2005 Updates:
NASA MidWest Championship
October 12th, 2005: We completed the last races of the
2005 season at Putnam Park last weekend with fairly good success. We managed to
finish all qualifying sessions and all 4 races without major incident which is a
first for us this year so we are very pleased to close the year on a high note.
The car performed well all weekend and a little too well on Sunday morning.
The weekend began with Saturday qualifying, unfortunately
Dale in the #55 Corvette experienced a component failure that put him off track
at high speed toward the end of the front straight resulting in a very scary
ride through the catch fence and onto the tracks approach road. Although Dale
was hurt in the accident it is not serious and he should make a full recovery in
a few weeks. Our best wishes go out to Dale and his family.
At the end of qualifying we managed to secure 5th in class
for a respectable starting position in a class field of 17 cars. We managed to
stay out of trouble while battles ensued in front and behind us to finish the
race as we started with a 5th place finish in class. For the second race of the
day all entrants start the race in their finishing position from the first race,
hence another 5th place start for the #32. Although we battled off and on with
Brian Groth in the #3 who started 4th we were not able to better our starting
position and once again finished 5th in class. All in all a very pleasing
result for a hard days racing.
We came into Sunday determined to post a better qualifying
time to hopefully start ahead of the hard to pass Brian Groth. Luckily we got
some clean track very early in the qualifying session and were able to post the
2nd fastest qualifying time in class, 5 tenths behind Robin Burnett in the #21.
The top 3 qualifiers are scaled and tested on a mobile dyno to ensure conformity
with the class horsepower and torque rules and this is where our fortunes took a
strange turn. Three dyno runs are performed and the highest run is used as your
cars result. Our first two runs resulted in 320HP +/- a few tenths, which is
right around our expectations and within our allowable limit for the weight of
our car. However the third run showed a jump of 10HP putting us a little over
330HP and exceeding our allowable limit. At this point the AI region director
gave us two options, we could add weight to the car to get back within the limit
and start the race from the back of the pack or we could say to hell with the
limit and run in the unlimited class of AIX instead. Due to our parts failures
earlier in the year we were not in contention for the AI Championship so we
chose to run in the AIX class instead and maintain our qualifying position.
The AIX class in it's unlimited nature normally includes cars
with significantly more horsepower than our AI car. However due to some
failures on Saturday there were only two other starters in AIX on Sunday so we
were guaranteed a 3rd place finish. Which is exactly what we achieved in the
first race, in the second race we actually managed one better due to an
unfortunate failure for Mickey Remen in the #41.
We actually scored 175 points in AIX which secured us 3rd
place in the AIX Championship for 2005.
September 25th, 2005: Preparations are under way for
the season finale at Putnam Park on October 8th and 9th. We've had some set
backs during the year but this is the last chance to show what the team is
capable of in 2005. Look for a race report in October.
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