The Final Competition of the week

We headed to South Bend, Indiana to finish the week on Saturday morning with a Dry Skid pad competition.  What a drive.  We were in Wisconsin above Milwaukee and only had a few hundred miles to go but those miles included a drive time circuit around Chicago.  That was painful.  We went for miles and miles in beep and creep mode which took two hours more than we expected.  Somebody has to figure out how to handle traffic better around Chicago.  Since our main menus of the week were either McDonald's or the tracks wonderful hamburger based offerings and since it would be 10 pm till we got to our hotel Steve and I stopped short and got  ourselves some nice steak dinners.  That was the first good food we had since we started the event.  When you have 600 miles to go before getting some sleep you don't waste much time eating.  Fast food and track food fill the bill.

I figured if I did well in the Dry Skid pad competition we could probably move up a couple of positions in the overall standings. I was about the 40th car to run in an inverted field.  When I was finished I heard the announcer say I was first in class and first in overall up to this point in Dry Skid pad.  I realized the fastest cars in the group were still to run I knew that the 1.018 g's I posted would get beat by several but my goal was to finish Dry Skid pad with a top 10 finish.  When all was done I had 10th place for that event and moved up two positions to finish the overall in 34th for the week.  That was not the final number I was hoping for when we started this years One Lap of America, but it was better than last year when we had a blown engine. 

The real success of our group was Scott Breneman along with his partner Nick Young. They were in car #28, Scott's 2002 blue Zo6.  Scott drove all the competition laps and finished in 13th place overall eclipsing his best ever finish of last year.  This was Scott's 9th year competing and Nick's 2nd year.  Early on we had a strong competition going between us with me leading in the early events and Scott taking the lead with a stronger event at Hallet, Oklahoma.  The next day in High Plains, Colorado, was our first problem with our car's computer shutting down when it didn't like the air flow versus the rpms  ending in our first of two DNF's.  I think we would have had a top 20 finish without the problems but that is called the "what if" game and we have to live with the 34th place that we did earn.  In racing one of the first goals is to finish "above the fold" which basically means in the top half of the field.  So we will be proud that even with our electronic gremlins we still finished better than more than half of the competitors.