Saturday, RACE DAY!

One of the best feelings in the world for me is the excited nervous feel you get as you head to the track for a race. There are few things that beat that feeling. We arrived early to try and get a good space in the paddock but since we didn’t camp at the track the pickins were slim. We set up, unloaded the car, and then figured out what the driving schedule would be for the day. We tried to set the order so that everyone would get an opportunity to race and it would minimize the number of driver changes. With the schedule set there was some time to relax and warm up before heading out to the drivers meeting.

I know from my experiences that too many of these meetings are taken way too serious, LeMons is for sure the exception. Even though all the information is useful and needed for everyone you have to give Jay and the whole LeMons staff credit for making even these meetings funny and enjoyable. After the formalities it was time to get back to the car and start warming her up.

The format for the race was the same as last year with a few laps under a full course yellow to check transponders and to make sure that everyone knows where they are going. Last time this process took about 20 minutes, this year took about 10. I did not expect the quick turnaround so I was sleeping at the start. Since they pick a car at random to start the race as leader, so you can be anywhere on track when the race goes green.  It was not until I got passed by a car that was ten cars back did I see the green flags, and got on with the program (note to self pay more attention).

The cars in front and back of me stayed put, so I did react quicker than them to pick up a few spots. The insanity of having 95 cars on track breeds a lot of yellows. The entire first stint was spent with local yellows on every corner station except the straight. This hurts us in a couple of ways. One we are a momentum car, we need to have space to roll speed through corners to make a fast lap. We don’t have the power to out accelerate the other cars on corner exit so keeping speed up is paramount. Having traffic everywhere does not help this at all. Compounding this is the number of yellows. Everywhere our car is faster would be where someone else had either attempted a bad pass and knocked each other off track or they had broken in the middle of the corner and couldn’t make it off line. This carnage and traffic makes it almost impossible to get into anything that resembles a rhythm.

This is also where the dream of fixing the overheating problem died a horrible, steam filled death. The entire time I was out on course the needle was climbing higher and higher on the gage. When it would get near the top of the gage it would vary by about half a needle width below and above the red warning line. This variation did not seem to be based on speed or effort or anything else I could think of while avoiding cars and jumping out of the way of guys wanting to go two wide in a single track line. Based on what I had to go on at the time I decided to go for it and hope that Sandeep would be easier on the car when I handed it off. Tim was thinking the same way when we talked after my stint. So I drove for about an hour and then saw our pitboard telling me to pit for the first driver change. I pit and jump out of the way so Ben can help Sandeep get belted into the car for his stint. I just get done getting my helmet and gloves off when a frantic call comes to me to help with a stuck lap belt. After messing with the belt for a couple of minutes, and thoroughly twisting it Sandeep rolls off the hot pit and into the battle.

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