Post Track Decline

Today the clock moved a lot slower than normal.  Each second of each hour mocked me as it expired.  I knew today was going to be rough.  This must be how people who suffer from seasonal affective disorder feel.  I suppose it was inevitable.  By now I should have been able to circumvent the issue since the routine is the same every year.  The adrenaline rush from our most recent test weekend has evaporated.  I am left with a lack of motivation and the dull pain of longing for more laps, newer tires, and someone else's car to test.  Our destructive testing is hard on vehicles, and I wouldn't feel right about subjecting my own vehicles to such torture.  That's why we have customers in the first place.

One disappointment from the last track weekend is that we were not able to try the zip line.  We had requested permission to test our vehicle on the line to measure its acceleration, but we were denied.  The officials whined about exceeding weight limits and other nonsense, but they were just upset because they didn't think of trying to put a car on the zip line before we mentioned it.  Next year we're going to get in there and see if we can use the zip line to gain a bit of extra speed down the start/finish straight.  My back of the envelope calculations indicate we could gain as much as 20 mph as long as we can make the turn off of the zip line.

There are times when the rush of customers and operational issues at AcMo keep me so busy that I don't even have time to notice we're not on track.  This is not one of those times.  Even though we are preparing for war and planning a rescue mission for our stolen money, the undeniable call of the track is too strong to ignore.  The track season will soon conclude for another year, and it catches me by surprise every time.  I am never prepared to enter the hibernation period during the winter months.  We've tried to transition to street testing in the winter months, but the local regulations make it too expensive and difficult.  It is also impossible to approach a vehicle's limits on the street without causing an accident or hitting an animal or pedestrian, or sometimes both.  We've never done that but a couple of our competitors have.  That was one of the rare moments when we learned a valuable lesson from someone else's mistake.

We have considered setting up operations in Florida for the winter months to enjoy the tracks there, but the situation is too crazy, even for us.  The last time we sent an exploratory committee into Florida to do a feasibility study, they all disappeared without a trace.  We're still not certain what happened to any of them.  That does not instill confidence in the expansion potential of the area.  We already have operational bases in California, but since AcMo has been banned from most of the tracks out there, we tend to avoid traveling there any time of the year.  It seems that most of the sanctioning bodies felt we were too fast to be considered safe on track.  This is all a matter of perspective, but I'm not going to waste my time arguing semantics with them.  If the track boundaries aren't marked with signs and fencing, I consider that to be part of the track surface and therefore drivable.  They didn't agree with my assessment.  There are other tracks we can use during the winter months.  The Europeans haven't banned us as far as I know, and it is easier to recruit new business in areas that haven't heard about us yet.

Having hundreds of revenue streams provides AcMo the luxury to allocate resources to the areas that have the best acceleration and profit potential.  We shift our focus away from motorsports and into our other industries when the season ends.  The problem is that our passion lies with motorsports, so it is always hard to shift away from it for anything else.  I had hoped intergalactic space travel would become a suitable diversion, but building a working ship is so difficult that it feels like it is draining the life out of me.  This is an important project because we are going to need somewhere safe to go when the machines take control, and be certain that the day will come when that happens.  AcMo will be prepared, will you?

A plan had been created that would have involved consuming several thousand five hour energy bottles to keep us motivated until spring, but the medical team advised against that for a couple of reasons.  I'm already in enough trouble with the medical team for disregarding every bit of advice I've ever received from them, so I don't want to add one more instance to the ledger.  Besides, I don't think exploding internals is a good way to go if they are correct about the side effects of that much consumption.

The real solution to my dilemma is that I need to find a hobby that is rewarding and provides as much of an adrenaline rush as destructive track testing.  It sounds easy, but few activities can compare.  If we can come up with a winner, we will start the AcMo Off-Season Track Club for fellow drivers who are also suffering from withdrawal.  Maybe we'll be able to create a new sporting category.  I just have to figure out what that would be.  If anyone has any suggestions on how to keep the fire stoked during the down time, please forward them to our suggestion box.  Anyone who provides a reasonable solution will be rewarded with the knowledge that we appropriated your idea and profited from it as a result.

A little bit of luck can change everything.  I had a breakthrough during my lunch break.  Don't tell anyone because I'm not supposed to do it, but I was putting in some time on the simulator this afternoon when I discovered an issue with my driving.  I was having trouble modulating the throttle mid-corner and it was impacting my ability to keep the car from sliding.  This was an unrecognized bad habit that had been preventing me from extracting the vehicle's maximum performance.  It also explained why I have hit so many walls.  I won't go into detail how I fixed the issue because I can't give our competitors any insight into the few driving weaknesses I have.  The breakthrough occurred before I had even analyzed the data--which still looks like a bunch of squiggly lines to me.

This post was difficult to create because I didn't want to admit I was dragging because that might impact AcMo morale.  Now I have refilled my adrenaline reserves and excitement levels with one simple observation.  I don't know how I missed it for so long.  I now have an objective to complete during the off-season, and I will still be getting valuable track time, so this is what I call an amazing solution.  I shouldn't be so surprised because one thing AcMo excels at is solving problems.  We've had enough practice.  The sim is not a substitute for the real thing, but it is as close as I can get without putting the track limits in jeopardy.  I am pleased to report that I was able to test my findings while running a fool's errand earlier today, and the sim findings were verified by my real-life driving. No pedestrians or animals were harmed during my on-road testing.  The off-road portions are a different story, but we don't need to go into that right now.