Mid Season Blog

So I’m now back in Seattle enjoying the nice weather that we get during the summer. I havn’t been home for over 2 months and its nice to have a little break. To give you an idea of what I’ve been up to, in 7 weeks i have flown 22,655 miles starting my trip in Seattle – L.A. – Taipei – Chengdu – Wuhan – Hong Kong – Sepang – Shanghai – Wuhan – Seoul – Beijing – Ordos – Beijing – Seattle.

In L.A. I competed in rounds 5 & 6 of the Pacific F2000 Championship at Cal Club Speedway in Fontana. In race 1 on the opening lap i had a collision with another driver and it left me with a broken front right control arm which took me out of the race. But we recovered in race 2 with a second place finish on the podium, thanks to my awesome team PR1 motorsports for doing such a great job of fixing the Our World Live/C.J. Wilson’s Childrens Charity #26 car.

So that weekend was done and it was time for me to make the long journey back to the far east. I flew from L.A. directly to Taipei for my layover, then over to Chengdu, China for rounds 3 & 4 of the VW Scirocco R-Cup Asia series.

This was my second time going to Chengdu, I’ve been here a couple years back when i was 15. I arrived a few days before my next race so i had some time to play. My parents met me there and invited some family friends to come watch the race. the Tuesday before the race weekend one of our friends brought out his brand new Ferrari F458 Italia, and demanded that i take him for a spin on the track. Of course i would not say no to a offer like that. So we rented the track for half a day and i got to play with this shiny new toy. It was also a great chance for me to learn the track which I would be competing on in the days to come.

This weekend I would also be shooting a promotional video with YouKu (Chinese version of YouTube) for Volkswagen to use for their PR campaign in China. Shooting a commercial, as i found out, was actually pretty hard work. each 5 second scene took over 2 hours of staging and multiple takes to get perfect.

The race quickly approached and i had ample time to counter my jet lag. It was rock and roll time. The qualifying gap from p1 to p20 was within a second. Race 1 saw a hard fought p6 finish after qualifying p17 for the start. This meant that with the inverted top 8 finishing positions to grid race 2 that i would start in P3. I took advantage of the standing start and was side by side with P2 going into the first turn. unfortunately the Pole sitter under estimated his cold tires and spun right in front of us. I tried to avoid him but my Our World Live #10 VW Scirocco R-Cup car was collected in what was a 6 car pile up to end my race 2 early yet again.

So now i had some time before the next race. Our series manager approached me with a job offer during this break. He and the guys at Volkswagen hooked me up with a job at Lamborghini to be an instructor at their Track Day Experience and Driving Academy programs. A driving instructor for Lamborghini… isn’t this want every boy fantasizes about?

So after the weekend i flew back to my hometown where i grew up, Wuhan, Hubei. spent the few days i had there visiting my extended family and relatives, some that i haven’t seen for years. Next i went with my family to Hong Kong for some shopping. Yay! Before flying out to Sepang, Malaysia for my new job.

I’ve never been to Malaysia before. The first thing i noticed when i got out of the airport was how hot and humid it was… even at 10pm. But that didn’t bother me at all, because of how excited I was to start my new job along with all it’s perks. I mean, driving Lambo’s all day, all expenses paid, a pay check on top of it, and just the job title is a killer when it comes to the ladies. Anyways, the event went on for 2 days, both were Track Day Experience where customers would come in and we take them around for hot laps. I clocked 8 hours of track time per day in my Gallardo on the Sepang F1 Circuit. And as a bonus it rained for half the day during the second day so i got to slide around! So much fun and i got to fly back with a fat check in my pocket.

So from Malaysia I flew directly to Shanghai to pick up my friend Aleks who was coming to China to join us in our next round of the Scirocco Cup. We stayed at the Park Hyatt Hotel on top of the World Trade Tower in Shanghai. It is the 2nd tallest building in the world dwarfing everything else in the magnificent city. My hotel room was on the 98th floor, which was 10 meters taller than the tip of the Empire State building in New York. Breakfast and the gym/pool was on the 102nd floor and we had a drink at the highest bar in the world on the 106th.

With Aleks, we rounded back to Wuhan for a few days and then flew out to Seoul in South Korea. My family was invited by the Governor of Hubei to come to Hanseo University. There we toured their school of aviation where they had their instructors take us up in a Cessna airplane. Once we were in the air the pilot let me take over for about 10 minutes. I was flying the thing like I was in Top Gun!

So now it was time to put all the fun aside for a bit as the next rounds of the Scirocco Cup was approaching. This time in Ordos, Inner Mongolia. I had always imagined tall grassy highlands, but when i got there it looked more like the desert drive from L.A. to Vegas. But what shocked me the most was in such a rural place the streets where flooded with more super cars than Monaco. The population here is just over 1 million people, but there are over 7000 billionaires in the city, not counting all the millionaires. This is a place that is rich in natural resources like iron, coal, and natural gas.

Qualifying for the race weekend was again a challenge. I managed P10 only 0.301 sec off of the pole time. And in Race 1 once again i worked my way up into a P7 finish. So this time i start race 2 in P2. I managed to make a good start to keep P2 and was able to finish a complete lap this time. but just after lap 1 there was a crash and the safety car was called out. On the restart the leader bunched us up with a bad start and we went 6 cars wide into turn 1. This wasn’t going to end pretty for someone, and again that someone was me. While braking for the turn another car used me as his brakes and pushed me right into the side of the car along side of me. the impact was hard enough to take us both out of the race with damage to my front right tires. It was a really tough pile to swallow, as I’ve been taken out of race 2 in all three weekends of the Scirocco Cup, and due to no fault of mine. But as the saying goes “That’s Racing”.

I had one last stop to make before coming back state side. That was in Beijing for another 5 days of instructing with Lamborghini. The first and the last days were Track Day Experiences like in Malaysia. We also had the Driving Academy for 3 days where we tough our customers how to properly drive on the race track, along with an oversteer exercise where we wet down a skid pad and have the students perform a 180 drift into a check point box. and also a pendulum exercise where we do a right hand drift into a left hand drift continuously. Needless to say it was again a lot of fun and a lot of work.

So that pretty much sums up what I have been up to for the last 7 weeks. And to think that all this has only put me at the mid point of my season, which will go until the second week of December. But the last few days i had to relax in Seattle and recharge my batteries has been great.

Next I’ll be flying out to Ohio for my debut in the American Le Mans Series where I’ll be driving the PR1/Mathiasen Motorsports Our World Live/C.J. Wilson’s Childrens Charity  #52 Le Man Prototype Challenge car. Watch me live on ESPN3 or delayed replay on ESPN2 and ABC!