Hey Guys!
So you like that one do you? Me too! And I didn’t even have to get them pissed on margs the night before like last week! (Wish I had realized that earlier it would have saved me a few hundred bucks!)
Let me tell you up until now I thought that the most stressful job had to be either a bomb disposal expert or Ashley Simpson’s PR manager. Boy was I wrong. And the winner for the most stressful job is……… professional racecar driver with Randy Pobst hot on your butt for 50 minutes. I couldn’t get to sleep last night not because I was pumped on making my fist pro podium (I was)
or because I was hooking up with hot podium girls (I wasn’t)
but because I kept on having nightmares about being gobbled up by Big Blue Mazda’s with Randy Pobst at the wheel.
I’m sure I’ll be in therapy years from now over this.
Before I get into the details of the race, I have to give big thanks to the whole 3R Racing crew. Dax, Jeremy, Will, Donovan, Steve, Holly and team owner Bob Raub worked their butts off to give me the best chance at putting our Dodge SRT4 up front.
That job was made even more difficult when in the last practice, another touring car thought that we had way to much grip on the track and that the best way to deal with that would be to blow it’s engine at the exit of the Carousel and dump it’s oil there as well. Now for those of you who have never been to Road America let me describe the Carousel, think giant skid pad in the middle of the track. It’s a long right-hander that you enter into at about 70 mph and hold that speed at the limit of grip for what feels like forever but in reality is only about 7 or 8 seconds. But you’re pulling maximum g’s the whole time. Being the second car through, about 3 -4 seconds back, I didn’t get a debris flag or a yellow. I came into the exit full tilt boogie, hit the oil and promptly went straight off into the wall at the outside of the turn just missing the aforementioned stranded car by inches. Seconds later Pete Cunningham decided to join the party and just missed making everyone’s night much longer (and sorer) by doing the perfect bank shot off the wall between my car and the other beached car. Even still my 3R crew was up unit 1 AM getting my ride back to fighting trim.
Now some drivers might be a bit nervous about getting into a rebuilt car and then going straight out into qualifying but I trust my guys implicitly and I had enough confidence in them and the car to go out and stick it into 5th place on the grid. I thought that the Acura’s would mount a big attack at the end and take back the top spots but the session ended with only Cunningham’s Acura in the top five.
Going into the race I was pretty confident that we could pull off a top five. The only thing that worried me was the weather, which couldn’t figure if it wanted to be the first inland hurricane in history or a perfect sunny day. One problem I was facing if it decided to rain was that we hadn’t scrubbed in my rain tires yet to get all of the mold release agent off of them. If I had to start a race in the wet with unscrubbed tires it would be almost as bad as trying to run slicks! Skip Barber to the rescue! I remembered that the Skippy guys always have a few street SRT4’s lying around so I went down to the Skippy admin/ garage building and got Joe the head mechanic to throw my race wheels on his car and had him run around town for a few to get them nice and scrubbed. (Thanks Joe). Fortunately it wasn’t needed as just as we were about to go off the sky cleared and all was right with the world.
All right onto the race. Cool P5. I can actually see the front of the field from here. But unfortunately the one thing I can’t see is the red starting lights. Hmmm… those might be kinda important. From where I was gridded my pillar and rollbar perfectly blocked my view of the start lights. OK what to do, what to do. Got it after we rolled back up to the start line after our installation lap I angled the car slightly to the left. Just enough so that I could see the corner of one of the lights. The problem with that however it gave Brian Smith, a fellow SRT4 driver who was gridded directly behind me and last years series champ Peter Cunningham who was directly in front of me the idea that I was going to go for the middle gap at the start. So much for the element of suprise. Lights go out. Peter blocks to the middle and Brian shoots the almost non-existent gap between me and the pit wall bringing Eric Curran’s Acura with him. However I’m on the inside of Peter Cunningham and Randy Pobst going into turn one and I get cleanly by them, so my net gain/ loss is zero and I’m still P5. Yeah right. Getting by Randy Pobst only means that you now have RANDY POBST behind you which as I mentioned at the start is not one the best things for ones mental health. However that was not going to be a problem for long as we went 4 wide coming into turn 5 and I got shuffled to the outside allowing Randy to get by and putting me back in P6.
That’s the way it was to remain for the next lap until Randy gets some lockup going into to 8 and gets a bit wide, only a bit but it was enough and I stick my nose into it and get a CLEAN PASS ON RANDY POBST!!! OK my race could have ended right there and I would have been completely happy, P5 and I passed Randy Pobst. Done. However there was still more racing to do and once again I’ve got Randy behind me with only two laps down 16 to go. Man, this is going to be a long day.
OK back to the basics, drive your line, hit your marks, don’t drive in your mirrors. (I wonder if the person who made up that last one ever had Randy Pobst in his mirrors. Probably not). OK the best way to deal with this was to focus on the car ahead and try not to worry about the car behind.
That car belonged to Eric Curran and he was only 4 car lengths ahead. For the next 4 laps I tried set Curran up for a pass going into 5 which was where I had the best chance on him, and do it without opening to door for Randy who was so tight on my bumper that all I could see in my mirror was his helmet (seriously). And every lap Curran would very aggressively block the line (including one lap where I was trying an outside/ inside pass and he ran me 3 ½ wheels off on the turn in to 5. Welcome to the bigs). Finally I got it right and got by him cleanly and moved into P4. But the bigger thing for me was having a car in between me and Randy to give me a bit of a buffer….. or not. After all of his super aggressive blocking on me, Curran rolls over and lets Randy by two turns later without barely a single move. In fact I think I saw a point by.
B*%<#.
(Just kidding. Actually I like Eric)
So the situation as it stands. Me P4, Randy P5, and Eric P6 and a nice gap to the rest of the field. Before the start I was going over race strategies with the team and we agreed that my ideal race would be to get into a train of 4 or 5 cars and sit at the back and save my tires and try to move up at the end. I don’t know where my brain interpreted that to mean, I would like to lead one of the greatest sports car drivers still racing and last weeks second place finisher around for 9 laps of a track that until 3 days ago I had never driven.
Rookie.
Once I’m clear of Eric I put down a scorcher of a lap (my second fastest of the day) and manage to get a gap on my pursuers. However Randy puts in two hot laps of his own and is right back with me again. From here on the story get a bit boring to tell but really exciting to watch (especially from the drivers seat). For the next 9 laps the gap between Randy and I never was more than about a ½ a second and for much of those laps it was much less than that. My main focus was just to run my lines as perfectly as possible. I knew if I gave Randy even an inch that he would get by. I was having a small problem with brake lock up and entry and mid corner push (all later traced to misjudged tire pressure at the start. A bit too high) so my strategy became to make Randy run my race. He had me on entry and mid corner and I had him on exit. So I decided to sacrifice my entry and mid corner to get as good of an exit as possible so I could get a gap on him going into the next corner. The thought was that this gap would be just big enough that Randy wouldn’t be able to get into position to pass for that corner, allowing me to once again sacrifice entry and mid for exit. Nice and tidy for a few laps. Except it was all about to change…..
Behind us Randy’s team mate Jeff Altenberg got around series leader Pierre Kleinubing for P8. Pierre’s bad race meant that Randy now had a good chance to move up in the championship picture so my position had just become way more valuable to Randy. But not as valuable as a lap later when, with 3 to go, Brian Smiths SRT4 blew a CV and caused him to retire. Now we were not only fighting over the two extra points that separate 3rd and 4th but also a podium spot!
I thought I knew pressure before but now this was a whole new ball game. But I stuck to my original plan and tried to make Randy drive my race as much as possible. And hey what do you know it worked!
P3! Dodge’s first podium and first manufacture’s points. Highest finish for a rookie this year and 2nd fastest lap of the race! I am now sitting 11th overall in points and just 23 points away from Jeff Courtney in the battle for Rookie of the Year with 3 races left. Game on!
Also I want to say thanks to all of the Skippy guys who I got to hang out with at RA. Shantanu, Tom, Duncan (congrats to Duncan on his IMSA Lites weekend as well). Even Lonnie Pechnick took time out of his busy AMLS schedule to find me and congradulate me on my finish. Gota love this Skippy family of ours.
Thanks for all the encouragement guys it really does mean a lot to me.
Keep reading.