Top ten results are getting routine. Although a top ten finish is quite impressive in the star studded Grand-Am Daytona Prototype field, it was not the type of result the team is used to or after. The weekend started out well on Thursday's 2 hour session with Darren Manning and Bill Lester getting in the car and putting on the timing charts within a second of fastest time of the day. We were conserving our allotment of 9 sets Pirelli racing slicks for the race and only used 1 set of tires the 1st day. Darren was sitting 5th quick until the end of the session and some of the teams bolted on a 2nd set (new) of tires and leap frogged in-front of Darren's time.  Friday's morning session resulted in a wrong direction for the set up. Darren went out with the new adjustments after reviewing all the data and information overnight. Unfortunately we made some choices Darren didn't like which made the car understeer mid-corner. We tried adjustments in pit lane during the session, but could not make it better and opted to end our session early and get back to the alignment pad. Bill Lester went our for qualifying and turned in a solid result for as few laps he has in the car.

Race day things were looking bright. The crew did a fabulous job replacing and bolting on all kinds of new equipment on the car like, Brake rotors and pads, input shaft, clutch, gears, and other goodies. Thanks to some help from our motorbuilder Dinan and BMW we were able to have BMW wonder-ace Bill Auberlen as a thrid driver for the race. Bill's first laps for us were the 20 minute morning warm up. Bill thought the car was pretty nice, but still had that mid-corner understeer. Our engineering team decided to make some changes for the race and we were ready to race.

Bill Lester started the race and immediately came over the radio saying the car was understeering like crazy. As Bill says it was "too tight" and he could not make it turn in. Our first pit stop was under green and we threw in Auberlen. He was saying the exact same thing over the radio..Understeer.  Fortunately a full course yellow came out almonst immediately and we pitted to make changes while the pace car would troll the field around at 60 mph allowing us about 2 minutes to work on the car and catch up to the field before it went green. This was the theme of the day it turned out. All 5 yellows that came out, we pitted and tried something. Some changes worked, some didn't. Overall, we make the car better, but not fast enough to compete with the leaders. We stayed on the lead lap until about 5 hours to go in the race. Right about then, there was a long green flag run which the leaders came around and put us a lap down.

We finished 8th which is still strong in this field, but not what we were after. The car was just strangely slow for us at a track our set-ups are normally quite good. Did something break? A park come un-done? A bad shock? Was it just a bad set-up? These are all things we are going to have to look at before our next outing. We are going to strip the car down to bare-bones and inspect every part. Then we will have to get out somewhere for some testing and make sure we have a good handling before our next race. This looks to be at Daytona, Saturday July 4th just before the Nascar Sprint Cup race infront of the massive crowd od 200,000 plus fans.. So you know we will want to look good there. If we find something out on why the car was not working so well at the Geln, I'll come back and edit this article.. so stay tuned!