Jimbob Racing is very pleased to announce that Engle Printing and Publishing Company Inc. has  re-signed and will be our major hood sponsor for the 2014 One Lap of America.  Engle Printing and Publishing Company not only publishes the well known Merchandiser but also 18 other weekly community newspapers highlighting the positive news in the local areas.  In addition they have many other publications such as Auto-Locator, Lancaster County Magazine, Antiques & Auction News, and others.  For more information see their web site at http://www.engleonline.com

 A huge milestone, EPC is celebrating their 60th Anniversary in business in 2014.  The a company their leadership and their employees are a great community asset with their support of many charities and endeavors in the local areas.

We have several other sponsors that help pull this all together which include The Mount Joy Diner, Auto-Locator, Top of The Line Roofing, KrunchKritters Body and Spray Shop, Mick's All American Pub, Jim's Tire Service, SSC Tint & Graphics JimRoberts' West Main Auto and the Lancaster County Corvette Club.  I would like to sincerely thank all of my sponsors for their contributions.

Jimbob Racing Raising Funds for Pa. Breast Cancer Coalition

Jim is shown presenting the 2013 event picture to Kristen Snoke
the Pa. Breast Cancer Coalition Community Outreach Director.

Jim Roberts of Mount Joy along with Steve Barrett of Fairfield Ohio, will compete in the 2014 One Lap of America. A major part in this effort will be raising money for the Pa. Breast Cancer Coalition. Stickers with the Pink Breast Cancer ribbon will be placed on the car for each donation of $10 or more, and can be “In Honor of”, “In Memory of”, or you can put your own name on to show your support of the Breast Cancer Coalition.


This will be Jim’s 6^th One Lap of America and he has raised several thousand dollars for the Breast Cancer Coalition as part of the effort. Make a donation and you can ride along “vicariously” on the trip and help a great cause.  The Pa. Breast Cancer Coalition, celebrating its 21^st Anniversary in 2014, represents supports and serves breast cancer survivors and their families in Pennsylvania through educational programming, legislative advocacy and breast cancer research grants. The PBCC is a statewide non-profit organization that creates the hope of a brighter tomorrow by providing action and information to women with breast cancer today.


To make a donation and get a sticker on the car, stop in at the store or send to Jim Roberts, % West Main Auto, 14 W. Main St. Mount Joy, Pa. 17552 along with who to name on the sticker. Please make all checks payable to Pa. Breast Cancer Coalition or PBCC for short.  If anyone who is sympathetic to the breast cancer cause and would like to be a "Captain" to help collect funds from friends co-workers etc, I can provide you with donation sheets.  Please email me at jimbobcorv@comcast.net 


The Cannonball One Lap of America is an endurance race that will challenge the preparation and endurance of both man and machine. It is an offshoot of the original “Cannonball Sea to Shinning Sea Memorial Trophy Dash” created by Brock Yates in the early 1970’s. In 1984 Brock reworked the format to make it more acceptable to the general public and law enforcement, and continued to change the format until in 1992 it evolved into what it is today, where all the competition takes place on the tracks.


Each year One Lap goes off in a different direction to another part of the country. This year Jim will travel nearly 5,000 miles in a little over a week covering much of the Eastern United States. The first leg of the trip will be going from Lancaster County Pa. to South Bend Indiana, the starting spot for One Lap, and the first event, a wet skid pad competition.  The second event will be at Grissom Air Force Base also in Indiana, then it's south to Memphis, Tennessee to New Orleans then on to Mobile, Alabama followed by Atlanta then up to Spartanburg South Carolina.  After South Carolina it's north to New Jersey Motorsports Park, west to Mid Ohio then to Gingerman in Michigan and back to South Bend. They will compete in about 20 events including 2 skid pad competitions, a large autocross on the runways at Grissom Air Force Base, two drag strip events and the rest will be road course time trials. At each track Jim will do Time Trial events and accumulate points against competing cars in both class and overall standings. Jim will do all the competitive driving and will share the driving over the highways with his transit driver Steve Barrett. Typically there will be about 75 entries from professional racers to amateur track guys, but all must have racing credentials or at least high performance driver school experience. The car they are using is Jim’s Yellow 2000 Corvette Coupe which has been modified to add a little extra horsepower and has several performance and suspension upgrades.

Getting Ready for One Lap of America 2014

It's that time of the year again when I start posting about our One Lap of America effort.  It will be May before we know it and we still have some work to do on the car.  A couple of pieces of information to share is that Steve Barrett from the Cincinnati Ohio area will be my Transit Driver again this year.  Steve was my Transit Driver in 2012 and I found him through my fellow One Lap buddies from Cincinnati who knew that I was in need of a partner for the trip.  Steve is a Corvette enthusiast and is also a Corvette restorer so he is knowledgeable on a lot of the mechanical parts on the car.  Even though we did't meet until the day before the event started we made friends quickly which is good since you are shoulder to shoulder in a Corvette for a week and 3500 miles. Steve was a great asset to the team in sharing the highway miles and helping to maintain the car.

The route has been posted and I have included a map.  This years event will again concentrate on the eastern half of the United States and will take us a far south and west as New Orleans and to some tracks I haven't been to including Memphis International Raceway road course, Memphis International Raceway Drag Strip, Mobile International Speedway oval, Atlanta Motorsports Park, and GingerMan Raceway in Michigan. We will visit several other tracks and the closest we will be to home is when we do the Thunderbolt course at New Jersey Motorsports Park at Millville NJ.

I did have a chance on Friday to take the Corvette to the track down at Summit Point just to give it a shakedown run to make sure everything felt right.  I wanted to get a picture but din't think of it until the car was loaded back on the trailer.  BTW, on One Lap you cannot trailer the car at all once the event begins, although some do trailer their cars to the start point at South Bend, Indiana.

Stay tuned for more updates.

We made it Home

We made it home Saturday evening about 11 pm after logging 4964 miles since leaving Thursday to head west for South Bend.  Rick still had another 30 miles to get home to Ephrata.  This year gas was slightly cheaper this year and the lowest we paid was $3.41 in Mississippi and the highest was on the Indiana turnpike at $4.45.  Total spent for gas was $1039 and we averaged 17.29 miles per gallon including transits at about 19 mph and on track mileage of about 6 mph.  Out longest transits were from New Orleans to Daytona Beach which was 650 miles and from South Bend to Grissom Air Force Base then on to Talledega, Alabama at 683 miles. We did give a little too much money to the turnpike commissions of Pa. Indiana and Ohio where we spent a total of about $180 on tolls.

This years finish was less than we were hoping for at 37th place.  We had an ABS brake system failure at the Autocross at Grissom Air Force Base so we spent the rest of the week without ABS.  I am used to teaching without ABS and I race my Spec Miata without ABS so it wasn't a disaster but I probably would have done much better on the autocross and at BMW Performance Center which was like an autocross with the ABS.  Also as I mentioned in a previous post I think I chose the wrong tire and didn't have quite the grip I had in the past.  The lack of grip and a little over aggressive driving had me off the track a few times during competition which cost me several finishing positions each time.

The other big event that cost us in finishing positions was at Carolina Motorsports Park when an oil cooler line got cut through by the power steering pulley which then spewed oil and put out a smoke screen.  I was able to finish my run by nursing the car to the finish but lost a lot of time.  We were able to make a repair on the oil line before the end of the session and run the second event of Carolina but got a 10 second penalty for running out of group and I was the last car to run.  Our goal this year was for a top 20 finish.  The competition really seemed to be stronger this year with many awesome cars in the mix.  Even at 37th place there were a lot of cars that finished behind us, so that's a little bit of a win.  The biggest win is that we were able to complete the event and bring the car home ;^)

Don't forget we are still raising money for our charity, the Pa. Breast Cancer Coalition. We still need a few hundred dollars to meet this years goal. For a donation of $10 or more we will place your name on a Pink Ribbon sticker on the car, or the name of someone you would like to honor or memorialize.  Pa. Breast Cancer Coalition helps women going through Breast Cancer as well as helping to fund mammograms and research. Help us meet our goal. Please make any checks out to Pa. Breast Cancer Coalition or PABCC and send to Jim Roberts 14 W. Main St. Mount Joy, Pa. 17552. This event is really a lifetime experience and we felt is was a good way to leverage the it to the community good by raising funds for this worthy charity.

Dry Skid Pad Day, last event of 2013

Our last event of this years One Lap of America is the Dry Skid Pad competition.  We do two laps in a counterclockwise direction then two in clockwise direction.  The best lap in each direction counts and is divided by two and calculated to determine how much average g force you were able to maintain on the 200 foot diameter skid pad.  Last year this was one of my best events finishing 10th.  This year I finished 20th in the Dry Skid pad and it has me questioning my changing away from my tire choice from last year.  I ran the Michelin PS2 last year and the Continental DW this year and while the Continental was a great tire for the road and held up great for the treadwear it didn't give me quite the grip in the aggressive high speed driving manuvers on the road courses or on the Dry Skid Pad.

Between the tire choice, the problem with the ABS (anti lock brake system) and the cut oil cooler line, this won't end up as one of my best years, finishing in 37 place overall.  I do try to keep things in perspective and my motto is "Take your wins where you can".  Sometimes that "win" is beating someone you have set your sights on in an indivdual event.  This year that win will be that we were able to complete all the events with no DNF's (did not finish).  There were also a lot of entries that fared much worse the we did, with major problems that put them out of the race.  So we are pleased that we were able to roll with the problems and finish as well as we did.

The picture show what a little off course can cost with the front splitter from the Mitisibushi all clogged with grass from running off the dry skid pad.  This car driven by our friends Tim and Steve from Rochester, NY had a few problems this week and they finally ended up replacing a turbo, but they were able to finish the week.

A day at Pittsburgh International Motorsports Complex

The week is winding down.  We spent the day at Pittsburgh International Motorsports Complex (formerly Beaver Run)
 out near Beaver Falls in Pennsylvania.  Rain came in early and we had a wet track for most of the morning event.  By the last two run groups the track had started to dry so some of the slower cars placed pretty well.  Our car #29 finished 40th in the morning run, I was just a little too conservative in the wet.  The afternoon run was dry and we did much better and finished in 30th place and moved up to 37th overall.  Tomorrow morning we will compete in the dry skid pad event which will be the last for this years One Lap of America.  Shortly after the Skid Pad we will have our awards banquet and then everyone heads for home.  If all works out we should be home late Saturday night after a 601 mile transit.  When we get home Rick has another 30 miles to Ephrata.  It has been quite a week and by the time we get home we will have logged almost 5,000 miles

If it's Thursday it must be VIR

If it's Thursday it must be VIR. 

I've used this line for several years now.  Basically I mean when you travel all those miles in so few days you really do loose track of what day it is until you look at the schedule and figure it out by where you are.  Tonight we are in the Beaver Falls area for an our two races at Pittsburgh International Raceway tomorrow and we have put on 4125 miles since leaving home on Thursday.  This was one of our short transit drives at just over 400 miles, but we didn't get started until late since we did 3 different events at VIR.  We ran the South Course, then the North Course and last the Full Course which is over 3.3 miles long.  By the time we wrap things up and get home Saturday night we will have over 5,000 miles in 8 days.

Today we ran three events at VIR (Virginia International Raceway).  We moved up a little in the standings.  I had a couple of pretty good runs and gained a few points.   The awesome SLS Mercedes that I showed in a picture went into a tire wall busted it up a good bit and maybe did some engine damage.  Our repair of the cut oil line seems to be holding up fine.  A little less excitement for once it a welcome relief. 

Here is a little adjustment being done on Sean's car after he spun coming out ot the kink at Carolina Motorsports Park yesterday and took out a big section of tirewall.  The picture above is Rick checking the tire pressure before my afternoon run.

BTW we are still a little short of our goal for
the Pa. Breast Cancer Coalition and are still accepting donations  and will put a sticker with your name on the car for a donation.