At this time Ben took over for his first stint. Ben's racing experince to this point had been playing Gran Turismo. So to go wheel to wheel for the first time ever out on a track can be pretty intimidating. His face says it all.....
So Ben heads out on track and finds himself in the middle of a pack. They all get around him and he continues around to the back side of the track. Here he follows two other cars and they do the full lap of MSR. As he manages to come around the entire track and joins back to the lemons part of the circuit he sees doom at the flagstand. A nice black flag with 08 on the number board means that we are going to have to serve a penalty. To add some insult to injury, Ben decides to miss the pit lane, or does he. He decides to hop a curb and dodge some cones to make pit in about 50' after the fact. Now with most races this would mean a drive-thru penatly or a stop and go, not in this race. Penalties here get you spin on the wheel of misfortune! So the penalty for a black flag can come in a few different forms, if you are guily of a minor infraction it may just require a short lecture or a driver change. Break a major rule and you might end up like these guys (link to pigs feet incident). If you drive like an idiot and you just may have the Arc Angel weld a baryard animal to your car. Other punishments included preaching to the converted (The offender stands on top of their hood and has to talk like a minister to try and convert the masses to their cause), The Max Mosely (Somthing involving a beating from the commoners), The Al Gore (Put a tree in your car, then push the car across the paddock and plant the tree), dumping a jar of metal shavings into your motor, eating a can of fried oakra and some pickled pigs feet, the Ozzy Ozborne (The horn was wired to the throttle so if you applied more than half throttle the horn would go off,oh and the horn was relocated to the drivers compartment), and the bongo Mariachi (Offender was forced to roam the paddock and play the bongo to the masses). So which one did Ben get? Unfortunately for the humor all he got was "Know where you are going now?" Ben said yes and returned to the race. Not funny, but not much of a penalty either so it worked out for us in the end. This would end the excitement for a while, as we
got back into our race rythem and made laps. Ben wrapped up his stint and handed off to Sandeep. With this being Sandeep's first outing in a racing car he did the right thing and took it easy. This was probably a good thing as it allowed the car temps to return to normal and a chance for the clutch (that at this time had to be howing in agony) to also cool off a bit. El captain tried to get him to go faster as he passed by the stands on the front straight by yelling "GO FASTER!!!" It seemed to work as Sandeep's pace got better and better as he got more comfortable with the car. Sandeep then handed back off to Justin who finished his second stint with no issues. Tim's second outing went pretty well except for his brush with the law on track. After a few laps a car had run into some mechanical trouble in turns 1 and 2. The car in front of him slowed up because of the waving yellow flag. Tim missed the yellow and took the oppertunity to make a pass. The problem is that he had no idea to give the position back and was imediately black flagged. Again I had hoped for a great photo op while he was forced to do some crazy stunt to earn his freedom from the oppresive judges. The result this time... was only a driver change. Again good for us but it could have been much funnier if he had to publiclly humiliate himself. So I had my suit handy so I jumped into the car for a lap and then pulled back in for Tim to take back over and finish his stint. We continued to rotate through our driver roster all the wile still adding laps to our tally. We did have to refuel once but more on that later. The day ended with us still running with a horribly slipping clutch but running none the less. By the end of the day we were sitting in 38th out of 75. Not bad with all thing considering. Now as we packed up the car and headed back to Sandeep's house the real work would begin once again.