Barber Motorsports Park
 

As far as I can tell, I was the only one from Potomac region to attend the club race last weekend at Barber MSP. It was an 11 hour tow but it was well worth it. The track is beautiful but like Catherine Zeta-Jones in Intolerable Cruelty, it can also bite you. 15 turns, many of them blind, in 2.3 miles makes for a very busy lap. Designed by Alan Wilson, it is a very technical track with several 2 gear corners and some fast sweepers as well. You really have to be on your apexes at this track or you will be off. And if you go off, you will probably hit something.

On Friday in the first practice session, we had two "black flag all" situations. A total of 10 incidents involving 19 cars on the first day alone. I got a total of 15 laps all day because of shortened and eventually cancelel sessions for track cleanup and repair. They were also monitoring sound levels at trackside and a few people got sent home when they couldn't get their cars under 104 db.

Saturday and Sunday went better with fewer incidents and more track time. I was knocking 3 seconds a day off my lap time, so if I could have stayed 2 more days I would have been running with the top dogs!

As I said, the track is the best paved, smoothest, cleanest, best manicured, best maintained facility I have even seen or driven. It certainly must rank up there with any F1 facility but on a smaller scale. The only thing it doesn't have is power in the paddock. The entire track is inside of a large park-like setting with lots of landscaping, spectator areas, and sculpture all around. The museum is very modern and houses Mr Barber's collection of hundreds of motorcycles and some Lotus race cars.

It turns out George Barber is a 40-year PCA member and was often scene during the weekend tooling around the track in his Cayenne Turbo. He is a very generous guy to have built such a wonderful facility and made it available for all of us to enjoy.

Birmigham is a nice moderate sized Southern city with decent hotels and restaurants at reasonable prices. A definite step up from what you can find in Danville, Winchester, Lexington, or Watkins Glen, that's for sure. A being a university town, there is plenty of southern bred eye candy to keep your head spinning when you venture out from the track.

If you get a chance to do a DE or Club race at Barber in the future, it's an event not to miss and well worth the long drive or tow.

Karl

Isn't this the "official" PCNA track? Where corporate folks take their cars, I mean?

Barber is the home track for the Porsche Driving Experience (PDE) which is run by PCNA. It is also rented to many of the sports car companies, including PCNA, for use in doing press intros of their new models (see the Lotus Elise article in the latest Autoweek for an example). I don't think that PCNA has an "offical" track per se, but given their HQ is in Atlanta, the two closest tracks for them are Barber and Road Atlanta.

Karl