Race day two started mostly like race day one, there were just fewer cars running due to the attrition.  Who would have thought that $500 cars would break so easily? But you also have to give credit to a whole bunch of teams that repaired some amazingly bad cars and actually kept them running to the finish. While the car count was down from the Saturday start the count was actually up from when the checkers fell on Saturday afternoon!

So with a few more parade laps it was back to racing. As I dropped the hammer and began to race an amazing thing happened, our car actually accelerated! It took me a few laps to figure out exactly how much better the car was and where I could now start adding more throttle. The difference between yesterday and today was that now for some reason our clutch was hooking up better (still not right, but much better) maybe it was the different clutch disk we installed the night before, or maybe it was using less oil in the transmission, but whatever the reason it was a big increase in performance.

      After finishing my stint I came back into the pits to do our driver change and had a big smile on, though no one could see it under my helmet. As I jumped out of the car I immediately was trying to tell the others that the car is much faster than the day before. (It turns out that at that point the car was about 4 seconds a lap quicker than the previous day!) So being the “experienced” captain I told everyone to be careful on their first laps out since their turn-in, and braking reference markers may not be in the same positions as the day before.

       As far as lap times on Saturday the best time we could wring from our car was a 1:26 and some change, after my first stint I was able to get into the low 1:23’s. Tim dipped into the 1:22’s and threw the gauntlet at me jokingly bragging to me that he was faster. Well I couldn’t allow that so I then had a mission on my next stint to show him what’s up. Tim’s lap stood as our fastest lap until I got some clear track in my second stint. I managed to throw down a 1:20 lap to emphasize my dominance!

      The biggest drama for me during the day actually came from how much warmer it was on Sunday. In our rush to get to the track we skipped out on some of the necessary provisions like water! So it got rough before our crack support team arrived at the track around lunch time. I was trying pretty hard during my second stint and the effort level was high trying to maintain all the speed possible through the corners. I was in pretty good shape at the time and firmly believe that anyone who says race car drivers are not athletes, are idiots. The beautiful thing is that adrenaline is a great drug. While in the car you don’t feel the pain, it’s not until you have a chance to catch your breath after a few minutes that you realize how wore out you have become from driving. To compound things for me we had to refuel the car at this point. The rule for refueling was that you had to wear full nomex while actively fueling the car. In the rush to get the fuel in the car as soon as possible only Sandeep, who was jumping into the car to drive had his fire suit on besides me. So I got to hold the gas can and fill the car while BEN WATCHED! In fact Ben did try to help but one of the officials looked at him and said “I hope you aren’t thinking of getting near that car.” To make things even worse, our fueling system was terrible. The nozzle on our gas can was not long enough to lower the flap below the gas filler. Our fix was to use a long screwdriver to open up the flap, the problem was that this would only open it up about a quarter of the way open. This causes a very slow flow rate to avoid spilling gas all over the ground. The result was that I had to hold a full 5 gallon gas can for about 10 minutes.  After the last bit of gas went into the car Sandeep fired it up and was back into the fray. I was probably suffering from some mild heat exhaustion, at this point and when I went back to the cooler I found it empty, nothing but melting ice. So I grabbed an empty bottle and drank the melted cooler water, it may have been sort of dirty, tasted terrible, but it was cold and wet and wow did that hit the spot. Of course about 20 minutes later our provisions showed up. Again a big thanks to Saki and Atul for the help.