PRACTICE AND QUALIFYING

There was a Thursday test day, followed by Friday practice and qualifying, and a race on Saturday. We had two half hour sessions on Thursday, which isn't much time to get anything accomplished on a 2.2-mile track with eighty other cars, but we did our best.

I split the first session with my co-driver, Tim Pappas, and we quickly determined that we were still down on power, as we have been all season. At one point, I exited turn four and received a point-by from a lower class ST car, which then proceeded to out-drag me down the straight to turn five. As usual, the handling was quite good and we seemed to have sorted out the brakes, although the heavy braking required at Laguna Seca made wear a pressing concern.

We made a few minor shock adjustments for the second session and the handling got even better, but we still had the power issues. Fortunately, we had a new motor coming the next morning, and since our lap times weren't too far off, we hoped that the motor would put us where we needed to be.

There was a practice session that was held early Friday afternoon, but we ran into a few complications with regard to the motor installation and had to skip the session as a result. I wasn't really too concerned about this since I was happy with the handling of the car.

Qualifying was held at 4:15pm. Tim qualified the car and I went and watched the session in turn nine. We made an unusual decision for qualifying regarding the tires. Since we really had no idea where we stood, we decided that Tim needed to stay out for the entire session and evaluate the car. As a result, we sent him out on old rubber so he wouldn't beat up his race tires.

I had a stop watch with me and I was pretty happy with what it showed. Even on the old rubber Tim managed a 1:40.9, which was only good for nineteenth position, but would likely have been much better on stickers. I reasoned that the new motor must have made some sort of a difference because we had both been much slower than this on the test day.

In looking at the data, we had picked up a significant amount on the straights, which was encouraging. Fortunately, we had one more practice session on Saturday morning prior to the race. We tried a few new things that didn't really work like we had hoped, so we went back to Tim's qualifying configuration for the race.

THE RACE

The race started at 2:45pm on Saturday. The race was scheduled as the lesser of 200-miles or two and a half hours. It didn't take a genius to figure out that with eighty cars on a 2.2-mile track the race was going to end at 5:15pm.

We had a paperwork issue on Friday that caused us to start in 37th position on the grid. In the rush to install the new motor we forgot to nominate Tim as the qualifying driver, and therefore got shoved to the back of the GS grid.

Tim got a good start, as usual, and steadily moved through the field in spite of a preponderance of yellow flags. Tim ended up being in the car for about 45 minutes and did somewhere in the vicinity of six laps under green, which was essentially a repeat of his experience at VIR the previous race. The only issue during his stint was some incidental contact with a Mustang in the corkscrew that banged up the right front corner a little bit.

When Tim pitted there was an hour and forty-five minutes remaining in the race. We took fuel and tires and completed the driver change. The pit stop was very well executed, and I rolled back out on track to take my position in line behind the pace car. I noticed a small vibration and a little noise coming from the right front where the Porsche had come in contact with the Mustang, but initially it didn't really seem to be bothering the handling, so I didn't worry about it.

There was a brief restart, followed by another full course caution period, and more laps behind the pace car. I still had a lot of ST cars in front of me in line, so it was difficult to evaluate the power of the car, but I was slightly faster in a straight line than the ST cars I was near, which was an improvement over the Thursday test day.

The next restart actually produced an extended period of green flag racing. We had a component failure that sent the engine into limp mode and I think it probably happened sometime during this period because after a few laps it seemed like at least two GS cars would pass me on every straight. Shortly after this the brake pedal started to get really soft and I had to pump it furiously with my left foot down every straight for the rest of the race. Finally, the contact that Tim had with the Mustang must have knocked the car out of alignment because I couldn't get it to turn in for right hand corners. I was driving a slow car that wouldn't stop or turn right in the midst of a very competitive field of GS cars, which was about as much fun as lighting your hair on fire and putting it out with a hammer.

By virtue of our strategy and quick pit stop we were pretty far up in the running order by the time all the GS teams had cycled through the pits, but I couldn't pedal fast enough to stay in front of any of them. There were some cars that were pretty far back that I may have been able to hold off, but every full course caution would bring a new pack of cars to my rear bumper, poised to freight train me on the ensuing restart.

If there is a bright side to any of this it would be that if "limp mode" actually succeeds in saving motors we won't have to worry about engine failure because I have now spent the entire season driving around in limp mode. The only thing keeping me positive at this point is the comforting thought that I have a very good team behind me, and I know that very soon we will have a competitive car.