World Challenge Race - Round 5
Road Atlanta, GA
25-29 June 2003

Looking Ahead...

After the crash at Lime Rock, Paul took the Mustang to HP Motorsport in Omaha, Nebraska to begin putting the car back together and then to AutoKraft in Lincoln to do the repaint After that, he hauled the car back to our shop in California and spent the next week scrambling to get the car into race shape in time for the next World Challenge round at Road Atlanta.

Atlanta is another track that I know pretty well, but that doesn't mean I'm comfortable there. It's a fast track with some dangerous spots. One or two that I'm quite familiar with. I had my first bad crash there back in '98. With that in mind, on top of the recent events at Lime Rock, I was a bit wary of getting the car back on track. What I wanted most from the weekend was to start and finish the race and run it cleanly. Not always easy in World Challenge.

Practice went pretty well. The only issue we had with the car was the suspension. The car had a really bad bounce in that we'd been working out since before Lime Rock, but we had new shocks Fed Ex'd in from Koni with stiffer valving that seemed to do the trick.

My times had been coming down during practice and I was fairly confident about qualifying and then... it started to rain. What's up with that? It's like those clouds have been following me around for months. Well, what can you do? I went out, looked for the driest line possible and concentrated on driving smoothly. I was actually pretty psyched at the end of the session. Paul had been timing the front runners on and off and in comparison my times looked really good.

While I had been allowed to race at Mosport and at Lime Rock, the truth is that I hadn't technically qualified for either race. There is a 110% qualifying rule for World Challenge. The way that works is that they take the top three times, average them and your time has to fall within 110% of that averaged time in order to qualify to race. I'd been driving very well in a brand new car, but I had just missed qualifying in each of the previous two rounds. I had been allowed to race because I had proven myself to be able to run cleanly and my times had either been fast enough during practice or were coming down steadily and it was taken for granted that I would be faster during the race.

I was grateful for that allowance and felt that I made a good showing out there, but I really wanted to clearly qualify for once and thought I had in Atlanta. The car felt good and I had driven well even in the rain, so I looked forward to seeing the qualifying sheet. It was a real downer when we finally got it. It seems that Paul had stopped timing the front runners while the track was still wet. The weather had been clearing and a few of the guys had come in for dry tires and gone back out to bring their times way, way down. I had only been out there when the track was wet and had just missed qualifying for a third time. I wasn't the only one. There were quite a few other guys that had only logged time in the rain. So once again, we were all allowed to race.

Well, I just had to put that behind me. I knew that I was fast enough on a dry track and wasn't uncompetitive in the rain either. So I tried to look on the bright side. My time, while it didn't technically qualify, placed me 17th in a field of 24 cars. In World Challenge, that's not too bad. So I concentrated on preparing for the race. The Mustang was checked over, I suited up and climbed into the car to head for pregrid. The crew followed me down on the golf cart, but before they got there, I was stopped by an SCCA official. I was told that pregrid had closed about 5 minutes before. I was shocked. I thought we were at least 15 minutes early, but it seems that we had somehow missed a schedule change. I have to take responsibility for that since I'm the driver. It's part of my job to be on top of these things. It was a really hard pill to swallow.

When Paul showed up and found me sitting off to the side of the other cars waiting on pregrid, he was puzzled. I explained to him that I had screwed up and would have to start the race from the pit lane. It was another blow for all of us, but there was nothing we could do. We tried to make light of it and joked that there was likely to be the usual bumping and aggressive driving in the first corner and I would be lucky to avoid that.

It turns out, we weren't that far off. There weren't any problems in the first corner on the first lap, but there were a number of incidents during the race. My own race went well. I battled with a Viper for a few laps and ended up finishing 15th overall. That is my second best finish in World Challenge to date. Not bad. In fact, pretty good. I attribute that partly to my looking ahead while I was driving. You have to look thru the corners when you're racing. The car goes where you look. If you fixate on the apex, then you're going to drive straight to it instead of past it. I talked myself around the track and it seemed to work well. I just need to learn how to make that automatic.

The car ran well, I drove a clean race and we finished mid-pack. There is a saying in racing... In order to finish first, you must first finish. That means that reliability and clean driving are imperative. The Mustang had done its job due to my crew's hard work and the quality of the parts that our sponsors have provided us with and I had done my part to keep the car on track and pointed in the right direction. It was a great way to end the weekend and it left me looking forward to the rest of the season.