incident where I lost the rear end, hit a curb and chipped a wheel; but no real damage was done. I knew I was starting to push the limits of myself and the car. So I used the opportunity to put on some new Pirelli PZ4 225/45 rubber. A bit thicker, and bit grippier than my previous all-seasons which would whip the tail out if I breathed on the throttle. It’s a Michelin Pilot Sport 4S equivalent (at least according to Tirerack and tyrereviews.com), the quintessential dual-duty performance tire.
Pineview Run is pretty safe, and it’s hard to mess up very badly there since there is lots of run-off. The only negatives are maybe the tarmac isn’t so great, and you have to stay completely off the curbs since they are so high. It’s pretty popular, and there are always people there. I liked Pineview Run. Some people say that they have had disagreements with the owner, but I really have nothing bad to say about the place. That said, it’s no Watkins Glen, with its high speed curves, hard braking zones, and narrow confining baby-blue steel barriers. The Blue Heaven, if you will.
I was really excited to go to Mass Tuning’s event at the Glen. In my previous HPDE (High-Performance Driver Education) at the Glen with the BMW Club, I had had a very good instructor. She was very methodical and very cautious; a little too cautious, I naively thought. Mass Tuning’s HPDE was very different. It was mostly just one guy managing the whole show. Everything was very chill, you could get an instructor (or not), and choose your own run group, more or less. I had a good instructor, I forget his name, Ryan xxxxovic or something. He was super encouraging, and seemed impressed with my driving progress, and said “You’re driving at an intermediate level. You cleaned up your lines when you went out solo! That’s awesome.” Yo! Don’t say nice things to me, it’ll go to my head.
The day went well, and I managed to hunt down an Alpha 4C in the evening. I had previously spoken to the owner of the Alpha, and he wanted to go out together on track, and have some fun. I thought there was no way I could keep up with or catch him in his high-strung Italian sports car. But I did, and it was nice. He was very cautious, avoiding the curbs, and I was flying like a maniac, clambering all over the curbs to save milliseconds. It was very thrilling.
Track days and HPDE are more about community than anything else. It’s mostly a bunch of car nerds, obsessed with little mechanical details and milliseconds of laptime. My kind of people. I spoke to a couple of BRZ guys to figure out what mods they had on. There was a wide range of ability and car-prep. There was a guy in a supercharged, or at least, fully tuned BRZ with headers, suspension and 200TW tires. He was running in the 1:21s, which was very quick for our powerless little cars on a power track. For comparison, I was maybe running in the mid 1:30s. There was another beginner in a blue BRZ that was on his first track day and was very slow and unpredictable. I offered some advice about data capturing and stuff like that since I was more “experienced”. I saw a nice white BRZ tS driven by a kid from Boston who had had an incident and triggered his right airbags. I didn’t know what to say to him, but I suggested he have it towed to Boston instead of trying to drive it back. I felt really sorry for him at that time, given that he seemed so young.
Later that evening, I went and got dinner at a Thai place, and hung out with an airline pilot from Mass or Rhode Island or thereabouts. He was a cool guy. He tracked his Elantra N, and we both talked about parenting, our risk tolerance and how we both feel safer because we have track insurance. We discussed the oiling issue in the FRS/BRZ, and how I was running Redline 0W20 since I was worried about high oil temperatures and oil starvation in FA20 engines. Oil starvation would turn out to be the least of my worries.
That night, I camped out again under the stars in the little grove past the paddock. I started cold weather camping about 10 or 15 years ago, and I much prefer it to summer camping. It’s cold, quiet, and there no bugs. It went down to the 30s, rained a bit, and the ground was a bit uneven. So it was hard to get comfortable, but my sleeping bag was good and I was probably a bit too warm.
I wasn’t driving on Day 2, but I went out with my instructor in the morning in his car. He had a nice, fully-prepped, stripped and caged Miata. On the first lap, the flags were out, and there was a white BRZ in the wall at turn 10. After he hit the curb, his right rear must have had too much grip and his left too little, thus spinning him out into the left wall. The word on the paddock was that this guy was known to be super aggressive in previous events, and that he was crazy to have pushed so much on the first lap. I also saw a Formula Vee in the wall with a completely broken right rear suspension. Formula Vee is one of the biggest amateur racing open-wheel classes in the SCCA. I would never be so stupid now, would I, I thought. I would take my time, get the tires warmed up, feel out the track for grip, and then maybe start to push.
My kids had really wanted to watch me “race” my car, and were coming to join me later that day. I had booked a room at the Seneca Lodge so they wouldn’t have to camp out in the cold. Seneca Lodge is an amazing place with a lot of racing history and memorabilia; highly recommended. I went to a diner to get a good lunch. I had been eating packed sandwiches for most of my meals and wanted my second hot meal of the weekend. Curly’s restaurant hit the spot. Then I went out and got a coffee in Montour Falls at a place called North New York. The espresso was decent, and they buy coffee from a local roaster who was (formerly?) a physicist at Cornell. They suggested Jerlandos or the library as a place to hangout until my wife and the kids showed up. So I did both: I got a slice at Jerlandos, and went out to the library, which was a cool little space with a playroom the kids would have enjoyed. The family finally arrived at the Glen. They had had a long drive, and the kids were a bit cranky, so a bit of R&R was in order.
After resting up a bit, we headed out to try and get a parade lap at the Glen in the old rustbucket. However, we were stuck waiting in line for more than an hour because there had been another incident in the evening. This was getting a bit much, right? I had never heard of an event with so many crashes. After waiting for a while, we abandoned the parade lap and went out to get some pizza in the nearby town. Our room was super comfortable either: it right under the bar, it was loud at night, and there was a pillar running through it that I kept bumping into. Remind me not to book that room again. #traveltips. All in all, not a great night, and I would have preferred sleeping under the stars.
I was driving again on Day 3. I got up early, and went straight to the track, while my wife wrangled the kids through their morning routine. I was nervous about driving in the intermediate group since my car was slow and there had been so many crashes, but I psyched myself up and decided to go for it. I took it real slow in the first few laps, and slowly gained confidence. I stayed off all the curbs and paint. I braked well before the braking zones. But I was getting faster and faster, and conditions seemed OK - at no point did I feel like I was going to lose control. I passed many people, and was given a few point bys. I was still driving well within my limits. On maybe my 6th or 7th lap out, I took the curb coming out of Turn 8, and it felt real good. I took a wee bit of exit curb on turn 1 as well. On the next lap, I decided I wanted to feel a wee bit of inside curb on turn 1, and carried a little bit more speed through the corner. This put me wider out on the exit of turn 1, with my left wheel on the outer part of the exit curb. That part of the curb had a bunch of deep grooves that held water, and given the temperature was 30F overnight, it was probably ice. As I got on the gas, I lost the rear immediately, and started to spin. I was just a passenger as the car careened towards the wall. It all happened in a fraction of a second.
I didn’t black out or lose consciousness. I was well aware of what happened, and during the spin, even felt that I got on the gas too aggressively. I was thinking: “Oh F! It happened to me. I never thought it would happen to me.” After hitting the barrier, my car came to a stop. My head was stuck under the airbag. I got out from under it, and checked myself. I remember thinking, I only hit the clutch and brake like you were supposed to after I hit the wall, so I did roll back onto the track after my impact. That could have been dangerous.
The firetrucks and the medics pulled up. The medics checked me out, asked me where I was in the parking lot - in fact, he asked me where I came from and I said “Rochester, NY”. Then the guy said, sorry, my fault, let me clarify: “where were you parked on the parking lot?” The ambulance guy asked me to sign off on a waiver saying they asked me if I wanted to go to the hospital. He said, “You look fine, take some ibuprofen for the soreness.”
Back at the paddock, the adrenaline was still coursing through me. I called my wife: “I had a track incident, but I’m ok.” I ought to have inverted those clauses. Spoke to the organizers: “What did I do wrong? How do I make an insurance claim with track insurance? Has anyone else crashed before? How did you deal with it?” Hugged the friends I had made. Looked around for a body shop and tow truck. Eventually decided to just leave it at the “Boneyard” at the Glen, a bunch of mangled up cars that people have left behind after their crashes. Some car-guy gallows humor for you.
It was a long drive home. My wife was very supportive, just happy I was alive. I was happy that I had gotten track insurance earlier that year.