In the "What motorsports moment are you proud of?" thread, there was this comment.
Mr. Peabody said:
I'm so overwhelmed by the sheer number of motorsports moments I'm not proud of to actually think of one I am.
And, yeah, I'm sure we all have a moment or two where we've made a complete fool of ourselves while behind the wheel of a racecar.
Mine was the time I co-drove my friend Scott's Focus RS. The FLR SCCA was holding a team event, where you had to pick a team of 3 drivers, each in a different class, and you accumulated points depending on your standing. It was in late October in New York, so the conditions were cold, and I decided it would be best not to try and run my supercharged Miata on nearly-corded BFG Rivals in 40 degree weather. So my friend Scott was running his Focus RS in Pro, and was looking for another teammate and I asked if I could run his Focus RS in D/Street, and then we would try and find a third on the day of.
That morning, we found our third, our friend Joe in his G/Street Focus ST, and dubbed ourselves "Team Sole Focus". My friend Scott gave me a rundown of all the bells and whistles of his RS and upon mentioning the RS-unique bumper that was hand-laid in Germany with a multi-week lead time and 4-stage blue paint, said we should probably be careful not to punt any cones in the cold weather and break said front bumper. I especially made a note, because while I don't think Scott would expect me to buy him a new bumper, I'd feel guilty as hell.
I was in the first run group, and Scott was doing course work. I decided to play it safe with my first run and just acquaint myself with the car, since I'm used to driving a very analog RWD car. I kept it clean for the half the course, and then decided to get on the throttle and see what the car had through one very fast segment. The car got a little ahead of my hand speeds though, and the OEM tires were also not very happy on the Seneca Army Depot surface, and so the very last cone in the slalom I center-punched with the front bumper and launched into low orbit. And it was right in front of the work station that Scott was working at. Oops. I came back into grid and discovered that fortunately I didn't damage the front bumper, but I still felt pretty sheepish when Scott later joked "That was a hell of a power move. You miss every cone on course and then blast one right in front of me."
Already feeling dumb, I got to my last morning run without hitting any more cones, although my times were pretty dismal because I just could not get a handle on the car. The course had a weird start interval and you pretty much had to go exactly when the green flag was thrown, or else you had to wait for the course to completely clear of the cars ahead of you. I was anxious about this and was pretty jittery on the starting line, not wanting to snarl everything up. The flagman threw a green flag and somehow I stalled the car, but I'd had enough juice that the car lurched forward and rolled into the starting beams. I panicked and tried to get it restarted as fast as possible, and then by power-cycling it, I reset the driving mode from Track Mode to Normal Mode, although I didn't know it. I got going, didn't snarl up traffic, but then part way through the course the traction control started kicking in and pulling power, at which point I realized it had reset itself to Normal Mode.
Our team results ended up being all around disastrous, although I was somehow the only one to grab points, and we renamed our team from "Team Sole Focus" to "Team UnFocused"
So, TLDR, plastered a cone in front of the car's owner after being told to be careful not to hit a cone early in the morning, then stalled said car on the start line, then coasted into the timing lights while I tried to restart it, then further blew the run because I forgot to put it in the correct driving mode.
