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| Its 2026? LET'S GO! |
Here at NMS-North, we're holding team meetings to determine some goals and performance targets for 2026. Some of the easy "no-brainer" goals will be to HAVE FUN and DRIVE SAFELY! If the team can accomplish those goals, then everything else is just icing on the top. Or maybe its gravy on the top. But not icing AND gravy, that would taste weird together. On the other hand, I've never tried icing and gravy together, but, uh, no, I'm not going to try it either.
Driving wise, the team is focused on two main areas. First off, driving on track. With the NASA Southeast group, we'll be driving at High Performance Driver Education (HPDE) track events, hopefully at multiple tracks in the Southeast region. Driving in the HPDE 3 group, these events are focused on improving driver skills, and not necessarily going faster, because the driving is not competitive. Just doing something that's fun to get better at it? Crazy! So far we've signed up (and paid for) the first two events at our home track Carolina Motorsports Park.
Driving on track tends to cost a bit of money, so one way that NASA offers cheaper events is that if you work as a volunteer at two weekends, you can then drive at a third weekend for FREE! As we often say, "Free is our favorite flavor." With events about every month all year, this offers plenty of time to get out to the track, do some volunteering, pay for some driving other weekends, and then earn a free weekend or two of driving too.
In a second area, NMS-North hopes to again compete in all the Carolinas Region Porsche Club of America autocross events, and again, have a lot of fun, drive safely, and in this case, place in the top ten of every event. We don't have a firm schedule yet, but we'll expect to see about six events spread amongst different sites in North and South Carolina. Naturally, if only 10 drivers showed up for each event we'd be IN the top 10, so we'll see how that turns out! Odds are that more than 10 drivers will be at each event, in which case we'll have to just try and drive faster.
Remember, our pro tip #33: Your goal as the driver is very simple: MAKE THE CAR GO FASTER!
