Qualifying was held at 4:15pm. Tim qualified the car and I went and watched the session in turn nine. We made an unusual decision for qualifying regarding the tires. Since we really had no idea where we stood, we decided that Tim needed to stay out for the entire session and evaluate the car. As a result, we sent him out on old rubber so he wouldn't beat up his race tires.

I had a stop watch with me and I was pretty happy with what it showed. Even on the old rubber Tim managed a 1:40.9, which was only good for nineteenth position, but would likely have been much better on stickers. I reasoned that the new motor must have made some sort of a difference because we had both been much slower than this on the test day.

In looking at the data, we had picked up a significant amount on the straights, which was encouraging. Fortunately, we had one more practice session on Saturday morning prior to the race. We tried a few new things that didn't really work like we had hoped, so we went back to Tim's qualifying configuration for the race.

THE RACE

The race started at 2:45pm on Saturday. The race was scheduled as the lesser of 200-miles or two and a half hours. It didn't take a genius to figure out that with eighty cars on a 2.2-mile track the race was going to end at 5:15pm.

We had a paperwork issue on Friday that caused us to start in 37th position on the grid. In the rush to install the new motor we forgot to nominate Tim as the qualifying driver, and therefore got shoved to the back of the GS grid.