Goodyear Challenge Race |
||||||||||||
| This was just what I needed! I remember back when I was a young go-kart racer my dad would rent a race track and I would run laps until I fell out of the kart. Then, in the next race I ran, I was much faster. Last night I ran the whole 100 laps and I got a chance to really work on being smooth and letting the car roll through the corners and then picking up the throttle at just the right time. I probably only ran about 10 good laps out of the 100 but, from the ones that I got right, I think I now know how its supposed to feel and what I'm supposed to be feeling.... (more) | ||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
Last week the car felt so good that we didn't do anything other than clean it and check to see that everything was tight. When we got to the track I still had those old tires on the car and I knew they wouldn't be fast but we wanted to make sure the car still felt the same. After just one practice I came in and we put on the new tires and got the car ready for qualifying. I guess I was a little nervous for qualifying. I really didn't push the car as hard as I could have but I still got my fastest lap time ever. I was 4 tenths of a second faster than I was the last time we qualified for a race here. Everybody else was about 2 tenths faster though. That put me 17th out of 20 cars. When we lined up for the start I was way in the back and I didn't realize that the cars in the front would be starting while I was still in the middle of the back stretch. They sort of ran off on me before I got going. A few laps later the yellow came out when a car blew up and dropped oil all over the track. That took about 15 minutes to clean up and when we lined up single file for the restart I was way back in turn 2 when the leader were coming to the stripe. They got the jump on me again while I was sleeping a little bit but after that I was paying a lot closer attention to what the leaders were doing. I have to tell you, it's hard to watch what all 20 cars are doing and then try to figure out which one you want to go with! People think that being a race car is a lot of fun. And it is, but it's also a lot of hard work. I'm not talking about the 8 to 10 hour I spend getting my car ready every week, that's the easy part. I'm talking about the 15 minutes it takes to run a 100 laps race. I work out at Gold's Gym 3 days a week and I'm pretty big and strong for my age, but let me tell you, when I got out of that car last night I was tired, tired, tired! Well back to the race. While the leaders duked it out up front it was basically me and a few other cars in the back sort of having our own race. In qualifying I was just a little loose and I was afraid that the car would tighten up during the race so I changed a spring to loosen the car up a little bit more. It wasn't a huge change but it was enough that I couldn't drive the car in as hard as I wanted to nor could I get off the corners like I wanted to either. I really had to tip toe around the track and the car never changed all night. This one car and I swapped the same position back and forth. He was faster than I was but not by much. Towards the end of the race he finally took a shot at the outside and made it stick and took the position for good. I was as high as 9th at one point but I lost 2 positions right at the end of the race and finished up the race in 11th. And here's the update on the points leader's engine problems from last week. Sure enough, the tech man discovered that he made a mistake and he read the numbers wrong on the seals of the engine. They now say that the seals were fine. What did I tell you! But, then it got funnier yet. After having said that the motor was fine they still went ahead and tore his motor down. When they got to the cam they found out that it wasn't the spec cam so some one did tamper with it but they still didn't disqualify him. Go figure!
|
||||||||||||
