Weekly Update 7/30/11

75 Lap Race Event 7/30/11

Another Hot Day At The Track

Once again this week the temperatures were well over 100
degrees at Old Dominion. The track temperatures were in the 150’s and it was
over 130 degrees in the car during practice and the race. Temperatures like
this make it tough on the drivers and the crew guys, but the show must go on
and we endured the day which finally ended around 1am.
Practice

When practice started David was pleased with the handling on
the car and through two rounds of practice he was the fastest car. We decided
to skip the third practice and concentrate on the qualifying set-up. With Just
some minor adjustments we were ready for qualifying.

Qualifying

David was next to last to go out for his qualifying run, he
gave it a heck of a run and fell just 400ths of a second short of the pole and
ended up third. With the invert he would be starting the 75 lap event in fifth.

75 Lap Race

On the initial start of the race David started 5th which was
third in line on the inside row. The pole sitter got a real good start and
coming to the stripe at the end of the first lap David was already in third,
however the caution came out and there would be a complete restart. On the next
start the Pole sitter didn’t get going quite as good but after two laps David
ended up in third anyway. Over the next several laps there was plenty of tight
racing among the top five. David worked his way in to second and was working on
the leader only to get hit in the back bumper and shoved up the banking, he
ended up back in third. After a few cautions he started pressuring the two
leaders, the leader got shoved up out of the way and that made way for the second
place car and David to get by. Once David was in second he and the leader had
some good racing going on, at one point David got a little high coming out of
turn two, he brushed the wall hard but he was able to keep going. The handling
on the car was a little off after that but David kept after it and was still
able to stay up on the bumper of the leader, David couldn’t quite get around
him and finished second.

During post-race tech we discovered that when he hit the
wall a main mount bracket for the rear broke and bent over, this shoved the
rear over a couple of inches and that’s why the handling went away. The bracket
probably would have broken completely off if he had to race another couple
laps; that would certainly have meant major damage to the car. So we will take
the second place finish and add another ten points on to David’s point lead.
David is now 39 points ahead of second place.