Friday qualifying was good. Car owner Mike Lock took the wheel of his 1993 Acura Integra Honda Challenge H4 car to qualify, putting in a good enough time to get us 2nd in class and 19th overall out of 56 cars.

Saturday once again Mike took the wheel to start the race. Things started off well enough. We were running our race and doing the lap times we were shooting for. Fairly uneventful for the first 5 hours. We did several driver changes and gas stops. I got into the car around 3pm for my first stint. All was well, until 4:15pm I got hit going into T10(#1) by a ASC stock car that passed me and then locked-up the brakes causing him to spin into me. His front bumper hit my left front fender. Just a little bit of body damage, but nothing serious. I think we were still in 2nd place at this point. I continued on and our next driver (John) took the seat. Shortly after his stint started, he was hit (#2) by our class leader (a Miata) making an unsafe pass in the inside of turn 1. This caused him to spin and he stalled the car. He was not able to get the car restarted, so he had to get towed in. During the process of getting towed in, he was able to bump start the car. After being dropped off in our pits, we gave the car a quick look over and not seeing any obvious problems, we sent him on his way. Within a minute of sending him out, he radioed in that the car was dead and the lights weren't working right. He got another tow back into the pits. After looking over things again in the engine bay, we figured out that the positive lead for the starter had been sheared off and was shorting against the car. We taped it up and gave the car a push start.

At this point, we were in 6th position now after losing 20+ minutes because of the two tows and fixing the problem. At least the car that hit us was assessed a 7 minute penalty for hitting us, and had constant mechanical issues the rest of the night. We spent the next 8 hours slowly catching up to the leaders and at just a little past 4 am, we were in 2nd place and about 3.5 laps behind with still 7+ hours left to go. We were feeling good at this point since we were running faster lap times and making up 10 seconds a lap on the leader. We were clearly the fastest car in our class still running. At this point, I was back in the car running good laps one after another. About 4:30am I spun out in turn 14 due to oil on the track. I ended up stuck on the inside of turn 14 because the car was high sided with 3 of the 4 tires floating in the air. A yellow flag was flown and as I sat in the car waiting to get towed off the burm, I was hit (#3) by an EP Civic that obviously didn't slow down for the yellow flag. The damage was extensive and collapsed the right rear of the car 6+ inches. The hit was soo hard that it even deformed the left side of the car.

We were pretty bummed since the car was running so well and had no mechanical issues except for those caused by the hits.

I want to thank all our drivers and crew! everyone did a GREAT job!


Modified by BrianZ at 9:40 PM 11/26/2007

 

Nice write up Brain I want to thank everyone involved with our cars effort and also thank Mike for the opportunity to drive the car. It was alot of fun and I really wish we would have had better luck. Who know what could have happened.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by #19crxHC &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">Who know what could have happened. </TD></TR></TABLE>

Well, we PDQ Motorsports, thought that you were going to catch us!! Really, you guys had a great run. As Mike L. said in the other thread, you were unlucky. An honor to race against/with you guys. It was fun to laugh & joke with the GOTO team during the race. (For those who didn't know, we actually requested pit spaces next to each other. )

Mike

 

Thanks a ton to all the crew, we were a small but spirited bunch of people this year who were all awesome. Brandon was excellent as crew cheif, and all our drivers did a great job. Looking forward to next year! Congrats to Mike Q and PDQ, three in a row is unbelievable.

 

 

Sorry to hear about the bad luck guys. Sounds like you were having a great run. I see your fast lap was a full second under the PDQ guys, so you were definite contenders without all the contact. I hope the chassis isn't junk, but from the sounds of it you'll be hard pressed to save it.

Z - glad to year you're ok after the hit.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by FlyZlow &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">I see your fast lap was a full second under the PDQ guys, so you were definite contenders without all the contact. </TD></TR></TABLE>

I wonder who set that?

We were definitly contenders. Better luck next year I guess.