THE UPS AND DOWNS OF MOTOR RACING – The Mustang Challenge

Well, I started this weekend off on a huge high; I had won three straight races and was slowly crawling closer to the championship points lead. However, as I alluded to in the title of this event’s blog, the downs in racing can come just as quickly as the ups.

Also in my pre-race blog I said I had high hopes for the facility at New Jersey Motorsports Park, and they were met and exceeded! Where there was dirt, now there is grass. Where there was a sharp drop-off, now there are apex and exit curbs. The track layout was altered slightly, placing a right-left-right chicane instead of the old turn three (which I found gives the track much more of a rhythm).

Race #5 of the 2009 Ford Racing Mustang Challenge began well for me. In two days of testing and practice, I was the fastest car in each of the four sessions! In my last note, I had a few goals laid out for the weekend. The first was to get the setup nailed. The TC Motorsports crew and I did that, and we knew we had a fast car for the weekend. While we were hard at work, Andrew Caddell and his crew were also hard at work, and had found some speed since the last race; he nipped at my heels on the time sheets all of Friday and Saturday.

Saturday morning brings us to qualifying, and we are first on track at 8:00AM. My first lap is sloppy (I’m still having problems getting enough heat into my tires to run fast on lap 1). Lap two is better, but I am dropped to second position by .008 of a second! Of course my goal was to qualify first, but getting nipped by that small of a margin was just brutal! I wasn’t worried for the race though. I knew I had a fast car and have shown that I could take the win even starting from second position (like the second race at Barber).

Sunday morning however brought another set of downs. We arrived at the track to see the rain steadily falling, with no reprieve in sight. Now, I grew up in the Seattle-area, and have always loved driving and racing in the rain. It’s always been calming to me and I love the smoothness with which one needs to drive to win. The other side to that point of view is I have very little testing time in the Mustang FR500S in the rain (which means we have no setup data for wet conditions). I resolved to stay clean at the start and see how things unfolded.

The rain-soaked start:


I got a decent start, and I slotted in right behind Andrew. After a few laps, it was apparent that my car was definitely not optimized for the wet conditions, and Andrew proceeded to pull a large gap on me. I was OK with this, and tried to stay smooth and maintain second place. All was going well, until the third and fourth place cars began to get larger in my mirrors. I called on the radio, “How much time remaining?” The response was, “25 minutes.” Ouch. I made my red and blue #9 Mustang as wide as I could for as long as I could, but with 4 laps to go, Jason von Kluge and Dan Aweida both got by me. I had nothing for them; their fastest laps were each 1.5 seconds faster than mine, and believe me, I was working my car for all it was worth!

At the end of the day, I finished fourth. It was a pretty tough pill to swallow, especially because Caddell likely increased his points lead by half (with a pole and a win). But as I stated earlier, with racing there are ups and downs. The team performed great: we led all the practice sessions and I did all I could do with the car I had. My resolve: See you in Monterey, CA for Race #6 of the Mustang Challenge at Laguna Seca!!

This Pony Train keeps rollin' - all the way to New Jersey!

As I write this, I am flying high over Washington State, heading east. I am also personally flying high after an amazing weekend at Barber Motorsports Park, and the 45th Anniversary of the Mustang celebration. Racing twice and winning twice is thumbs up in my book! I also got to meet a ton of Mustang fans! Round #5 of the Ford Racing Mustang Challenge represents the halfway point of our sophomore season, and it also brings us to the sophomore season of New Jersey Motorsports Park.

Last year, the Mustang Challenge was fortunate enough to be a part of NJMP’s inaugural race weekend, and to be honest, the track showed its youth. Things weren’t quite buttoned up yet, and there were some details that needed addressing for future events. If you follow Grand-Am road racing, you’ll know that the folks in New Jersey have been hard at work preparing their facility for this weekend, and as a racer I have high hopes! The place has the infrastructure and the potential to be a great venue; it just needed a little polishing.

Me at Barber just after taking the lead in Race #4:


Speaking of polishing, my performance at New Jersey’s Thunderbolt circuit in 2008 could’ve used some. Our car setup was not ideal, and I made a few mistakes early in the race, finishing 8th (two positions down from where I started). So I’m going into this weekend on a mission:

Goal #1 is to find a better setup than we had last year. I think we’ve already got most of that work done, so I’ll be feeling the car out on the test day to verify and make small adjustments if necessary.

Goal #2 is to qualify well. If we can accomplish goal #1, then goal #2 should be attainable. Since Andrew Caddell has 19 points on me in the championship hunt, I need to do everything I can to get points at every opportunity. This starts in qualifying, where 1st through 5th are awarded points based on their qualifying position (5 to 1, respectively).

Goal #3 is to win the race. I know the TC Motorsports crew will do everything in their power to help me get goals #1 and #2 done, and if we as a team can do that, then #3 will be all up to me. I’ll just need to do what I’ve done all year so far: be fast, consistent, and easy on my tires.

Racing in the Mustang Challenge is all about consistency. Being able to turn fast laps is one thing, but being able to turn a fast lap every lap while at the same time conserving your tires is the true challenge. So far I’ve been able to do that, and hopefully with the preparation the team has done and a little bit of racing luck, I’ll be able to keep winning races and chipping away at Caddell’s championship lead!

Another important piece to successful racing is building relationships; from your crew, to series officials, to potential sponsors and marketing partners. It’s to this end that I’m excited to announce my partnership with Go Pro Cameras. Go Pro sponsors the series by providing cameras for each car that create all that awesome footage you see at www.MustangChallenge.com (you are visiting there, right?!). The folks at Go Pro were generous enough to provide me with a couple Motorsports HERO cameras (a wide angle and a standard lens), so you can count on more awesome racing footage throughout the 2009 Mustang Challenge season. Check out www.TedAnthonyJr.com for photos and videos of my racing!