The race was held at 2.238-mile Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. I always love going there, not only because Laguna Seca is a tremendous race track, but also because of the natural beauty of the Monterey area.

PRACTICE

There were twenty-four Daytona Prototypes and thirty GT cars entered for the race. Laguna Seca is not a very long course, nor is it particularly wide, so we were all expecting a lot of issues with traffic.

The first practice session was as expected. It was crowded and difficult to get a clean lap. The handling of the Porsche was better than it had been all season. We've had our difficulties with the setup, but we tested between Fontana and Laguna Seca and made a lot of progress.

We had another session that afternoon. The car was handling great with the exception of the first part of the corner. We were having a lot of difficulty getting the Porsche pointed into the corner. For the Saturday morning session we made a few changes to the shocks and the toe settings. The changes fixed the turn in, but caused the car to turn in too well - now it wanted to swap ends as soon as I turned the wheel.

We left the car alone for qualifying because the problems we were having never showed up until the tires had a few laps on them. Manuel qualified at a 1:36.4, which put us twentieth on the GT grid. He liked the handling of the car, but since he was on new tires we knew we still had some work to do.

Sunday morning was our last chance to get the Porsche's setup right for the race. We worked with the shocks a little more and the car was the best it had been all weekend. I couldn't get a clear lap as usual, but I could see from the data that we would be able to do competitive lap times.

THE RACE

The race started at noon on Sunday. The weather was beautiful as it had been all weekend. It was sunny and about seventy degrees; a perfect day for a race.

Manuel started the Porsche and was doing a solid job as usual. About fifteen minutes into the event someone flew off and we had our first of many full course yellows. Manuel was still on the lead lap in the GT class, but he was near the back of the line so we brought him in for a splash of fuel. The pit stop went well and he had plenty of time to catch the field before we went green again.

Our race proceeded without incident for another half an hour before full course caution number two arrived. Once again Manuel had managed to keep us in contention as we were still on the lead lap in GT.

As soon as I saw the caution flag I pulled on my helmet and got ready for the inevitable pit stop. A few minutes later I was told that Manuel was going to stay in the car. This didn't make too much sense to me because our car was still near the rear of the line, so it was a great time to pit. Apparently there was some miscommunication and the crew thought that Manuel wanted to stay in the car.

I removed my helmet and went back to waiting. It was nearly another hour before we got another caution. Manuel was out there driving around on the same tires he started the race on, and I'm sure he was a little overheated himself. On the previous caution most of the teams had put in a new driver on new tires, so Manuel was hanging on trying to keep us in the fight.

When the next full course caution came out there was only about an hour remaining. The overall leaders had split us from most of the GT field so we were at least one lap down to most of the other cars by the time I got in.

We took fuel and tires and I headed out on course while the field circled behind the pace car under yellow. We wouldn't need to pit again, but neither would any of the cars that were a lap up on us, so we weren't going to catch them that way.

Much to my surprise, the track stayed green for about the first fifteen laps I was in the car. It was then that I discovered that we had missed the setup for the race. Our turn in issue came back after I put six to eight laps on the tires and it began trying to swap ends on me. The Porsche was great once I got it into the corner, but it was tough to turn it in with much speed. All I could really do was slow down. When I tried to drive it hard it just heated up the rear tires and the problem got progressively worse.

After about fifteen laps we got another yellow. The rest of the race was run in increments of two to four laps separated by full course yellows. This was great for us because when the Hoosier tires had a chance to cool the Porsche actually handled pretty well. On the restarts I ended up passing a lot of GT cars and actually picked up some spots from the GT cars that were still on my lap. When I got in we were in seventeenth. I got up to eleventh position by the time the raced ended -under yellow, of course.

As big as the fields are getting I think that Grand Am will have to split up the DP and GT fields at some of the shorter tracks or we won't see a lot of green flag racing. Another problem is that the Daytona Prototypes are not that much quicker than the GT cars so it takes a while for them to get past, thereby creating more opportunities for incidents. I'm confident that Manuel and I can stay out of trouble, but it certainly would be nice to spend some time racing under green.

We head up to Mt Tremblant in a couple weeks for round five. Mt Tremblant is a great race course and it is one of two six hour races, so it should be a lot of fun.