Notes from the Roar Before the 24

"Night Practice, Talk about Fun !"

Well we finished up with the "Roar before the 24" 10 days ago. The good news is we found our fourth driver, Richaed Campollo (a.k.a. el pollo loco). He is an outstanding young driver in the Formula Renault series in Europe, and a quality individual that adds that youthful enthusiasm to the team. The best was when he was calling Wolf Henzler, one of the best Porsche guys in the world "Langsam", which is slow in German. Wolf drove the #85 R4R car down in the upper 1:51 range and I believe that was in the top 5 times for the weekend. Richard speaks 7 languages and will also be our teams Babe Magnet. Our driver line up has great chemisty and a good strategy for the race. I hope it pans out. Our crew chief Frank Resenetti is one of the best, He worked with Krohn racing when they won the championship, and was Dale Ernhardts crew chief on the #3 Corvette team. He expects a lot out of us, I hope we live up to those expectations.
The bad news is that we were chasing the set up on the car all weekend long. It would push into the cornor and then become snappy loose just after apexing the cornor. It was a handful. Towards the end of the test, we started to get it dialed in, but we were still slower than we needed to be. So, we still have some set up work to be done when we get back to the track. Richard did well in his first test in a car with a roof on it. His times methodically kept dropping, and he remainded level headed in the car (which had to be hard for him !). Dan Graeff ran consistently all weekend as did Micheal Gomez. When it was all said and done an intact car was placed back into the hauler! Any time you can roll the car into the trailer after a three day test in Grand-Am you had a sucessful test.
So, we are ready to go !, We need to pickup a little more speed, but our consistency should payoff for us. All that we need to do is keep it on the track, Stay out of the pits except for fuel, tires and driver changes and we should do well. Sounds easy enough! but it ain't. It's those 54 other cars that cause the problems.

See ya in Daytona

Ron