Well it is pre-race night and I am FINALLY getting a free minute to pop my head in here. This week has been absolutely nuts busy... Not that I am not accustomed to the pace.

In my "off" time between Sebring and VIR, I have done testing for World Challenge, some club races to stay sharp, driver coaching, the international media release of the X6 for SpeedTV, some work with the new 1/3 Series cars with Grassroots Motorsports, and visited a few tracks for our upcoming One Lap of America assault with the 135 (which I also found some time ot wrench on in an all-nighter - drivers can have value!). Kind of my own whirlwind tour of the Southeast US. Through that, I managed to get in the office a few days as well even!

We showed up to VIR after having tested last week ready to go. This weekend has been interesting. We have really continued to learn a lot about the cars. We have had a good setup since we rolled in, and a lot of track time, so we felt pretty comfortable really experimenting in an effort to make things really perfect. We have had this loose problem that is livable, but with rear tires wearing at Sebring, we were hesitant to leave it in. We have tossed spring, bar, shock, alignment, geometry changes, and every other trick we have at it and were making a little progress until today! Finally, we had the breakthrough with a little more rear spring and a tick more shock - odd to control an oversteer, right?

My car was really close for the second practice session (when I added the rear spring) and we made a couple more changes to work on the bumps/curbs. Overshooting that session was perfect - for qualifying, we dialed it back a little and hit it really pretty dead on. I went out behind Seth with Nick a little further behind (rushing from a last minute setup change). Unfortunately, we dropped the ball a little and didn't use the last 2% or so of the tire in the first couple of corners so we left time on the table. I ended up 6th and Seth a couple of hundreths of a second behind - both of us 0.4 behind pole. Nick was balked on his flyer (you only get 1-2 with these tires) and couldn't get it much better with a second outing later in the session.

Looking forward to the race tomorrow. With some front-wheel cars ahead of us, we should get a good start and if we can stay in the draft on the long straights here, we should have a good race. We will know when the flag drops at 4:20 tomorrow!

Labels: VIR Round 2