Watkins Glen April 2019 AER

Another weekend of excitement and fun......

Practice:

Friday we got to try out some of the improvements to the car and assess if any major changes were needed or not, luckily we were able to get away with just a few tweaks and dialing in the tire pressure. Now we got to work in a few of the drivers to get them used to the vehicle and the track.

Qualifying:

Second in class without abusing the car, right where we wanted to be.

Saturday Race:

With another great group of drivers we worked our way up to the front and stayed there for a while. One of our last pit stops, we got held by a yellow flag....which typically only puts you a lap down but for some reason we (and others) were held for multiple laps.

During my stint, I wanted to "push" the car and try to make up lost time, but the shifter bracket had loosened and I knew I had to be very careful if we wanted to finish the race. We still made up quite a few positions, but in the end we finished second place, by two laps. On the plus side, we knew we had the vehicle to beat and second still isn't bad :)

Sunday Race:

Fortunately, this race did not require any major changes to the vehicle, just a few maintenance items and securing the shifter bracket differently. We knew this race would require a bit more strategy though, as there was the risk of rain for the second half of the race. As such, we prepped a set of "rain tires" and started to work on our pit strategy.

While doing so, the drivers once again worked their way to the front of the field with a pretty good lead, around lunch time the rain started to fall. We made a risky choice to pit a little early, under yellow and switch to our rain tires (which are slower in the dry). This caused us to loose a few positions, but after the rain started to come down harder, we started to close that gap. As the rain started to get heavy, our laps got even better (compared to the competition), until vision became a problem....our defrost was working but the car was sealed up too tight to vent the humid air, this required another pit stop to remove one of the windows and tighten a loosening wheel. That stop unfortunately caused us to loose more time than we expected, even though the car was very fast afterwards and we made up a lot of time, we finished 5th knowing we had the car to beat.

Overall:

Given the attrition during this race, we came away with a 2nd "overall" (combined

weekend), which we were pretty happy with, but also a little bummed knowing we "could" have won....but that is also endurance racing, anything can happen over the 8+hour race each day!

We have a few things to work on, looking forward to the next race at NJMP, but the car continues to get better and receive compliments from drivers and competitors thanks to the efforts of the AutoWorkx team!