Putnam Park Road Course – Mount Meridian, Indiana
Putnam Park, that’s another story. After the accident at BIR, we only had 10 days until we had to leave for Putnam Park for the Inaugural CenDiv Regional Runoffs. We rebuilt the car as fast as we could. We cut the cage out of this one, bought a new shell, sleeved the cage into the new shell and set about swapping over all of the mechanical components that survived. We got the car painted at Coachwork Connection and headed to Indiana. I think the paint was still curing on the trailer ride down there!
Putnam Park is beautiful. Nestled in a little western Indiana valley. It’s got great off camber sections and tricky elevation changes, but my biggest memory from Putnam is the hay bales at the exit of the final corner. The final corner was a long, wacky, on camber, off camber, on camber corner that lasted forever. At the exit was the pitlane wall. Right there, like two feet from the track out. Cars used to hit the guard rail so much they started putting hay bales there.
Problem. When hay bales get hit, them move and sometimes they move onto the track. This is exactly what happened at the start of the IT regional runoffs race – somebody hit a hay bale, it came out into the track in front of the field and then mass chaos as everybody hit more hay bales the guardrail and each other. A Triumph came from behind me, hit a hay bale and flew up and across my hood. It didn’t hit anything, thank goodness. But I got a good look at the underside as it went left to right over the front of my car. I got the heck out of there. I turned hard right into the infield and got away from the chaos. When I came back around under the red flag, there were cars and hay everywhere – one even had a hay bale through the windshield and one had its front wheels up in the air with a hay bale underneath!
The rest of the race was uneventful, we ran away and hid, setting a lap record in the process and winning our first Regional Runoffs Championship! But that image of the underside of that Triumph TR7 going over my hood is my lasting memory of Putnam Park.