With a Sunday race at 1:00 in the afternoon, our typical weekly routine would need some adjustment.  There just wouldn’t be enough time on Sunday morning to do what we normally do on race day and get to the track in time as the pit gates opened at 8 a.m.  So we treated Saturday like a normal race day.  We met at the shop, completed our set-up and loaded the car in the trailer so that we could just show up and leave on Sunday morning. 

Practice – Practice started at 10 a.m. Sunday morning and lasted for an hour.  The car felt great on old tires with a slight loose feeling coming off turn 2.  We made a few small adjustments to correct it but didn’t want hurt the handling for the rest of the track.

Qualifying – Our practice times were some of our fastest of the year on used tires and felt great going into qualifying as we bolted on 4 new tires.  But for some reason, these new tires just didn’t have the grip we thought they would.  The last couple of races, I felt that I could have qualified faster and I wasn’t going to have that happen this week.  I drove the car into the turns hard and the grip just wasn’t there, and we ended up with one of our slowest times of the year.

Race – Our poor qualifying attempt rewarded us with a good starting position.  We started in the second row on the inside.  But we had a bunch of faster cars behind us.  We stayed out of trouble and fought them off as much as we could and ended with a 5^th place finish.  I think there were 18 cars in the race, so we had more car finish behind us than in front of us.  Last year we would have been thrilled with a 5^th place finish in this race, but this year I felt a little disappointed.

There is no change in the point’s standings for the top 5.  Andy Sole missed this race, so Mike Holden moves in to 7^th place and Andy drops to 8^th.