My first visit to Barber Motorsports Park. Wow!

Barber is a stunning facility: The beautiful rolling drive-in, the epic scale of the place (800 acres), the perfectly manicured grounds and landscaping, the unique inclusion of sculpture and the stunning modern museum and architecture all rivaled the layout and condition of the track itself. Hands-down the nicest track facility I’ve ever seen. Makes even Road America look pretty mid-market. Kudos to Mr. Barber for the vision and the execution. As with Road Atlanta, Barber is right off the highway outside of Birmingham Alabama. 

The gang (Todd, Shawn and Luke) and I packed up after our Road Atlanta weekend and drove over to the JZilla event the next day. As this was just a one-day event, it was a very busy but exciting 24 hours. Checked in at the main Barber gate then dropped our rigs and went over to the very cool training center to check in. 

The track per se is like a smaller, much more refined version of NCM (which takes nothing away from NCM): Blind corner exits, some off-camber, smooth and a couple of gotcha’s, including T13 where I went four wheels off (see other video) trying to early apex it.. 

Weather: sprinkled a tiny bit as we drove in, but the sun came out for most of the day and the temps were mid-60’s. In the last couple of sessions, the clouds rolled in and it just started to sprinkle during happy hour. We got really lucky at both Barber and Road Atlanta with weather. It was pouring rain the next day rolling out of Birmingham. 

Organizer: JZilla. They put on a very good event – very well organized and upbeat, but very full. It was apparently their busiest event of the year. The mix of cars was quite a bit different than we had at Road Atlanta. Barber is a lower speed track (my top for the day was ‘just’ 121 mph) and the attendees tended to be in lighter, lower horsepower cars that reward momentum driving. Since three of the four of us had not been to Barber before, we signed up for the intermediate (yellow) group. That ended up being the busiest group and, to be honest, a bit frustrating at times as clean laps were virtually non-existent. The largest unforced error was that we were all in much higher horsepower cars than most of the other cars in our group, further decreasing clear space. Completely our bad for not knowing the track & group dynamics ahead of time. 

Driving: No giant pucker moments except for the aforementioned off-road excursion at T13.. Track is very well taken care of.. No big bumps and the curbing is two-stepped and predictable. It's quick to learn, but there is nuance there which I can see taking a long time to master. 

After 5 days of traveling and 3 consecutive days on-track, I was really zonked but wanted to try and find a few clean laps during the last 50 minute happy hour session. I got two and managed a very sloppy 1:37.87 on lap 17 of 19 on 12 session old R7's. Certainly more fun than fast. Lol. 

I’d really like another visit at Barber as there was a lot of time left on-track. My Catalyst optimals were mid 1:35’s even with just a few clean laps all day. With a couple of days of faster traffic and fresh tires, I'd guess there's a :33/34 lap in this car as equipped. The analog was Road Atlanta - ran a 1:37.7 with intermediates on my first day and 1:34.4 on Day 2 with the advanced guys on fresh R7's. 

Regardless of lap time, and as always, I had a great time driving and hanging-out with my buddies Todd G and Luke L in their respective Zl1 1LE’s and Shawn in his TA/2 car. Todd’s alternator busted after session 1, but he took some really cool pics/videos of the rest of us. We'll call that silver lining.

Equipment of the day: Day 1 started on 6 session old R7’s – the ones I broke in at Road Atlanta the day before. Fresh tires at Barber would be fun, but would have been lost at this event/self-selected run group. Brakes were G-Loc R16. I had the pleasure of changing the rear pads yet again. It’s time for a new brake setup. :/

Running mod list: ‘WolfpaqC8’ is a 2022 C8 Corvette Z51 and has magnetic shocks/PTM. Mods from ‘Factory Stock’: Lowered ¾” front and back on Paragon collars, GM-spec track alignment, GM brake ducts (now removed) Girodisc rotors front/rear, G-Loc R16 track pads front/rear and SRF flush. Used, then new for Day 2 Hoosier R7's for this event.

Next stop – COTA (Circuit of the Americas) with Edge Addicts in December.