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!!