Our koni Challenge team this past weekend had many highs and lows. We rolled off the trailer for the first practice on thursday morning and within 3 minuets on the track we lost severe oil pressure in our motor. Although, the motor did not blow up or even loose fluid, we knew it would not last much longer. The crew then worked for hours preparing another motor to be up into the car. During this time I missed another valuable practice session. After the new motor was almost in the car, they realized that the motor had an issue and that it would not work! Now it was on to ANOTHER motor that was just recently delivered to the track thursday afternoon. By this time we knew we were not going to make the afternoon qualifying session for the race. The crew worked real hard to make sure that this motor was 100% and did not over look any detail ( knowing that we are not going to have any real time to test it) Since we did not put in 1 lap during the Thursday qualifying session I would be forced to start at the back of a 43 car field ( 97 car field total counting the ST cars)
Friday morning I show up to the track and the car is running and looking good. Perhaps the weekend wont be so bad after all. We only had 1 practice session friday morning before the race in the early afternoon. Although, optimistic as to how the car was going to do due to the lack of practice time practice went well. During practice my teammate Andy Lally put the car in 2nd overall. About half way through the session I got back in the car and within a couple laps put it P1 with a time of 2:01.4. After that lap I knew we had a good car so we decided to park the car and not put the added minuets of practice on the car.
In the race I started 43rd in class and with nearly 100 cars on the track I knew this was going to be tricky. However, slowly but surely I worked my way up to the top 10 within a little of an hour of racing. I then turned it over to my teammate Andy Lally who came out of the pits in about 20th. He worked his way to the top 10 before pitting again for gas and left side tires. On the last race re-start, the officials sent a string of ST cars out of the pits right in front of Andy in the GS field. This separated him from the other GS cars ahead of him. After getting around the slower ST cars andy worked his way up to 8th place. So considering we did not get any practice on thursday and the circumstances of the weekend we were happy with this result and look forward to LimeRock Park.
-scott
