This is a big enduro weekend for the Autofiends; the Loverman has teamed up with Murilee Martin to bring you the 25 Hours of Thunderhill, and I have just returned from the “other” NASA enduro of the weekend, Friday’s eight-hour NASA-SE event at Road Atlanta. There are two cars in the above photo. The first is the supercharged Miata of Voodie Racing, driven by yours truly; the second is Robertson Racing’s mighty ALMS Ford GT. One of these two cars won the enduro overall, while the driver of the other car was forced to retire at the six-and-a-half-hour mark when the burning left front brake threatened to ignite the copious in-cockpit fuel vapors. No prizes for guessing that I didn’t win! Click the jump for links to photo galleries of the event and a few close-ups.

Here’s another shot of that fabulous Ford GT. Nothing against our friends out in California, but there’s a reason Road Atlanta is one of the “Big Five” American road courses: it’s fast and vicious, with a long string of blind hills culminating in the vicious, car-eating Turn 12. I’d never driven Road Atlanta before, nor had I set foot in a supercharged Miata, so the first twenty laps of so were fairly terrifying. There’s nothing quite like cresting a blind hill with a half-million-dollar ALMS car to your inside and an opposite-locked old Spec E30 to the outside!

In addition to the superstar GT, there was a selection of fascinating driver/car combinations including the infamous Eric Meyer and his flat-black Grand-Am RX-8. Not terribly fast in a straight line, it was still capable of inspiring awe with Meyer’s tire-smoking, flame-spitting entrances to the back corner complex.

My race, while not successful, didn’t end in tears. We had what was shaping up to be a great mid-field race against a selection of much faster cars in the “E1″ class when the supercharger belt went missing. A quick replacement restored the Miata’s power and then some, permitting me to knock three seconds off our previous lap times. Even a high-speed run off the end of Turn One courtesy of a brake-checking fellow Miata didn’t end our day… but a fuel supply problem that filled the cockpit with nausea-inducing fumes and emptied twelve gallons of 100-octane race gas onto the rear suspension in the course of only twenty laps caused me to pull the car in at the 6.5-hour mark with a splitting headache, blurred vision, and a needle to the left side of the “E” mark. Still, we kept the car off the wall, which was more than some of our competitors can say, and we finished three-quarters of a tough race. We’ll do better next time. [Photos By Dave Everest]

For more photos, check out the Flickr set here: Road Atlanta Enduro