Sunday, October 4, 2009
What a crazy but great weekend. We took 1st in class and 5th overall.
Friday did not go so smoothly. It was raining and the pit area was one huge mud hole. It looked like the automotive version of Woodstock. Most of the practice time was spent trying to set up a dry camp in the pits instead of out on track testing and learning the track.
Each driver did get about 30 minutes on track with instruction from Tim Smith who has over 2000 laps at Nelson Ledges. The track was so wet that even the little 4cyl in the 318 would power oversteer on throttle application. Brian ended up putting the car on the tire wall. Nothing major other than a little more bent sheet metal but the car was still very driveable. Brian did a quick front end re-alignment and says the car now drives better than before.
The race was very exciting. Each driver was doing 2.5 to 3 hour stints or until the tank was almost empty. Tim went out at about 8:45pm and shortly there after it went full course yellow with brief sessions of green. After about 2 hours of this we decided to pull Tim who was our ringer driver since he had only seen maybe 15 minutes of green track. We would need him fresh to make up time later. Mike and Than each did 3 hour sessions getting us down to 6th palce. All 4 drivers had an off at night but did not get called in. Unfortunaly once the sun came up we got black flagged to come in. Apperently their offs did not go unnoticed and we ended up with a 30 minute penalty which put us back to around 14th place. Brian did the 6:00am to 9:00am shift and got us down to 8th place. At around 9:00am Tim got in the car and was instructed to go balls out and get us a top 5 finish. And he did. He was flying around the track. It was amazing. He ended up setting the 2nd fastest lap time with a 1:22. Normally we could go 2.5 to 3 hours on a full tank of gas. He was pushing so hard that he went through a tank in only 1.5 hours! After a splash and go to refuel, he ended up getting us down to 5th place overall and 1st in class!
Driving went something like this:
12:00pm-3:00pm Brian
3:00pm-5:30pm Than
5:30pm-8:45pm Mike
8:45pm-11:45pm Tim
11:45pm-2:45am Mike
2:45am-5:45am Than
5:45am-9:00am Brian
9:00am-12:00pm Tim
HUGE THANKS go out to Dave, Tony, Colin, and Neal for crewing and helping out. They went above and beyond. We absolutely could not have done it without them!
Class Winners!
(Anthony, Dave, Tim, Than, Brian, Mike, Tony, Scott, Snoopy)
More pics here.
