Dejan Murko

In January we took a trip to Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands. I was told there are amazing roads and the preliminary research confirmed that, so I decided that a Miata is a perfect choice to rent. I haven’t driven any version of it before, and it’s another one of the sports car benchmarks that I feel I need to experience to broaden my horizons.

Besides getting better at drifting this year, the other thing I wanted to do was to rent a sports car to broaden my driving horizons.

This last weekend was perfect for this. My GT86’s clutch died after a dynamic session and I was stuck at home. So on Thursday, I opened a local rental car app and booked a 2019 Porsche Boxster GTS. To my pleasant surprise, the car was free and I had it booked from Friday noon to Sunday.

Oh my, was I looking forward to the first track day of the season. I made some changes to the car setup in the spring, more specifically, added the Gruppe-S UEL headers (should’ve done it sooner), and camber bolts for setting negative camber on the front wheels. I also bought a tire set specifically for track days. Unfortunately, not everything went as I hoped.

It’s been a long break because of COVID-19 but June was then full of automotive fun, from twisties to drifting. After a few sessions, I started to get a nice rhytm and can almost connect the whole track in one direction.

Racegasmic is a drift track in Ljubljana and it’s one of the few, very welcomed, places where enthusiasts can play with cars in Slovenia.

It’s on a track used by driving schools over the week, moonlighting as a drift track on Saturdays. You can also rent drift-prepared cars there which is what I’ve done yesterday.

When the season started I was hoping I’ll be able to get in a few more sessions than last year. But as luck would have it, I’ve missed two over the summer, and this one was the first one after early August. Car track days are definitely secondary for the organizers, as it seems they had almost daily track days for motorbikes over the summer. Which is really a shame since car track days are always full, even when they give us a weird time. As it happened this time – Thursday later afternoon, from 17 to 20.

Unfortunately, the weather was not on our side for this session. We’ve had some dry minutes, but also pouring rain which meant that the track was wet the whole time.

The new tires I fitted for this season, the Cup 2, definitely do not feel at home on the wet. I’ve had to catch the car at least three times and had no chance of keeping up with FWD Type-R Civics which are usually clocking around the same time.

Grobnik is a racetrack located two hours away from me, near Rijeka, Croatia. I’ve started going to track days regularly last year when they renovated the track with new asphalt. It was also in the first year when I owned a car worth driving to the racetrack. 🙂