PRACTICE AND QUALIFYING

The race was scheduled for Saturday afternoon at 1:00pm. The average high temperatures had exceeded 100 degrees for the past week and the forecast for Saturday was a high of 102 degrees. Given that we have been having overheating issues all season, this wasn't good news.

We had a practice session on Thursday afternoon, followed by qualifying at 6pm. Since Tim was qualifying the car he ran the entire practice session. Tim thought the car was a little loose and, of course, there were temperature issues.

Qualifying was a few hours later. Tim did a nice job. He qualified fourteenth, which was our best result of the season. Our car still seems a little down on power, but PIR doesn't have very long straights, so I think that accounted for most of the improvement.

The next day we had one session. I drove the whole time, since it was the last session before the race and I hadn't driven the car yet. I did a few laps to bed in some new brake pads and rotors, and then I came into the pits to make some changes to the car. While I was sitting there the car got really hot. By the time we got things under control I only had time to do a few laps, so we didn't really get much done. In spite of the problems, I thought the car handled pretty well, so we decided to leave it alone for the race.

THE RACE

The race started on time at 1:00pm. Tim got off to a good start and quickly moved up a few spots to eleventh. Unfortunately, the hotter the car got, the slower it went, and Tim ended up losing positions as he lost power.

Since the GS and ST cars were split into two different races our race was only two hours long. This meant there was no question that we could make it on one stop. Without the ST cars, and without any gravel traps, we weren't expecting a lot of full course yellows. We decided to leave Tim out until there was either a full course yellow, or he ran out of gas.

As a result of our strategy, most of the other cars pitted earlier than we did, so as they came in we moved up to fourth place. We were hoping to catch a yellow after the other cars pitted, but no yellow came. Since we were out so long, Tim's rear tires started to go off and he had severe oversteer. Nevertheless, he did a good job of driving around it without too much effect on his lap times.

There was only about thirty-five minutes left in the race when we finally ran out of fuel. The pit stop was under green. Since Tim was complaining about oversteer we only took on rear tires. The pit stop was very fast, but we dropped from fourth to sixteenth during the stop, which was about where Tim had been running before everyone started pitting.

When I first went back out on track I had pretty severe understeer, especially in the slower corners. It was really difficult to get the car to turn in for the slow stuff, but it was great in the banking. I thought that since the race was almost over I could go ahead and use up the rears and I started using the throttle to turn the car. This helped my lap times initially, but I drove the rear tires off the car very quickly and spent the last ten to fifteen laps sideways. The Hoosiers normally wear really well, but in that heat there was a big premium on taking care of the rear tires.

It seemed like I passed a lot of cars during my short stint, but I guess a lot of them weren't on the same lap as me because we only moved up from sixteenth to thirteenth. It was a little disappointing because I thought we ran a pretty good race. Our car just seems to heat up and lose power and the conditions didn't help that problem at all. Fortunately, our next race is in two weeks at Lime Rock where the air should be a little cooler. In the meantime the guys at Fast Metal Motorsports are hard at work chasing our cooling issues.