Things can certainly change fast in this business. One day you're hot, the next day you're not. And boy how prevalent this was yesterday when we visited the Badger Kart club in Dousman Wisconsin.
In an attempt to get some much needed seat time we decided to throw a set of Bridgestone tires on the Pegasus Auto Racing/OMP Merlin and jump in with the Tag Senior boys for a day. But in hindsight I guess when the skies open up and literally pour on you all day, preventing not one single tire to touch the track for practice, you can't really expect to be at the head of the field come race day.
In a nutshell that's how it panned out for us. We arrived late at the track on Saturday afternoon and didn't get a moment of practice in before the storms arrived. Eventually we spent most of Sunday playing catch up but never really felt we were on our mark to begin with. Sam qualified 5th for the pre-final and that had us somewhat encouraged but throughout the day the kart's performance began to dwindle. Regardless of our best efforts a 7th place finish was all we could manage.
The silver lining to this is that not much sleep was lost over our showing since the weekend was aimed at testing only. It just would have been nice to find some extra speed. No, our concern lies in the fact that we certainly had something wrong with us and despite all of our tweaks and adjustments we could not find nor erradicate the problem. It was later speculated that a cracked exhaust core could have been the cause of our downward spiral. Not chancing anything, the entire engine and pipe were pulled instantly from the chassis and are now in the builder's hands.
We now have three weeks until Road America and all of us are keeping our fingers crossed that whatever gremlins we had will be a distant memory by then. This event will also be our last Rotax Max race before the Grand Nationals in Indy, and the place where everything has to work perfectly for us. Nothing less than 110% needs to come from driver, crew, and equipment if we're ever going to stand a chance against the others. After all, these drivers are the ones that people everywhere talk about, and only three from our class are going to Italy for the World Finals. This could be a long stretch for us but even if we're not one of the chosen few, to really compete alongside these individuals and possibly have our name on their lips for a change would be a success in our book.
