Other than these minor problems we kept on making our laps and climbing up the order. The only other drama that we had was when Ben had a “moment” coming over the hill after the tire chicane. It seems that he got though the chicane well and was carrying more speed than he normally had carried in the right hander over the hill, while this is normally a good thing it’s the next part that you also have to get right in order to not go spinning off the track. While cresting the hill the back could get light and step out slightly, all you need to do is to add a little correction with the steering wheel and you would have to time to settle things down before the next turn. However if you over react and lift this only makes the problem worse. By lifting when the back end started to step out Ben experienced what is called trailing throttle oversteer. What happens is that when you lift off the gas the weight on the suspension shifts from being mostly balanced between the front and back to being shifted to the front. This takes traction away from the back which is where you need it to hook up. The end result in this case is that the back end came completely around and Ben looped it into the infield. I did not see this happen but I did see Ben come in a visit the penalty box again. And again he escaped with only a driver change! So we threw one of our drivers in for a lap and let Ben head back out and finish his stint.

      With a few more driver changes the team let me head out for the final 15 minutes and take the checkers. I have to thank the team for this because to actually finish the race with all that had happened and with all we overcame was unbelievable! The cool down lap consisted of a salute to the corner workers, and returning through the pits to all the teams and fans applauding all the finishers. It was a very cool experience. I took the car back to the trailer and met the team there and the celebrations commenced. I think at that moment we all felt that we had accomplished something so we posed for some pictures and reveled in simply finishing. We climbed from beginning the day 38^th to finally climbing to 23^rd. Not too shabby considering the slipping clutches. If we hadn’t received the 20 lap penalty from my lack of preparedness we could have had a top 20 finish. Considering everything that had happened I don’t know how we could have finished any better.