After three days of SEMA, our group from Optima left Vegas Friday morning and went to Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch in Parumph, NV. Spring Mountain is a country club for racers and people with high end sports cars. The club house features 8000 square feet of resort-style amenities, including a lounge, men’s and women’s locker rooms, massage and fitness center, pool and jacuzzi, an executive conference room, billiards, custom poker facilities and nine plasma televisions. An outdoor veranda with barbeque area and fire pit connects to a 23-foot-tall viewing tower of the track. There is also a racquetball/handball court, an indoor gun range and racing simulators. A one time initiation fee of $15000 plus maintainance fees of $200 month will get you access to the club house, road coarse and access to their in-house professional driving instructors, including Ron Fellows. They also offer six different racing/driving schools, including the one GM gives to all new ZR1 Corvette owners They have two main track configuratins; the North/South road course is 2.1 miles and the west “Radical loop” is 1.5 miles.

Optima rented the track for the afternoon so after lunch at the clubhouse we were able run the short coarse in a Lotus Elise orMini CooperS. We ran two 30 minute sessions of lead follow behind an instructor. The first session was slower paced so we could get to know the track and the car. The second session was fast paced and alot of fun, especially since I had never driven a Lotus before or done any road racing. The Lotus was hard to get in & out of but it was easy to drive and very forgiving on the track. Then we were able to ride side-by-side with an instructor in a Radical race car for an even faster paced 15 minute heavy g-force laden ride around the 1.5 mile short coarse. I had a smile on the face the whole time, what a rush.

Afterwards we were able to run the Lotus or Mini thru an auto cross course that was setup for the Optima Ultimate Street Car Invitational. I picked the Mini CooperS for the autocross coarse since I had never driven one before and I wanted to see how it would do. While the Mini CooperS is no 1/4 mile racer, it has good power, it’s light-weight and it impressed me how well it handles.

Not that I need another expensive hobby, but I really had alot of fun and really enjoyed road racing and autocrossing. I wish we had more time so I could have run the Mini on the road coarse and the Lotus in the autocross. But the sun was setting and everyone was getting hungry. So after a day of racing we went to dinner and then to the Hotel for the night.

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This isn’t really car computing related, but here is some exclusive video after hours at the Lexus booth at SEMA 2009. Apparently there are no other places where you can get a first hand view of the LFA engine running so we are posting the engine piece now and will post the rest of our video review later. For those of you who are crazy about Lexus, you can download the ring tone on our forums.

Behold the Giovanna Wheels display at the SEMA show.  The wheel and tire guys (and Chrysler) are buried in a basement, out of the way of most of the SEMA traffic, but the trip downstairs is a must for any SEMA attendee.  As much as the economy has hit everyone, the wheel and tire guys seem surprisingly unaffected and the Giovanna “champaign room” was the epitome of excess.  

If I didn’t know Giovanna was a wheel company, I’d have no idea what they were trying to sell.  It was so dark in that room, one almost had trouble making out the scantily-clad *ahem* models, who were walking around.  Someone even told me they had some Ferraris and Bentleys in there, but I barely noticed. 

The economic downturn did hit the aftermarket grille companies hard.  Either that or the Giovanna guys hired all the remaining pros spokeswomen in the Las Vegas metro area.

MrGrille had to resort to dressing mannequins in tight-fitting tanktops, with complimentary MrGrille stickers tucked suggestively into the front of their pants.  I was hoping to snap a picture of someone snagging one, but I didn’t want the MrGrille guy to think I had some kind of weird thing for his lady friends.

Ford brought several of their soon-to-be-released Fiestas to SEMA and bribed people into test-driving them, by promising a ride in the passenger seat of a Corvette, driven by an instructor from the Bob Bondurant driving school (I guess a ride in a Mustang wasn’t incentive enough).  I knew I couldn’t fit in Corvettes, but if they let me beat on a Fiesta, I’d be happy to do so…provided I could fit.  I had a little trouble with my left knee in between the steering wheel and door, but not so much that I couldn’t crank hard on the wheel and make the Fiestas wheels scream through the turns on the autocross course.

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