The Georgia Invasion
It was a BLAST!
11/12/2024 - 18/12/2024
We our back from our trip... this is what happened.
After arriving in Atlanta, and picking up our airport rental cars we
where greeted by our personal host Eugene, who is also a staff member at Jzilla Trackdays, and treated us for some fantastic Burgers in Atlanta. After food and some beers, everyone was tired from the flight so we went to our DriveHUB. Our driveHUB was located in Gainesville, we had a fantastic lakehouse with a stunning view over Lake Lanier (which also turned out to be the most haunted lake in the world). After spending 7 nights there, we did not encounter any evil spirits, so that was a bonus :)
On day one we introduced to everyone some American food culture, which becane everyone's favorite: Waffle House! Offcourse we also did other things than just stuffing ourselves with American carbs.. After having Breakfast with James from Jzilla Trackdays, we headed out to the Savoy Auto museum. They change the cars each month, and currently they where having a JDM hall, which had some rather unique Japanese cars on display.
Day two was quite dangerous... we driven downtown Atlanta to a Shooting range where we were able to shoot handguns, shotguns and semi automatic guns. After a short but firm training with each gun, we went into the shooting range.. we shot over 1900 rounds of ammo, enough to start a small war.
Day three we headed down to Atlanta Motorsports park for some warm up laps in the outdoor Go-Karts. Pictures don't do this track justice.. this was by far the best outdoor Go-Kart track any of us had every driven. With elevation changes of more than 20 Meters, this track is also probably the most dangerous outdoor go-kart track in the world.
Day four we went back again to AMP (Atlanta Motorsports park), this time to drive the main track with cars. - Hold on, this is gonna be a long write up -
We arrived in the early morning at AMP. The weather was cold, rainy.. nothing that says a lot of fun, but we were very very wrong! First we got greeted by the Jzilla trackdays staff, who once again had everything ready for us. All our participants got their wristbands and we went into the drivers briefing which was a very unique one.
Trackdays in the USA are very different to what we know in Europe, so we had to listen very well to the trackday rules. After that we went into a classroom where the basics of driving was explained to us, since it was for most of our participants the first time on a track in the USA, we asked the organisation to treat us like rookies.
After that we got introduced to John from AOA Racing. John DeBarros own a racing team that is very active in many different racing series in the USA. John brought for our Group a variety of cars existing of a bunch of Spec-Miata's, a Corvett C7 racecar and a Toyota Corolla GR, which turned to be a key player on this day. One of the biggest differences on US trackdays compared to European ones is that you should drive with the windows down. Another one is that the driving is divided into multiple groups;
Green is for full novices
Blue is for novices without instructors
Yellow is for experienced drivers
Red is for the advanced / pro drivers
Being rainy and cold, after the first stint we quickly realised that where soaking wet in the Spec miatas, and we started to head out in the Corvette and Corolla GR, which still had windows in them. One of our participants was black flagged immediatly after passing 20!!! cars in his stint with the corvette.. we where also immidiatly kicked out of the green group as our experience turned out to be a bit to good for that, so we all moved into yellow and red (which is a big compliment to our drivers)
The Corolla GR was by far the quickest car on track in these conditions! We where litteraly passing everyone else on track, this weas by far the most fun i have had on track, and all our participants could not agree any more..The car was flawless, very fast and perfect for the conditions we were in. This was an incredible first day on track!
The next day we did the same thing all over again, but this time it was dry and we had a much bigger track: Road Atlanta!
On this day we started off immidiatly in all the driving groups apart from Green.. again we were told that we should not drive in the green group, so we tried not to :)
Again here, we had a blast, this time with all the cars.. it also turns out that Spec miata's can be extremely fun and fast on track. We also got a few taxi laps with ouir friend Rafael Torres, who is an experienced racing driver in the US. He showed us the lines on Road Atlanta whilst taking us in his BMW 335i. Big thanks goes out to him for taking the time and putting his life on the line by getting on our passenger seats..
Other than that we meanwhile got introduced by the Jzilla Team to other experienced driver as the crazy europeans, which lead to meeting a lot of new people that invited us to come for some laps in their cars, which was definatly a cool experience as well.
Some of them had track prepped Corvettes, Supra's and BMW's. others had full self build kit cars, which is simply un-thinkable in Europe. These americans are (positively) crazy to say the least! Our second day of driving also ended without any major incidents, everyone had a massive blast on this fantastic track, in johns fantastic prepped cars.. speaking of being fantastic..
I need to put out a massive thanks to John DeBarros from AOA racing here.
John is a fantastic guy who builds very well setup racecars. Also his passion for what he does is incredible. We could not have been better of than with John, once again a very special thanks goes out to him and his team for making this trip as good as it was!
The rest of the days everyone went out to do a bit of their own thing, as there is so many things to do around and in Atlanta. A few guys went to rent some muscle cars a few of us went to another state to checkout the next track we will be going to, Barber motorsports park in Alabama (signup is open!)
We could make this write up even longer, but since pictures say a lot more than words (and are also less boring frankly) we will end it here.
Once again a very special thanks to..
Our AirBNB host for giving us a fantastic DriveHUB
Jzilla Trackdays for organising the best events.
AOA Racing for providing the best racecars.
Everyone who joined this trip for being the best travel buddies
And offcourse Eugene for being simply the best































