We were the support race for the IRL event at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Of course, we ran the 2.21 mile road course while the IRL cars stayed on the oval.

PRACTICE AND QUALIFYING

We had a one hour and forty-five minute practice session on Thursday afternoon. We were late getting out and consequently had only about an hour of testing remaining. Once on track I had gotten a couple laps in when the "engine hot" warning appeared on the Motec dash. I came in and the crew told me to continue on to technical inspection because our transponder wasn't working. I immediately turned off the car when I got there, but after a few minutes we started to lose all the water.

After some work in the garage I went back out, but on the out lap the "water level" warning light came on and I came back in to the pits. After some more work in the garage I went back out and the same thing happened again. That brought an end to the session. We didn't get much done as a result.

On Friday we had a 9:00am practice session. It was raining and the track was very wet. I did a few laps to make sure the car wasn't going to overheat, but since the weather was expected to clear up we didn't make any changes to the car. Manuel got in and did a few laps. The car didn't overheat or lose any water.

There was one more session prior to qualifying. Since the starting driver has to qualify according to Grand Am rules, Manuel was scheduled as the qualifying driver, so he took the entire session to get ready for qualifying.

Qualifying took place in the early afternoon. I went and watched Manuel from turn one. He stayed out for the entire session since we had had such limited track time. He managed a 1:23.2, which was good enough for fourteenth out of twenty-seven GT entries. Considering that we had no time to work on the handling of the car, and Manuel had hardly driven it, we were pleased with the result.

We had one more chance on Saturday morning during the thirty minute warm up. We had time to try a couple shock changes and the car seemed to get a little better. We tried to use the information from the session to guess at a race setup.

THE RACE

The race had a scheduled start time of 3:00pm on Saturday. Manuel got us off to a good start and picked up a few positions early in the race. There were three full course yellows during the first thirty minutes of the race. During the third yellow we brought Manuel in for fuel. This put us on a two stop strategy and left us hoping for a second yellow within our fuel window.

Fifteen or twenty minutes later Manuel got hit in the left rear by a Daytona Prototype. The impact pushed the bodywork against the left rear tire and the tire started to produce a lot of smoke, particularly on the banking. After some discussion, we brought Manuel in to the pits for fuel, tires, and a driver change. While I was latching up my seat belts I looked down and realized that I wasn't wearing any gloves! I would have just left without them (and hoped that I didn't get black flagged), but Manuel quickly took off his gloves and handed them to me. After checking to make sure I was wearing my helmet, I headed back on track.

It was a good pit stop by the TPC crew and in spite of my showing up without all my equipment we got back out quickly. Unfortunately, we made an extra stop under green and there was no way to recover from that. When I got back on track we were back in twentieth or worse. As if that wasn't bad enough, we still had to stop one more time.

After a few laps it became clear to me that in addition to all of our other problems we had missed the setup by a big margin. We've gone a different direction than our teammates with the car, and so far, it hasn't paid off. It seems that the Hoosier tires, although they are slicks, are not really pure race tires. The combination of the tires and the elevated minimum ride height makes it more like a showroom stock car than a GT car. Hopefully, we'll figure it out at the next race at Fontana. In the interim, it was tough to get a fast lap out of the car at Homestead.

We got another yellow late in the race and we came in for fuel. The overall leader was only a couple cars ahead of me on the track when the caution came out, which effectively put us another lap down to most of the GT field. Once back on track after the stop we were moving up pretty steadily and had battled back to tenth position. There were still a few GT cars on the same lap as us and we were gaining some ground, when another disaster came our way. As I was approaching turn six, a tight right hand hairpin, I saw two Daytona Prototypes approaching quickly from behind. The first one was right on my tail and the second was way back. I got on the brakes a little early to let the first one by, but when I got ready to turn in I had a feeling that the second car was going to try and make a late braking maneuver. I waited and turned in late, well wide of the apex so as to leave a lane for the second Daytona Prototype. Unfortunately, he was even more optimistic than I had suspected. I was all the way against the outside of the road, leaving all the room I could, but the DP crashed heavily into the right side door of our Porsche.

The trouble we face in the GT class is that the DP's are incredibly strong cars (and the guys driving them know this), and consequently using a Porsche in lieu of your brakes doesn't carry the consequences normally associated with crashing into another car. The impact was enormous, but the DP just turned in and continued on as if nothing had happened. Initially, I thought it was unlikely that I would even make it back to the pits. I've had many lesser hits that were terminal, but after a couple corners it seemed like the car might make it to the end. As it turned out the impact was in the door and somehow missed all the suspension, so we were able to continue circulating. I fell back to twelfth after the hit and that is where we finished.

Obviously, Homestead was not our best effort. Our teammates faired much better, with Randy Pobst and Michael Levitas taking second, and Spencer Pumpelly and John Littlechild finishing third. We lost some ground in the championship, but thanks to our strong second place effort at Daytona, we are only seven points in back of the leaders. I expect that round three at Fontana will go much better. We have a full test day and a lot of practice time to get the car setup figured out, and the TPC crew is becoming a well oiled machine. Fontana can't come soon enough for me.