Although the amount of money spent this weekend wasn't nearly as much as last week's, the amount of frustration seen from driver and crew was just as high.
It all boils down to seat time. And when priorities with one of my three jobs or scheduling conflicts in our personal lives should interfere with this it's easily noticed on race day. We only managed to finish a couple of hours of testing time on Saturday, and with the track being as dusty and loose as it was we never really found any quality times from it. Contrary to the belief that smaller drivers need to have all of their bars removed, we did find that we ran much better with the rear bar installed on our kart. It was apparent that Sam was faced with a loose condition on corner exit and adding this bar just about eliminated it. He liked the way the kart now felt so we figured that's where its new home was going to be.
Race day would once again begin with a false impression on how we would stack up against the others. I often wonder if the other drivers are not as quick to find their race legs as we are, or if by some cruel joke they decide to sand bag the first couple of sessions so we feel we're "on it". More than I can remember have we looked very quick in practice only to have our competition pull away from us later in the day. In the final, Sam did manage to narrow this margin as all five drivers were within three tenths of a second of one another. Sam brought up the rear but was easily within striking distance of Tyler Lucich who was closely guarding the fourth place spot. We later commented on how we both felt that if the race was one more lap it may have been a different story but we'll just have to wait until our next race on August 17th to see if that will be the case.
So with that we want to apologize to everyone for pulling the August 3rd date from our schedule. We're planning on using this down time for a much needed engine rebuild in addition to our family vacation to Road America for the American Le Mans Series event. Ahhh, one week of getting to enjoy our trailer with no kart to work on in the back of it. For a change I get to be the spectator while someone else works their tail off for that win, and believe me I will revel in every minute of it.
