I had a plan. Pull the 20-inch wheels off Skipper, bolt on the 18-inch Apex wheels wearing Yokohama AD09s, go be a hero at Eagles Canyon. Real track tires, sticky sidewalls, the whole deal.

Then I couldn’t find the puck for my QuickJacks.

One little rubber block. That’s it. And I know for a fact somebody two garage bays over had a spare and would’ve handed it to me without blinking. I just couldn’t be bothered to go ask. So I ran my street setup: 20s on Michelin Pilot Sport 4S, which are lovely tires for driving to breakfast and merely adequate tires for a 100-degree August track day in Texas.

Nothing got lifted that morning. Not the car, not my expectations.

Here’s the part I didn’t see coming. I went faster anyway.

My personal best walking into today was a 2:19.36. That number had been sitting there long enough to get comfortable. A couple weeks back I did the math on what it would take to crack the top 100 on the Catalyst leaderboard and landed on 2:17.64. Just under two seconds. Easy on a spreadsheet.

Today, on the wrong tires, lap 4 of the last session: 2:17.34.

Two full seconds off my PB. Three tenths under the number I’d been chasing. And because the universe has a sense of humor, the leaderboard has moved since I did that math, so instead of the top 100 I landed at P103. I beat the target and the target ran away. That’s motorsport.

Session by session I went 2:19.75, then 2:17.91, then 2:17.34. What I’m actually proudest of is the consistency. Session one my laps were scattered across about six and a half seconds. By session three that spread tightened to three and a half. Nobody puts consistency on a leaderboard, but it’s the difference between learning a track and getting lucky once.

Now, the tires. If you’ve never tracked street tires in summer heat, let me save you the discovery process. I pulled the data afterward and the pattern is almost comical. Session three, lap one: peak grip 1.25g. Lap two: 1.23. Lap four, my fast one: 1.20. Lap five: 1.14. Lap six: 1.08, with a lap time of 2:26.58. That’s nine seconds slower than my best, in the same session, in the same car.

The tires didn’t fail. They got hot, got greasy, and started politely suggesting I calm down. Three or four good laps per session, then a very expensive slip-n-slide. Coolant backed it up, climbing to 109°C in the later sessions versus 100 in the cool morning air.

Which brings me to the video.

Catalyst stitches your best individual sections from the whole day into one “optimal” lap you never actually drove. Mine came out to 2:14.16. My real best was 2:17.34. So there are three more seconds sitting right there, already proven, already driven, just never in the same lap.

Watch where the gap opens. It’s mostly in the back half, and most of that is me being cautious with throttle because the rear had already told me what it thought of my ambitions. Some of it is me. Some of it is rubber. Data doesn’t care about your ego, it just shows you the line.

Would the AD09s have been faster? Probably. Not because peak grip is night and day, but because they’d hold that grip past lap four instead of tapping out. My problem today wasn’t how much grip I had. It was how long I got to keep it.

So the puck would have raised more than just the car. I found two seconds without it. Imagine what I’d have found with it.

Next time I’m asking the guy two bays over. Like a normal person.