bradzilla94 Posted July 31, 2013 Share Posted July 31, 2013 Hi all. I'm interested in HPDE1. Going to Road Atlanta event Aug. 4-5 as a spectator. If I like what I see I'm planning to join NASA-SE and prepare for the Road Atlanta event in Sept. in the HPDE1 division. Now, here's my question. After gaining experience and getting to the level I feel ready to compete, which class would be best for me and can I use my car? I have a 2005 Ford Focus S121 Saleen, stone stock from Saleen. Again I'm looking to compete in the southeastern division. Thanks for any help. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kbrew8991 Posted August 1, 2013 Share Posted August 1, 2013 get through HPDE up to about level 3 - and in the meantime watch some of the racing and see what's interesting to you. An already built and/or dedicated race car may make more $$ sense than converting your nice street car. But plenty of people do go ahead and build their DE cars into their race car too. Just keep an eye out and your options open for what looks appealing while you work through DE The Focus would probably fit somewhere in one of the PT classes. I ended up kinda in the middle of both approaches - I alllmost converted away from the MR2s I had been doing HPDE in for SpecE30, but ultimately decided I wanted to go ahead and do PT with one of them. I had a quote in hand for the rollcage install in my street/TT/DE MR2, and was searching on a whim just to see if there were any already caged examples out there. I had never seen one for sale before, but did happen to come across my current race car that was half the cost of the cage install itself. The whole car was cheaper than the cage install - yeah! Been racing that ever since. In TX there's a pretty big PTF class and almost no SpecE30s, so I've been lucky that I went that route when I moved from SE to TX region and went that direction on cars. If I had stayed in SE it probably wouldn't have been the right call car wise, even though buying the already built example was considerably cheaper than converting the street car. It's no fun to race in a class of one or two with a bunch of out-of-class people getting in the mix. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bradzilla94 Posted August 1, 2013 Author Share Posted August 1, 2013 Great perspective, sounds like some good ideas. Thanks for the info., there is a lot to be learned from other people's experience's. Hope to hear from others as I'm all ears. Thanks again! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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